Verarde
Pondering Wearing A Hat
I write my stuff in Word, then a little copypasta and voila! No expired tokens necessary.
Hammer and Steel
- Thread starter Tycho
- Start date
Bair_the_Normal
転輪聖王
I personally write everything in Word, and save after every few paragraphs or so, due to my extreme paranoia of losing anything (I have experienced losing a short story that took me ages to write). Plus, I can wait for ages for a good update to a great story. 
Verarde
Pondering Wearing A Hat
Only after every few paragraphs?! I save after practically every sentence! 
Tycho
AFK Forum Warrior
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2011
- Messages
- 3,240
Heh, I usually write in Word and then copy paste, but I was being lazy, and then tried to refresh the page when it didn't load. 
"You can not do that due to expired tokens on this page".
Whenever I see that, I instinctively punch the wall in rage, especially if it's 4,000 words or so.
"You can not do that due to expired tokens on this page".
Whenever I see that, I instinctively punch the wall in rage, especially if it's 4,000 words or so.
Daedwartin
Emperor
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2012
- Messages
- 1,785
tell that scout to get off his bum. oh he's dead.
get of your bum, anyway.
get of your bum, anyway.
Tycho
AFK Forum Warrior
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2011
- Messages
- 3,240
Scout is still alive, and will remain alive for quite some time, thankfully.
Planning another C&E update soon, as well as possibly a Ming Tian, Li the Revolutionary, and a special update. And starting with the ancient section, and placing more emphasis on it... hard to do so though.
Planning another C&E update soon, as well as possibly a Ming Tian, Li the Revolutionary, and a special update. And starting with the ancient section, and placing more emphasis on it... hard to do so though
.
SamSniped
DJ Goodboye
I can't wait!
Tycho
AFK Forum Warrior
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2011
- Messages
- 3,240
“I have to say, you have made a quite speedy recovery, sir. You appear to finally be able to walk and function like a normal person once more, and the therapy sessions were shorter than I and many of my fellow colleagues were expecting!”
“Thank you doctor, I appreciate all the help that you and your staff have been to me on the long road to recovery that I have faced. Mind if I smoke in here, Doctor?”
“Not at all, feel free to do so if you want.” The doctor smiled, pushing an ashtray forward towards Cambridge as he sat in his seat, and pulled out a pack of his own and carefully selected one cigarette and a silver zippo type lighter. Cambridge had his own cigarette, and the doctor lit Cambridge’s with the lighter that he had gripped in his hands. “Now,” said the doctor, rings of smoke issuing from his mouth as he smiled, whiskers along his face twitching. “We need to talk about further recovery that you will face in the future, since you still have a road of recovery to go along in the future.”
“What will have to happen, doctor? I am a busy man after all, with a busy life, wife and kids, and many things in life that have to be dealt with, one step at a time.” Cambridge gave an honest smile to that as he sat there and thought about that a bit more, the smile not really getting into his eyes and his gaze at all.
The doctor did not notice at all though, merely had a bemused smile as he puffed more smoke rings like a chimney. “Aren’t we all terribly busy with life? Ah, but anyways, the path to recovery will be somewhat long and difficult for you to get over, Zach, so it will be extremely difficult for you to get back up and onto your feet for a while in a way of speaking due to the nature of the injuries that you suffered, but in the end, it will no doubt be worth it. You are a very lucky man as it stands; very little to no nerve damage in your lower abdomen, quite healthy, didn’t bleed too much and didn’t require too much transfusions, actually healed faster than we anticipated, and no bullets hit anything vital like an organ, a vertebrate, bones or anything else of the sort. You are extremely lucky, considering the type of bullets that were fired, as they were hollow point rounds… granted, they were defective ones that did not ‘burst’ upon entering your body like they were supposed to, but still, that is the type of odds that one would not gamble on.”
“Have they been able to trace the bullets back to wherever they were made yet?”
“From what the chief of police for your district has told me, they could not trace the bullets back to a specific origin, though reports say that they are have the distinctive marks of Krupp Weapon Manufacturing, and the Dai-Ichii fragmentation physics that are often used in the type of bullets like hollow points… a full investigation of Dai-Ichii will undoubtedly happen, but for Krupp, that might take a bit more time than we would like, since they are a German weapons company after all.”
“Very understandable, very understandable indeed… so what is the road of recovery going to be like?” Cambridge snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray, the doctor finishing off his and doing likewise as Cambridge soon after, and placing his hands on the table in a spread fingered formation.
“Basically, you are going to have to be very careful… damaging hits to the solar plexus that you could get from bumping into counters and whatnot, is going to hurt to the extreme for the next six weeks. There is some leftover scar tissue and internal wounds that are in there, as well as stitching that might break if you decide that you want to go and run a twenty kilometer sprint in the near future, though I would hazard a guess that you will not be doing anything like that for the foreseeable future… we also identified two hairline fractures in your right kneecap that had apparently gone unnoticed before, as well as a fracture in three toes on your right foot, and two fractures on two toes on your left foot. Significant bruising that came from something else on your back as well, don’t know how that came about…”
“I fell down the stairs doctor.”
The other man across from Cambridge raised his eyebrows slightly but made no comment about the stairs excuse that Cambridge had come up with. “We also identified a breakage in your left arm that had healed and reformed back appropriately, without external help it seems, and also your eye of course… though that does not really need to be said, since you knew about it prior to today, did you not?”
“Indeed… though the whole eye thing was a bit of an accident on my part,” Cambridge said with a laugh. “A female colleague of mine accidentally stabbed out my eye, necessitating a replacement.”
The doctor and Cambridge both laughed, but the former did not notice the anger in the latter’s eyes. Pulling out a clipboard, the doctor made a few notes, jotted down a few lines of information, and ripped the paper off of the clipboard and passed it off to Cambridge. “This is a prescription for some powerful pain pills that you can take to avoid abdominal pain from the damage that you suffered from being shot there. You can take them with alcohol, though it is not advised to do so, as it has been shown to cause some aggressive and violent tendencies with some of our patients. I would also advise you to come back here for therapy unless you are going to have another service set up in place, at which point, feel free to do that instead; sit ups and crunches are advised to get your abdominal muscle mass back, and also to help the healing process by exercising. Generally, a good diet, a touch of exercise, and some good sleep should help you get back to the way you were before, in top speed. We’ll also give you sleeping pills if you think that the pain might be a bit much even with the pills… and it might be as well.”
“Thanks doctor.” Cambridge slowly pushed himself up and out of the chair, wincing as he did so, and pushed it back into its spot in front of the doctor’s desk. The doctor did likewise, his bald head gleaming in the light, and they both shook hands, before Cambridge turned around and headed towards the door, walking out of the hospital for the first time in several months.
Cambridge pulled out another cigarette when he was outside the hospital and lit this one up, breathing deeply as he did so and grimacing. It was a cold day for spring time in Washington, and the clouds were in the air today, a thin, misty drizzle coming down from the sky at the moment. The pain in his abdomen had started just as he had left the hospital, and he had quickly popped two pain pills to quell it, and control it even more, so that way he could function. The smoke curled around his face slowly and lazily, mixing with the misty rain that was in the air as the fog and the mist in the capital came slowly down in lazy sheets form the sky.
Just across the street from the hospital was a bombed out building, one of the remaining un-bulldozed buildings from the Washington bombings last November. It was a tall skyscraper, with its steel teeth burned and blackened and rubble inside of the building showing through the empty windows, looming and stabbing ominously into the sky… it was one of the few of its kind left that had not been destroyed and rebuilt during the long interim since the November bombings. Some parts of the hospital were being refurbished as well after pieces of rubble had pierced empty sections of the building, and that was something that Cambridge had gotten to see on a near everyday basis.
Cambridge snuffed out on smoke and was in the process of lighting another when the footsteps picked up from the sidewalk. Turning slightly to his right, Cambridge smiled a bit as he saw Yulai drawing up in the rain; coat wrapped around him, and hands in his pocket as he walked up the street slowly.
Yulai raised an eyebrow at Cambridge’s smoke as he stopped and took up a position beside him. “Should you really be having that in front of the hospital right now?”
“Shove off, Yulai, I was in that damned hospital for two and a half months, I take what I can get.”
“Very well then, I won’t begrudge you this. Did you enjoy your stay in the hospital, friend?’
“Oh, you bet, it was a boatload of fun.” Cambridge savagely smashed the second smoke into oblivion and folded his arms across his chest. “How was your time in the south?”
“Much the same, we lost some agents and some other people though… none from our squad, or from Bloody November, though the Verbenschwa got torn a new one with all the losses that they suffered down in the south right now… about three quarters of their people were either dead or wounded in the fighting down there in the south. The Liberation Front was pushed back after all that bombing business in San Francisco, but they are still out there, still ready to fight and getting ready to combat others and planning to attack us some more, though thankfully they didn’t manage to find a single agent of Verbenschwa body out there in the wilderness, which is something that I guess we can be thankful for.”
“True.” Cambridge and Yulai watched as a few cars raced past their standing point on the sidewalk; rain on the pavement churned up by their wheels. “And the squad has been doing well?”
“Pretty well, all things considered of course. Epsilon has been rather downcast since your whole hospitalization business and the long month trek back up from the south… can’t tell you how long that operation took and how difficult it was working with Harmony and the others to get our people out of there, but we finally did it. Delta’s still his cold, bastardized self, and Oxford is still brutal as ever, and Theta and Nova are still doing their side by side twin stuff in the squad… it’s been boring though without you though, and without your talent in the group.”
“I’ve missed being a part of the squad… being a part of the operations, joining up with you guys to help with whatever is needed… and the killing.”
Yulai looked concerned at that point. “Have you been taking the Red Spice while we have been gone, Cambridge? You do realize that you are not supposed to be taking it at this point right now, correct?”
Cambridge smiled at that. “I do realize that I am not supposed to be taking the Red Spice, and I have not been having a single portion or a packet of the stuff since I was taken to this hospital… though it could have sped up the healing process considerably, and would have allowed me to get back into the saddle quickly and efficiently, without having to wait for my wounds to heal… and you knew that as well. Why was I not allowed consume and ingest some of the stuff?”
Yulai was expressionless, as another car rushed past the two agents. The rain was coming down just a tad bit harder now, making the sound that rain makes in a quiet part of the city as it hits the pavement and hisses during spring or summer time. He spoke slowly, seeming to measure his words carefully and quietly. “You were not allowed to take the Red Spice because we were concerned about what had happened before we left. We did not want you to come back immediately when it was clear that someone was hunting you down, and might be rather unhappy and try to do a more… thorough job once they heard and realized that you had escaped alive. There has obviously been a breach in the agent program, and bringing you back into the squad so early when another assassination attempt might have been made.”
“That’s no excuse right there.”
“Your hallucinations were an issue as well.”
“Really? I would have never guessed.”
Yulai gave Cambridge a look that was half bemused half sulking. “Yes, the hallucinations were an issue, and we had to rather restrain you after that whole episode you had in the hospital. Nearly broke a few necks on that one, and a few people were indeed wounded. High Command was interested in giving you a psyche evaluation, but we deflected it by saying that you were rather delusional due to the cocktail of drugs and the pain that you were experiencing at the time. You got lucky on that count when they bought that explanation from us.”
“How is High Command doing anyways? And have there been any other assassinations as of late?”
“High Command is back and functioning despite all the odds stacked against us. Most of the High Command is scattered across the nation currently due to all the Ming Tian assassinations that had been going on, but he has been rather silent as of late, so we don’t know what exactly he has been up to. The entire program is as it stands teetering on the edge, and more people are being brought into the Verbenschwa on a daily basis. It also appears to be that the Chekra might be disbanded soon.”
Cambridge was surprised at that last note. “Why’s that happening?”
“Most of the Chekra were killed during the bombings, and the command structure of the Chekra has been falling into a rut with some of the assassinations that they have been having. A lot of the surviving agents are not that eager to do their jobs as of late, as there is ‘Chekra Hunter’ out in the suburbs of New York and moving to some other metropolitan areas, so they are just a tad bit uneager to do any of that at the moment. It appears to be though that all of the Chekra are being reabsorbed back into the Verbenschwa, due to all the conflicts that they have been having as of late.”
“So the Chekra are in decline at this point? What is their current situation like?”
“Not good, as I said, lots of them are dead. About ninety five percent as I last recall. Some have been killed and targeted for assassination by some of the paramilitary groups; the Brazen Spears, the Soldiers of the Endless Night, and others. It’s a bad situation; with the Black Marchers weak as they are after the fall of the House of Leaves, and with the rather brazen attacks led by the Zuschlag Und Stahl Liberation Front has put most of the smaller to the larger organizations on edge, and has made them more eager to attack and burn and pillage left and right. Grey Dawn is quiet, Black Marchers are moving and regrouping in the East and the West, and the Rising Sun Separatist Group is starting to mobilize its own forces after being somewhat dormant for so long.”
“What is it about the Rising Sun Separatist Group now? I thought that they were deemed ‘safe’? What the hell have they been doing to make the government hate them so much and despise them to the extreme?”
“They have become a lot more active at this point; they’ve been carrying out attacks and assaults on army depots and whatnot all across the eastern and western parts of the country, and it’s our job to clean up the mess, as always; the usual drill of course, get in clear up everything, make sure that there are the bodies that are supposed to be there are left in their usual location, and whatnot. Though we might instead be deployed to hunt Snowbell instead.”
“Snowbell…” just hearing her name made Cambridge’s eye twitch and his hand curl up into a fist at his side in rage, gritting his teeth silently as he maintained control over himself. “Did she not make it to the north like she was hoping to do? Did she die yet? Please for the sake of god; tell me that she is dead and that we no longer have to deal with her and that you are just messing with me on that count.”
“Unfortunately no, Snowbell is still very much alive, and she is still heading north. Though the train that she was on was bombed to hell by a trackside explosive apparently planted by the Grey Dawn after they apparently tried to stop the Black Marchers from shifting operations northward into their territory. Marchers and troops of the Dawn hate each other with a passion. She apparently has been causing trouble in droves up there in those areas, and is antagonizing the Grey Dawn, and having the remaining Black Marchers in the area attack them. Less than fifty percent of the initial bases up in the North, and their assorted troops, but they are still fighting for what they believe in, and they are extracting much blood for very little effort, as Snowbell plays both sides of the war between them.”
“I see.” Cambridge stamped his feet on the pavement, and for the first time, he realized that it was a touch chilly outside, even though it was nearing summer. All of this soft drizzle and rain was getting into his bones and making him feel quite cold and quite frankly was getting tired. “Anything else that you need to tell me about, Yulai?”
“Not yet, but I may be speaking to you later when you return. Right now, you need to focus on getting better over the next several weeks and so that you can return when you are finally ready and healed. Go to your family as well; spend some time with them while you still can. You never know how much time that you have left to spend with them, so make the most out of it that you can in the meantime, my friend.”
“I already placed a form to go back into the program in a few days, Yulai.” Another group of cars went by and a few birds dropped down into the road and hobbled about, looking for worms or other delicacies that might be out there. “And my family is already gone, under my orders and direction. At this point, they are safe in Russia at the moment, spending time with the deranged old bastard of a father I have up in those parts. The kids like him, he’s got lots of stories and other such things, and we will keep them busy for a long time. I’m going back into the program, because at this point I have nothing left to do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone needs something to fight for in the life, some sort of goal or thing that they must pursue. Without that, what is the point of living at this point? I do not want to do nothing and just sit on my arse day in and day out for weeks on end; I need something to do, something to make my life worth living… if there is nothing left for me to do, then what do I do?”
“You have a family, Cambridge,” Yulai said as he began to walk away. “That’s more than I can say for myself or for Epsilon for that matter.”
Yulai kept walking and eventually disappeared back into the fog, and Cambridge watched him become swallowed and taken up by the fog as his footsteps petered off into silence. He shrugged and pulled out the cigarette holder that he had, flipping over the lid gently. North Star brand was always the best, even if they were a bit odd with their making of the cigarettes; they liked to make many of them with different packaging and wrappings, for no apparent reason at times. About seven of the regular, stereotypical ones were in there, as well as one pure white cigarette and about ten or so bloody red ones. Cambridge contemplated smoking some, but the pain was back, and they had advised him not to take any pills with cigarettes as well. He slipped the package back into his pocket and palmed several pills before taking the long walk back home, back through the foggy streets of Washington.
“Thank you doctor, I appreciate all the help that you and your staff have been to me on the long road to recovery that I have faced. Mind if I smoke in here, Doctor?”
“Not at all, feel free to do so if you want.” The doctor smiled, pushing an ashtray forward towards Cambridge as he sat in his seat, and pulled out a pack of his own and carefully selected one cigarette and a silver zippo type lighter. Cambridge had his own cigarette, and the doctor lit Cambridge’s with the lighter that he had gripped in his hands. “Now,” said the doctor, rings of smoke issuing from his mouth as he smiled, whiskers along his face twitching. “We need to talk about further recovery that you will face in the future, since you still have a road of recovery to go along in the future.”
“What will have to happen, doctor? I am a busy man after all, with a busy life, wife and kids, and many things in life that have to be dealt with, one step at a time.” Cambridge gave an honest smile to that as he sat there and thought about that a bit more, the smile not really getting into his eyes and his gaze at all.
The doctor did not notice at all though, merely had a bemused smile as he puffed more smoke rings like a chimney. “Aren’t we all terribly busy with life? Ah, but anyways, the path to recovery will be somewhat long and difficult for you to get over, Zach, so it will be extremely difficult for you to get back up and onto your feet for a while in a way of speaking due to the nature of the injuries that you suffered, but in the end, it will no doubt be worth it. You are a very lucky man as it stands; very little to no nerve damage in your lower abdomen, quite healthy, didn’t bleed too much and didn’t require too much transfusions, actually healed faster than we anticipated, and no bullets hit anything vital like an organ, a vertebrate, bones or anything else of the sort. You are extremely lucky, considering the type of bullets that were fired, as they were hollow point rounds… granted, they were defective ones that did not ‘burst’ upon entering your body like they were supposed to, but still, that is the type of odds that one would not gamble on.”
“Have they been able to trace the bullets back to wherever they were made yet?”
“From what the chief of police for your district has told me, they could not trace the bullets back to a specific origin, though reports say that they are have the distinctive marks of Krupp Weapon Manufacturing, and the Dai-Ichii fragmentation physics that are often used in the type of bullets like hollow points… a full investigation of Dai-Ichii will undoubtedly happen, but for Krupp, that might take a bit more time than we would like, since they are a German weapons company after all.”
“Very understandable, very understandable indeed… so what is the road of recovery going to be like?” Cambridge snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray, the doctor finishing off his and doing likewise as Cambridge soon after, and placing his hands on the table in a spread fingered formation.
“Basically, you are going to have to be very careful… damaging hits to the solar plexus that you could get from bumping into counters and whatnot, is going to hurt to the extreme for the next six weeks. There is some leftover scar tissue and internal wounds that are in there, as well as stitching that might break if you decide that you want to go and run a twenty kilometer sprint in the near future, though I would hazard a guess that you will not be doing anything like that for the foreseeable future… we also identified two hairline fractures in your right kneecap that had apparently gone unnoticed before, as well as a fracture in three toes on your right foot, and two fractures on two toes on your left foot. Significant bruising that came from something else on your back as well, don’t know how that came about…”
“I fell down the stairs doctor.”
The other man across from Cambridge raised his eyebrows slightly but made no comment about the stairs excuse that Cambridge had come up with. “We also identified a breakage in your left arm that had healed and reformed back appropriately, without external help it seems, and also your eye of course… though that does not really need to be said, since you knew about it prior to today, did you not?”
“Indeed… though the whole eye thing was a bit of an accident on my part,” Cambridge said with a laugh. “A female colleague of mine accidentally stabbed out my eye, necessitating a replacement.”
The doctor and Cambridge both laughed, but the former did not notice the anger in the latter’s eyes. Pulling out a clipboard, the doctor made a few notes, jotted down a few lines of information, and ripped the paper off of the clipboard and passed it off to Cambridge. “This is a prescription for some powerful pain pills that you can take to avoid abdominal pain from the damage that you suffered from being shot there. You can take them with alcohol, though it is not advised to do so, as it has been shown to cause some aggressive and violent tendencies with some of our patients. I would also advise you to come back here for therapy unless you are going to have another service set up in place, at which point, feel free to do that instead; sit ups and crunches are advised to get your abdominal muscle mass back, and also to help the healing process by exercising. Generally, a good diet, a touch of exercise, and some good sleep should help you get back to the way you were before, in top speed. We’ll also give you sleeping pills if you think that the pain might be a bit much even with the pills… and it might be as well.”
“Thanks doctor.” Cambridge slowly pushed himself up and out of the chair, wincing as he did so, and pushed it back into its spot in front of the doctor’s desk. The doctor did likewise, his bald head gleaming in the light, and they both shook hands, before Cambridge turned around and headed towards the door, walking out of the hospital for the first time in several months.
Cambridge pulled out another cigarette when he was outside the hospital and lit this one up, breathing deeply as he did so and grimacing. It was a cold day for spring time in Washington, and the clouds were in the air today, a thin, misty drizzle coming down from the sky at the moment. The pain in his abdomen had started just as he had left the hospital, and he had quickly popped two pain pills to quell it, and control it even more, so that way he could function. The smoke curled around his face slowly and lazily, mixing with the misty rain that was in the air as the fog and the mist in the capital came slowly down in lazy sheets form the sky.
Just across the street from the hospital was a bombed out building, one of the remaining un-bulldozed buildings from the Washington bombings last November. It was a tall skyscraper, with its steel teeth burned and blackened and rubble inside of the building showing through the empty windows, looming and stabbing ominously into the sky… it was one of the few of its kind left that had not been destroyed and rebuilt during the long interim since the November bombings. Some parts of the hospital were being refurbished as well after pieces of rubble had pierced empty sections of the building, and that was something that Cambridge had gotten to see on a near everyday basis.
Cambridge snuffed out on smoke and was in the process of lighting another when the footsteps picked up from the sidewalk. Turning slightly to his right, Cambridge smiled a bit as he saw Yulai drawing up in the rain; coat wrapped around him, and hands in his pocket as he walked up the street slowly.
Yulai raised an eyebrow at Cambridge’s smoke as he stopped and took up a position beside him. “Should you really be having that in front of the hospital right now?”
“Shove off, Yulai, I was in that damned hospital for two and a half months, I take what I can get.”
“Very well then, I won’t begrudge you this. Did you enjoy your stay in the hospital, friend?’
“Oh, you bet, it was a boatload of fun.” Cambridge savagely smashed the second smoke into oblivion and folded his arms across his chest. “How was your time in the south?”
“Much the same, we lost some agents and some other people though… none from our squad, or from Bloody November, though the Verbenschwa got torn a new one with all the losses that they suffered down in the south right now… about three quarters of their people were either dead or wounded in the fighting down there in the south. The Liberation Front was pushed back after all that bombing business in San Francisco, but they are still out there, still ready to fight and getting ready to combat others and planning to attack us some more, though thankfully they didn’t manage to find a single agent of Verbenschwa body out there in the wilderness, which is something that I guess we can be thankful for.”
“True.” Cambridge and Yulai watched as a few cars raced past their standing point on the sidewalk; rain on the pavement churned up by their wheels. “And the squad has been doing well?”
“Pretty well, all things considered of course. Epsilon has been rather downcast since your whole hospitalization business and the long month trek back up from the south… can’t tell you how long that operation took and how difficult it was working with Harmony and the others to get our people out of there, but we finally did it. Delta’s still his cold, bastardized self, and Oxford is still brutal as ever, and Theta and Nova are still doing their side by side twin stuff in the squad… it’s been boring though without you though, and without your talent in the group.”
“I’ve missed being a part of the squad… being a part of the operations, joining up with you guys to help with whatever is needed… and the killing.”
Yulai looked concerned at that point. “Have you been taking the Red Spice while we have been gone, Cambridge? You do realize that you are not supposed to be taking it at this point right now, correct?”
Cambridge smiled at that. “I do realize that I am not supposed to be taking the Red Spice, and I have not been having a single portion or a packet of the stuff since I was taken to this hospital… though it could have sped up the healing process considerably, and would have allowed me to get back into the saddle quickly and efficiently, without having to wait for my wounds to heal… and you knew that as well. Why was I not allowed consume and ingest some of the stuff?”
Yulai was expressionless, as another car rushed past the two agents. The rain was coming down just a tad bit harder now, making the sound that rain makes in a quiet part of the city as it hits the pavement and hisses during spring or summer time. He spoke slowly, seeming to measure his words carefully and quietly. “You were not allowed to take the Red Spice because we were concerned about what had happened before we left. We did not want you to come back immediately when it was clear that someone was hunting you down, and might be rather unhappy and try to do a more… thorough job once they heard and realized that you had escaped alive. There has obviously been a breach in the agent program, and bringing you back into the squad so early when another assassination attempt might have been made.”
“That’s no excuse right there.”
“Your hallucinations were an issue as well.”
“Really? I would have never guessed.”
Yulai gave Cambridge a look that was half bemused half sulking. “Yes, the hallucinations were an issue, and we had to rather restrain you after that whole episode you had in the hospital. Nearly broke a few necks on that one, and a few people were indeed wounded. High Command was interested in giving you a psyche evaluation, but we deflected it by saying that you were rather delusional due to the cocktail of drugs and the pain that you were experiencing at the time. You got lucky on that count when they bought that explanation from us.”
“How is High Command doing anyways? And have there been any other assassinations as of late?”
“High Command is back and functioning despite all the odds stacked against us. Most of the High Command is scattered across the nation currently due to all the Ming Tian assassinations that had been going on, but he has been rather silent as of late, so we don’t know what exactly he has been up to. The entire program is as it stands teetering on the edge, and more people are being brought into the Verbenschwa on a daily basis. It also appears to be that the Chekra might be disbanded soon.”
Cambridge was surprised at that last note. “Why’s that happening?”
“Most of the Chekra were killed during the bombings, and the command structure of the Chekra has been falling into a rut with some of the assassinations that they have been having. A lot of the surviving agents are not that eager to do their jobs as of late, as there is ‘Chekra Hunter’ out in the suburbs of New York and moving to some other metropolitan areas, so they are just a tad bit uneager to do any of that at the moment. It appears to be though that all of the Chekra are being reabsorbed back into the Verbenschwa, due to all the conflicts that they have been having as of late.”
“So the Chekra are in decline at this point? What is their current situation like?”
“Not good, as I said, lots of them are dead. About ninety five percent as I last recall. Some have been killed and targeted for assassination by some of the paramilitary groups; the Brazen Spears, the Soldiers of the Endless Night, and others. It’s a bad situation; with the Black Marchers weak as they are after the fall of the House of Leaves, and with the rather brazen attacks led by the Zuschlag Und Stahl Liberation Front has put most of the smaller to the larger organizations on edge, and has made them more eager to attack and burn and pillage left and right. Grey Dawn is quiet, Black Marchers are moving and regrouping in the East and the West, and the Rising Sun Separatist Group is starting to mobilize its own forces after being somewhat dormant for so long.”
“What is it about the Rising Sun Separatist Group now? I thought that they were deemed ‘safe’? What the hell have they been doing to make the government hate them so much and despise them to the extreme?”
“They have become a lot more active at this point; they’ve been carrying out attacks and assaults on army depots and whatnot all across the eastern and western parts of the country, and it’s our job to clean up the mess, as always; the usual drill of course, get in clear up everything, make sure that there are the bodies that are supposed to be there are left in their usual location, and whatnot. Though we might instead be deployed to hunt Snowbell instead.”
“Snowbell…” just hearing her name made Cambridge’s eye twitch and his hand curl up into a fist at his side in rage, gritting his teeth silently as he maintained control over himself. “Did she not make it to the north like she was hoping to do? Did she die yet? Please for the sake of god; tell me that she is dead and that we no longer have to deal with her and that you are just messing with me on that count.”
“Unfortunately no, Snowbell is still very much alive, and she is still heading north. Though the train that she was on was bombed to hell by a trackside explosive apparently planted by the Grey Dawn after they apparently tried to stop the Black Marchers from shifting operations northward into their territory. Marchers and troops of the Dawn hate each other with a passion. She apparently has been causing trouble in droves up there in those areas, and is antagonizing the Grey Dawn, and having the remaining Black Marchers in the area attack them. Less than fifty percent of the initial bases up in the North, and their assorted troops, but they are still fighting for what they believe in, and they are extracting much blood for very little effort, as Snowbell plays both sides of the war between them.”
“I see.” Cambridge stamped his feet on the pavement, and for the first time, he realized that it was a touch chilly outside, even though it was nearing summer. All of this soft drizzle and rain was getting into his bones and making him feel quite cold and quite frankly was getting tired. “Anything else that you need to tell me about, Yulai?”
“Not yet, but I may be speaking to you later when you return. Right now, you need to focus on getting better over the next several weeks and so that you can return when you are finally ready and healed. Go to your family as well; spend some time with them while you still can. You never know how much time that you have left to spend with them, so make the most out of it that you can in the meantime, my friend.”
“I already placed a form to go back into the program in a few days, Yulai.” Another group of cars went by and a few birds dropped down into the road and hobbled about, looking for worms or other delicacies that might be out there. “And my family is already gone, under my orders and direction. At this point, they are safe in Russia at the moment, spending time with the deranged old bastard of a father I have up in those parts. The kids like him, he’s got lots of stories and other such things, and we will keep them busy for a long time. I’m going back into the program, because at this point I have nothing left to do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone needs something to fight for in the life, some sort of goal or thing that they must pursue. Without that, what is the point of living at this point? I do not want to do nothing and just sit on my arse day in and day out for weeks on end; I need something to do, something to make my life worth living… if there is nothing left for me to do, then what do I do?”
“You have a family, Cambridge,” Yulai said as he began to walk away. “That’s more than I can say for myself or for Epsilon for that matter.”
Yulai kept walking and eventually disappeared back into the fog, and Cambridge watched him become swallowed and taken up by the fog as his footsteps petered off into silence. He shrugged and pulled out the cigarette holder that he had, flipping over the lid gently. North Star brand was always the best, even if they were a bit odd with their making of the cigarettes; they liked to make many of them with different packaging and wrappings, for no apparent reason at times. About seven of the regular, stereotypical ones were in there, as well as one pure white cigarette and about ten or so bloody red ones. Cambridge contemplated smoking some, but the pain was back, and they had advised him not to take any pills with cigarettes as well. He slipped the package back into his pocket and palmed several pills before taking the long walk back home, back through the foggy streets of Washington.
Tomorrow's Dawn
Heroes Never Die
Crossover Chapter III,
Wormwood
The explosion of the Czernobog and the death of every Russian cosmonaut caused quite a stir
in the space station, but it was the heated debate over the cause that seemed to poison any mention of it, whether if it was in the black or on the ground. RussiaToday, the premier Russian news network broadcast speeches and fiery calls to action delivered by a variety of different politicians and public figures. Many asserted that it was no accident like the Germans & Romans insisted, and that a bomb had been planted by one of the other factions. The official statement from the State indicated that the consensus was that the Russian government set the bomb in the shuttles themselves, in order to frame other states of hostile intent. They pointed out that no bomb could have been planted by anyone aboard the Cromm Crúaich, because each and every astronaut had to undergo comprehensive security checks, when the Germans argued that American security measures were lackluster and that their eagerness to defend their stance implied that the State was hiding something.
The sewage continued to seep through the station.
Already paranoid of one another, they were all forced to get to work on the leakage problem at hand.
It was grueling work, but it had to be done.
Day and night, the engineers rerouted the conduits and isolated
faulty systems that were to be expelled into outer space.
Perhaps it was just the sleep deprivation but was it just them, or were there more leaks than they could fix?
Two days later, a German was found dead, hanging by her own entrails over the rafters of the mess hall.
One of the astronauts onboard vomited at the sight.
Accusations were being flung on all sides like bullets and Savannah was caught in the crossfire.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Someone pulled out a knife. She didn't know who, she didn't care, there was only her life at stake.
Gunshots could even be heard. How did those pass the clearance checks?!
By the time she caught her breath, she had just turned the corner to her own room.
She fortified the room and barricaded the door immediately.
Some of the others had attempted to bridge communications with her, but she denied every request
and dialed NASA straight away. The operators answered, only to find Savannah ranting and raving at them
to get her down from the space station.
"Calm down, Collins. We need some time to clear a rescue mission with the administration."
"Time? I don't have time!" she shouted.
"The sewage is seeping into every part of the station and there's a murderer loose in the halls."
"By the time you get here, I'll either have drowned or died of starvation, if I'm not killed first."
"Please keep calm, we're doing the best we can. Try and maintain a constant connection with us, and we'll try to help you out." The feed ended there, as Savannah was about to say something.
She couldn't sleep for the past several hours, waiting for a response from NASA.
Screams could occasionally be heard outside the door in the hallways.
In the interim, she decided to be pro-active and while she was no professional sleuther, had the resources and the know-how to crack open each crew member's personnel files.
After a little cursory reading, she realized the data values didn't add up.
She ran her standard decrypter and soon found that a number of hidden data caches were located on each file. She started with the first person she remembered dying on the station. After a few repeated attempts in trying to get in, she succeeded and was able to view some of the data on a text editor.
"Dana Warren Langdon was a convicted and registered sex offender in Miami.
The majority of his victims were young teenage girls from between the ages of 12 and 17."
A list of names dropped down on the screen; the names of all of his victims came into view.
Digging deeper, she found that in between the period of his incarceration and his employment at NASA, there was a huge gap in information concerning what he did in the interim.
Savannah wondered if the same anomaly existed with the other crew members,
and as she did the math, she was right. Each and every personnel file had concealed a small cache of hidden encrypted data.
"Lucia Theodora, Roman.
Was arrested for business fraud and involvement in a pyramid scheme.
Released from jail three months after incarceration."
"Matthias Drexel, German.
Was a conspirator in a major media network wire-tapping scandal.
Pardoned in a controversial judicial ruling."
"Trevor Stone, American.
Convicted serial rapist. Was known to let his victims' guards down before he [REDACTED] them."
"Oh god," she thought to herself. "I let him give me a massage once..."
She kept cycling through the files and found that every single crew member had a criminal record of some kind. But it was odd. If these were true, they would have never been cleared to go up in space by any of their respective governments. And curiously- some astronauts appeared to be spies; Flavius for one wasn't a Roman, he was an American! What was even more confusing was that if this data was so easily accessible, then it couldn't have been the respective government that uploaded the data. But who would? But that wasn't the matter at hand. Nearly every and any crew member could be responsible for the murders. She was unsettled by what she had found out but exhaustion was setting in and after reinforcing the security on the door, tried to fall asleep.
She remembered the time when she was sixteen.
Her parents had died in a terrorist attack in a string of subway bombings across the State.
It was just her and another mouth to feed.
The crushing weight of it all loomed over her, and she was at a crossroads on what to do.
A demanding minimum wage job, a struggle to save for higher education and a little infant sister.
And the crying, it wouldn't stop.
It was so incessant, the shrill sound of crying. She'd do anything to stop it.
God! Make it stop!
"SHUT UP!!!" she screamed at the top of her lungs as her eyes forced awake.
There was no one there. But now that she was up and the adrenaline was pumping in her veins, it got her off the floor, just in time to notice that the sewage was seeping through the barricade and into her room.
She could not stay here any longer.
Gathering up her wits, she gathered all the data she had collected and slowly dismantled her barricade.
Her objective was to reach the escape pod and hope that it hadn't already launched.
If it was, perhaps she could salvage a gun and hold out till help came from NASA.
Certainly though, she wasn't the only one with that idea, she thought to herself.
As she waded through the ankle deep sewage flowing through the station, she saw the bloodied, mangled bodies of a number of fellow Americans floating by, dead in the black water.
She soon waded through to the hatch and it appeared that the shuttle was still there.
Upon entry, she rushed immediately to the controls, only to find out that
there was a big gaping hole right where the control panel used to be.
"What? What happened to the control panel?" Savannah thought to herself.
"Behind you," called out a voice.
Savannah turned around, to see Flavius smirking and pointing a gun at her head.
"Flavius!" she shouted.
"Were you responsible the sewage leak? And the Russians?" she confronted him.
"I honestly had nothing to do with either. It was convenient though.
Moved me right up on schedule, it did,"
"You were going to use this to create an international incident, weren't you?"
"I know you read my file. You didn't really think I was a Roman, did you?
That's just something that I half-assed. No. I'm a red, white and blue-blooded American, just like you."
Savannah opened her mouth as if to speak but bit her lip instead.
It prompted Flavius to laugh.
"Going to lecture me about morality? You were just about to, right?
Do you really think you're any better?"
"Nobody's going to make it out of here alive.
Not you, not me. And our State is going to have all the justification it needs to declare war on Rome.
I'll tell you the truth though, I didn't kill all of them.
I don't know who killed the rest of them,
but whoever it was did a damn good job."
He was about to continue on the finer details of the plan when he caught sight of her trying to sidle a hand behind her. He wasn't going to take any chances like an action-movie villian; Flavius simply opened fire. The shots flew straight through her chest, but the bullets he had packed were perhaps too effective. They pierced straight through her body and into the valves behind her, triggering an explosion, sending shrapnel flying every which way. Savannah was impaled from her back by a number of sharp objects, flooring her instantly. Flavius, in all his triumph, was even more unfortunate. A large metal edge came loose from a broken panel and lodged itself deep into his fat neck.
Still breathing, Savannah slumped by the side of the control panel and inserted her drive into an open slot.
In her last, dying gesture, she transmitted the recording of the American plot as described by Flavius and the crew members' criminal history including her own, to every major news network on the surface, irrespective of nationality. As she laid on her back, thoughts of regrets and guilt bubbled to the surface.
She never asked to be given such a responsibility. She struck her across the cheek. To stop the crying.
Each blow fiercer than the next, a testament to her rage.
It was because of her that she couldn't pursue her college education.
It was because of her that she had to spend all her time caring for her.
It was because of her that her dreams of reaching the stars seemed impossibly far.
Like the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
By the time she was done, the little body laid crumpled and still, having ceased to draw breath.
She was horrified.
She didn't mean it, she kept trying to tell herself that.
She wished that she could say that she did it in a drunken rage.
That she wasn't responsible for her own actions.
But she was fully aware, and each fist was laden with her crushing desire to be liberated.
They came the next day, as if they had witnessed the whole thing.
And they offered to cover up the whole thing, for nothing.
They even offered a full scholarship at CalTech, and an eventual position at NASA.
She couldn't believe it, though still wracked with guilt, she took it, without any hesitation.
She never questioned it.
"I'm sorry." she cried.
And she perished in the ensuing inferno before it was subsumed by the void of space.
***************************************************************
Pipa Jing watched from a distance before she hurled it into the atmosphere towards her intended target.
It started to burn up so she applied some shielding to help it ease its way into entry.
She delighted as the space station came down on an oil rig, and the carnage that came with it.
But, she couldn't stay for much longer in this world without being tethered, so regrettably, the demon left back to whence she came.
"You're back."
"I am. It's over. With the station gone, they won't be able to scour the globe for new recruits from up above. I doubt it threw a wrench in his plans in the grand scheme though,"
"That's fine. It was just a message, nothing more."
"Can I go back to sleep now?"
"Yes, I apologize for having stirred you. Rest well, Pipa Jing."
"It was fun playing taikonaut for awhile. There's one more thing though..."
"Speak your peace."
"One of them...she felt sorry. She felt really sorry. Maybe your friend took her in."
The demon looked at the woman beneath the ice.
The other component souls were resting inside, waiting for her to rejoin them in slumber.
"Call me if you need me," she said.
As she entered the body through the ice, the woman inside visibly degraded a little.
The serpent flicked his tongue longingly across the ice before he slithered out of the cavern.
Wormwood
The explosion of the Czernobog and the death of every Russian cosmonaut caused quite a stir
in the space station, but it was the heated debate over the cause that seemed to poison any mention of it, whether if it was in the black or on the ground. RussiaToday, the premier Russian news network broadcast speeches and fiery calls to action delivered by a variety of different politicians and public figures. Many asserted that it was no accident like the Germans & Romans insisted, and that a bomb had been planted by one of the other factions. The official statement from the State indicated that the consensus was that the Russian government set the bomb in the shuttles themselves, in order to frame other states of hostile intent. They pointed out that no bomb could have been planted by anyone aboard the Cromm Crúaich, because each and every astronaut had to undergo comprehensive security checks, when the Germans argued that American security measures were lackluster and that their eagerness to defend their stance implied that the State was hiding something.
The sewage continued to seep through the station.
Already paranoid of one another, they were all forced to get to work on the leakage problem at hand.
It was grueling work, but it had to be done.
Day and night, the engineers rerouted the conduits and isolated
faulty systems that were to be expelled into outer space.
Perhaps it was just the sleep deprivation but was it just them, or were there more leaks than they could fix?
Two days later, a German was found dead, hanging by her own entrails over the rafters of the mess hall.
One of the astronauts onboard vomited at the sight.
Accusations were being flung on all sides like bullets and Savannah was caught in the crossfire.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Someone pulled out a knife. She didn't know who, she didn't care, there was only her life at stake.
Gunshots could even be heard. How did those pass the clearance checks?!
By the time she caught her breath, she had just turned the corner to her own room.
She fortified the room and barricaded the door immediately.
Some of the others had attempted to bridge communications with her, but she denied every request
and dialed NASA straight away. The operators answered, only to find Savannah ranting and raving at them
to get her down from the space station.
"Calm down, Collins. We need some time to clear a rescue mission with the administration."
"Time? I don't have time!" she shouted.
"The sewage is seeping into every part of the station and there's a murderer loose in the halls."
"By the time you get here, I'll either have drowned or died of starvation, if I'm not killed first."
"Please keep calm, we're doing the best we can. Try and maintain a constant connection with us, and we'll try to help you out." The feed ended there, as Savannah was about to say something.
She couldn't sleep for the past several hours, waiting for a response from NASA.
Screams could occasionally be heard outside the door in the hallways.
In the interim, she decided to be pro-active and while she was no professional sleuther, had the resources and the know-how to crack open each crew member's personnel files.
After a little cursory reading, she realized the data values didn't add up.
She ran her standard decrypter and soon found that a number of hidden data caches were located on each file. She started with the first person she remembered dying on the station. After a few repeated attempts in trying to get in, she succeeded and was able to view some of the data on a text editor.
"Dana Warren Langdon was a convicted and registered sex offender in Miami.
The majority of his victims were young teenage girls from between the ages of 12 and 17."
A list of names dropped down on the screen; the names of all of his victims came into view.
Digging deeper, she found that in between the period of his incarceration and his employment at NASA, there was a huge gap in information concerning what he did in the interim.
Savannah wondered if the same anomaly existed with the other crew members,
and as she did the math, she was right. Each and every personnel file had concealed a small cache of hidden encrypted data.
"Lucia Theodora, Roman.
Was arrested for business fraud and involvement in a pyramid scheme.
Released from jail three months after incarceration."
"Matthias Drexel, German.
Was a conspirator in a major media network wire-tapping scandal.
Pardoned in a controversial judicial ruling."
"Trevor Stone, American.
Convicted serial rapist. Was known to let his victims' guards down before he [REDACTED] them."
"Oh god," she thought to herself. "I let him give me a massage once..."
She kept cycling through the files and found that every single crew member had a criminal record of some kind. But it was odd. If these were true, they would have never been cleared to go up in space by any of their respective governments. And curiously- some astronauts appeared to be spies; Flavius for one wasn't a Roman, he was an American! What was even more confusing was that if this data was so easily accessible, then it couldn't have been the respective government that uploaded the data. But who would? But that wasn't the matter at hand. Nearly every and any crew member could be responsible for the murders. She was unsettled by what she had found out but exhaustion was setting in and after reinforcing the security on the door, tried to fall asleep.
She remembered the time when she was sixteen.
Her parents had died in a terrorist attack in a string of subway bombings across the State.
It was just her and another mouth to feed.
The crushing weight of it all loomed over her, and she was at a crossroads on what to do.
A demanding minimum wage job, a struggle to save for higher education and a little infant sister.
And the crying, it wouldn't stop.
It was so incessant, the shrill sound of crying. She'd do anything to stop it.
God! Make it stop!
"SHUT UP!!!" she screamed at the top of her lungs as her eyes forced awake.
There was no one there. But now that she was up and the adrenaline was pumping in her veins, it got her off the floor, just in time to notice that the sewage was seeping through the barricade and into her room.
She could not stay here any longer.
Gathering up her wits, she gathered all the data she had collected and slowly dismantled her barricade.
Her objective was to reach the escape pod and hope that it hadn't already launched.
If it was, perhaps she could salvage a gun and hold out till help came from NASA.
Certainly though, she wasn't the only one with that idea, she thought to herself.
As she waded through the ankle deep sewage flowing through the station, she saw the bloodied, mangled bodies of a number of fellow Americans floating by, dead in the black water.
She soon waded through to the hatch and it appeared that the shuttle was still there.
Upon entry, she rushed immediately to the controls, only to find out that
there was a big gaping hole right where the control panel used to be.
"What? What happened to the control panel?" Savannah thought to herself.
"Behind you," called out a voice.
Savannah turned around, to see Flavius smirking and pointing a gun at her head.
"Flavius!" she shouted.
"Were you responsible the sewage leak? And the Russians?" she confronted him.
"I honestly had nothing to do with either. It was convenient though.
Moved me right up on schedule, it did,"
"You were going to use this to create an international incident, weren't you?"
"I know you read my file. You didn't really think I was a Roman, did you?
That's just something that I half-assed. No. I'm a red, white and blue-blooded American, just like you."
Savannah opened her mouth as if to speak but bit her lip instead.
It prompted Flavius to laugh.
"Going to lecture me about morality? You were just about to, right?
Do you really think you're any better?"
"Nobody's going to make it out of here alive.
Not you, not me. And our State is going to have all the justification it needs to declare war on Rome.
I'll tell you the truth though, I didn't kill all of them.
I don't know who killed the rest of them,
but whoever it was did a damn good job."
He was about to continue on the finer details of the plan when he caught sight of her trying to sidle a hand behind her. He wasn't going to take any chances like an action-movie villian; Flavius simply opened fire. The shots flew straight through her chest, but the bullets he had packed were perhaps too effective. They pierced straight through her body and into the valves behind her, triggering an explosion, sending shrapnel flying every which way. Savannah was impaled from her back by a number of sharp objects, flooring her instantly. Flavius, in all his triumph, was even more unfortunate. A large metal edge came loose from a broken panel and lodged itself deep into his fat neck.
Still breathing, Savannah slumped by the side of the control panel and inserted her drive into an open slot.
In her last, dying gesture, she transmitted the recording of the American plot as described by Flavius and the crew members' criminal history including her own, to every major news network on the surface, irrespective of nationality. As she laid on her back, thoughts of regrets and guilt bubbled to the surface.
She never asked to be given such a responsibility. She struck her across the cheek. To stop the crying.
Each blow fiercer than the next, a testament to her rage.
It was because of her that she couldn't pursue her college education.
It was because of her that she had to spend all her time caring for her.
It was because of her that her dreams of reaching the stars seemed impossibly far.
Like the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
By the time she was done, the little body laid crumpled and still, having ceased to draw breath.
She was horrified.
She didn't mean it, she kept trying to tell herself that.
She wished that she could say that she did it in a drunken rage.
That she wasn't responsible for her own actions.
But she was fully aware, and each fist was laden with her crushing desire to be liberated.
They came the next day, as if they had witnessed the whole thing.
And they offered to cover up the whole thing, for nothing.
They even offered a full scholarship at CalTech, and an eventual position at NASA.
She couldn't believe it, though still wracked with guilt, she took it, without any hesitation.
She never questioned it.
"I'm sorry." she cried.
And she perished in the ensuing inferno before it was subsumed by the void of space.
***************************************************************
Pipa Jing watched from a distance before she hurled it into the atmosphere towards her intended target.
It started to burn up so she applied some shielding to help it ease its way into entry.
She delighted as the space station came down on an oil rig, and the carnage that came with it.
But, she couldn't stay for much longer in this world without being tethered, so regrettably, the demon left back to whence she came.
"You're back."
"I am. It's over. With the station gone, they won't be able to scour the globe for new recruits from up above. I doubt it threw a wrench in his plans in the grand scheme though,"
"That's fine. It was just a message, nothing more."
"Can I go back to sleep now?"
"Yes, I apologize for having stirred you. Rest well, Pipa Jing."
"It was fun playing taikonaut for awhile. There's one more thing though..."
"Speak your peace."
"One of them...she felt sorry. She felt really sorry. Maybe your friend took her in."
The demon looked at the woman beneath the ice.
The other component souls were resting inside, waiting for her to rejoin them in slumber.
"Call me if you need me," she said.
As she entered the body through the ice, the woman inside visibly degraded a little.
The serpent flicked his tongue longingly across the ice before he slithered out of the cavern.
Bair_the_Normal
転輪聖王
Gah... *Dies from the overwhelming intensity*
That. Was. AWESOME!!!!!
That. Was. AWESOME!!!!!
Tycho
AFK Forum Warrior
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2011
- Messages
- 3,240
As always, excellent work Dawn.
Due to recent items on the agenda, I have had problems finishing my own side of the crossover series, and at the same time, have struggled to finish up the Ming Tian and the next Li the Revolutionary chapter, which should come shortly, as in tomorrow.
Due to recent items on the agenda, I have had problems finishing my own side of the crossover series, and at the same time, have struggled to finish up the Ming Tian and the next Li the Revolutionary chapter, which should come shortly, as in tomorrow.
SamSniped
DJ Goodboye
Great work!
Tomorrow's Dawn
Heroes Never Die
Thanks, but it's not on the Table of Contents in the first post yet!
It is good to be writing again though.
It is good to be writing again though.
Tycho
AFK Forum Warrior
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2011
- Messages
- 3,240
Li the Revolutionary, Part 7
Assault on the Fortress
The grappling hooks were out and up the wall silently as the members of the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front moved forward through the night. Li and Verarde climbed the more than fifty meter wall silently, under the cover of night with a crescent moon hanging gently in the sky, a speckled field of stars splashed behind it. The guards on the outer perimeter were dead or incapacitated, the chain link fence breached; now was the time to engage the enemy forces in the breach and marshal.
Li climbed the rope as fast as possible, but Verarde was putting him to shame, and for good reason; as a senator in the American nation, Li had not expected to be a part of a prison breaking operation, and was having trouble keeping pace with the other members of the Grey Dawn and of the Polish Resistance Front, but he was holding his own, but barely. An assault rifle was slung across his back and prepared, locked and loaded with cartridges of armor piercing and hollow point rounds stocked in his pack. So much for the supposedly inhumane ammunition that was hollow points being illegal, but then again, the American government and State Security had made sure that hollow points were used in riot situations and crowd dispersal tactics whenever they were needed.
It took a few minutes, but finally they were on top of the walkway for the first stone wall of the prison; before them was the main prison yard and the guard barracks here and there, and searchlights probed the yard, looking for any escaped convicts that might have tried to make it out during the night. A few guards could be seen here and there, patrolling with anti-material rifles gripped in their hands and loaded with bullets designed to murder tanks, not people, but all the stopping power in the world could not stop a stealth operation if undetected; it was at this point, that the Polish Resistance Front groups and the Grey Dawn cells split up and joined in sections with the other respective party, and the two units made up of Grey Dawn and Polish Resistance Front soldiers moved across the walkways. Li followed closely, Verarde just ahead and leading him through the area. One by one, the guards were taken down and stabbed to death where they were, or incapacitated with the butt of the rifles.
With that part of the operation done, the members spread out across the assorted towers and entryways on the outer wall, and moved towards where the searchlight controls were; slowly, the lights started to dim over the course of about ten minutes, until they were nearly ninety percent dimmer than they had been before. Next step was the operation involving stopping the guards and barricading the barracks, something that was accomplished by barricading the doors and side exits and blocking the windows with spare vehicles and junk scattered about; some of the anti-material rifles, made out of some of the finest and strongest steel in the world, were secured to prevent the windows from swinging open, not that it would matter much; three times as much alcohol had been routed into the barracks tonight, after the Polish Resistance Front fighters in charge of that bit made sure that the extra shipment would be a special batch full of high proof alcohol.
At this point, the main assault on the facility could begin and go underway. Ropes and cables were tossed and thrown between the groups as they split up, Grey Dawn units pairing up with Polish Resistance Front fighters, and likewise. Four groups in all, and Lis group that he was helping to lead alongside Verarde was going nicely, all things considered that they had upon their hands. Climbing up the sheer, concrete and stone wall that made up the second ring of the fortress prison would be difficult, but they managed to pull it off nicely, and without a single casualty whatsoever amongst the units.
For several minutes, careful observation of the perimeter patrols and the main facility were underway, and it looked to be a bit on the side of difficult for infiltrating the rest of the fortress; groups of guards and patrols were out and about in large numbers, and it seemed to be that they were in the areas where the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front would rather have them away from, but they had to work with what they were given.
The general layout of the facility constituted as a multi-level structure, with some of them going as high as four hundred feet at points, with the special sections tightly patrolled and monitored, as well as snipers nests on the very top. Machine gun batteries were everywhere as well, mostly aimed inwards at the facility to keep people in, in the event of a riot or attempted breakout from the prison, something that Li believed that he would rather not experience first-hand. Not only that, flak guns and sections were dotted around the yard, and what appeared to be surface to air missile pads with inactive launchers as well, which did not bode well for the choppers of the Grey Dawn. There were more of them than the Grey Dawn members had hoped for, but in the end, they would have to take them out another way.
It was 2:04 in the early morning when the games truly began.
Li and his team moved along the battlements and the walkways of the inner ring, sweeping around it to put down anyone who tried to resist them, as quietly as possible. Even with silenced weapons, they were not going to risk anything; silencers, often popularized in movies, do not work like they do in media when applied to real life, and firing them would have been equivalent to bringing a jackhammer out and punching holes in the wall. Stealthier options included stabbing and punching the guards out and incapacitating them, although one or two men of the Grey Dawn and of the Polish Resistance Front preferred something more along the lines of strangulation by piano wire, and opted for that when wiping out a few soldiers here and there. Behind the teams, groups of Poles were moving in taking up the positions one by one to hold watch and keep the guards and internal security of the prison from growing suspicious about stuff, which would have happened if mass amounts of guards started to inexplicably abandon their communication lines and suddenly drop off of the radar almost instantly in many cases, without permission to do so.
After almost an hour of all the teams slowly doing the work that they had been assigned to do, they reported at their specific locations around the base of the facility in many areas, and prepared themselves. Li and Verarde checked their rifles and cartridges, had their grenades ready, extra clips and magazines, secondary weapons at their hips in their holsters, and gave the signal for their respective teams. All across the base, cutting torches, designed as industrial tools to slice through steel and rock with ease, activated, and began the long and tedious twenty minute process of getting through the thick walls of the fortifications. It sure as hell took as much time to do so, and every minute, one expected to hear the sounds of guards running and shouting along the battlements or alarms being raised and started in the air to alert the entire prison that it was time to start offing potential liabilities.
But no, they finally got through the fortifications, which took enough time as it was. Slowly, they carefully pulled the wall towards them, breaking into the first floor of the maintenance area as they did so. At that point, all the men and women of the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front flicked the flashlights underneath the main part of their weapons and proceeded inwards inside of the darkened areas of the maintenance department.
Inside, it was eerily quiet. Banners and posters hung on white washed walls, governmental slogans and sayings printed on them and broadcast to anyone that happened to be walking by, and some were clearly propaganda posters. One displayed a happy Roman family working in the fields of an agrarian commune, and another displaying young Roman soldiers smiling as they held their rifles up and forward, displaying them fully. Some of the Poles made cracks about them as they went by, mostly about how they looked like they had been forced at gunpoint to do the pictures, and Li couldnt help but agree with them on that note.
The dark hallway that they had initially entered gave way to a larger hallway that was brightly lit and obviously led into more of the main part of the facility. Inside of it, just around the left hand corner away from the group that Li and Verarde were leading, a janitor whistled softly as he mopped and swept the floors, polishing them into perfection. One of the Poles, Lech (no relation to the man that they were heading for), put his finger up to his lips and motioned towards the janitor, pulled out a knife and ran down the hallway as fast as he could. The janitor did not look up until it was too late, allowing Lech to grab the man by his neck and shake him around while whispering urgently in Roman about how he would gut him like a fish if the janitor screamed or said a word. The man nodded at each instance Lech asked him a question, including one asking for directions to the central part of the facility.
At that point, they shoved him into a maintenance closet and barred the door with the mans own mop and proceeded until they reached the first juncture.
Now what, the Grey Dawn soldier named Ashman said. He was short and stocky, and quick to anger, with a face like a Russian with detailed Slavic features, and he seemed to be quite annoyed by the security cameras that were up ahead. We cant proceed until those damned things are downed.
Verarde smiled and nodded at him, before picking up his radio and whispering into it. Fire Team two, are you in position?
Ja, the German on the other end of the line said. We are good to go when you are ready. Cutting out the optics to that section of the facility right about . Now.
Like poked his head out from behind cover and checked the cameras; they were stationary, and unmoving, and the tiny blinking red dot that usually showed that they were on had been extinguished like so much candle flame. A half dozen on the hallway to the right, seven on the left, and several motion sensors, which had undoubtedly been cut as well.
Thanks for that gents, we will be on our way as soon as we can.
There was a muted boom from above on the upper floors of the building briefly. Lighting in the ceiling flickered and dimmed for a few seconds before resuming its normal tone, and angry voices could be heard dully from up above, carried down through some vents. A thin layer of dust and concrete chips were shaken down from the roof of this floor to fall onto the floor and gather on the work that the janitor had been doing before he had been so rudely incapacitated.
Ashman was the first to speak up. What the hell was that?
Li didnt answer but he was already on the communication lines, and from the sounds of it, the other fire teams and breach groups had heard it as well. TACNET, this is Li of the Grey Dawn, could you tell us what the hell is going on up there at the moment?
There was a brief burst of static before a TACNET operator came on the line. Rogue mercenary group in the harbor, they apparently have some men in the prison as well, and they have started shelling the south bank of the harbor, as well as key places all along the city and near the prison. They apparently are gearing up for a raid, but by the looks of it, they arent really interested in giving any quarter. Polish ships are engaging them, as well as the guns around the harbor, but it is advised from local STATCOM that you hurry up and complete your mission as soon as possible. STATCOM is saying that they might be deploying rocket artillery on the city soon.
Damn it. The others had chipped in and listened to the sound of TACNET informing them of their possible imminent demise, and by the looks of it, they were prepared to go to war with these mercenaries. TACNET, whats your call on using unsilenced weapons?
You are clear to use them, sir, enough shells are coming down on the city that nobody will be able to hear and tell the difference between a few gunshots here and there.
Understood, signing off.
Looks like we have some work to do then, dont we gentlemen? Li drew out his assault rifle and drew back the lock on it, making it weapons free at this point. Time to go, everyone.
Fire Team Four, responding, we have shells cascading down from the southern side of the city, how many ships do they have in the harbor, TACNET, over?
Enemy mercenary groups have about three hundred ships mobilized in the harbor; four carriers, almost three dozen battleships, four dozen battle cruiser, nearly a hundred cruisers, with the rest being a smattering of destroyers and auxiliary vessels patrolling the waters and raining down missiles and surface to air missiles whenever the chance presents itself.
TACNET, is Fire Team Seven responding, whats the status on evacuation plans and vehicles scheduled to help us mobilize out of the locale when the operation is successful, over?
Fire Team Seven, this is TACNET, over. Status on the evacuation plans and evacuation routes and vehicles are good at the moment, though we are having some problems due to unfriendly forces that remain present in the harbor currently, but we are working on solving this issue as fast as we can, so rest assured, we will not be leaving anyone behind, to the best of our ability. Stay true to your mission, and we will attempt to guide you to the best of our ability.
The communication lines were much like that while Li and Verardes fire team made their way up to the top of the central command building, through a wing on the maintenance department of the prison. Multiple guards had been killed or incapacitated on the route over, but they didnt have time to think about the fact that some of those people may have been innocent or anything of the sort similar to that. The mercenary attack, which seemed to be made up of an odd band of Germans, Russians, Poles, Romans, Americans, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese peoples mixed together in a paramilitary organization known as the Nation Without Borders. Radical men, even by standards compared to the Black Marchers, the Zuschlag Und Stahl Liberation Front, and the Rising Sun Separatist Group.
Where they had gotten the massive amount of military material to orchestrate this attack was unknown, but by the looks of it, this operation to rescue their compatriots in crime and in war had been in the planning for a long time, and by the looks of it, this continual shelling was beginning to put strain on even the massive fortress such as this prison, which had been built to withstand assault centuries ago.
Alright, fire team two, up ahead, you will come up to yet another juncture; at this point, you will proceed straight through, as we have already made sure that the cameras and optics through this area have been cut off and fried, letting you guys run right through. However, we should warn you that up ahead is the central command room that gives access and oversight over most of the facility and is heavily guarded by guards at many positions the rest of whatever the TACNET operator was going to say was drowned out in a hiss of static that smashed through the lines as more artillery shells rained down on the prison.
He hadnt been lying; as they came up to the next juncture by the way of a stairwell leading up from the floor down, they could see dozens of cameras and sensors arrayed around here in order to protect the main room from assault at any chance and opportunity that they would have been allowed. Oddly enough though, no guards were present, though it should have been the case; this was after all, the most central point of the facility, and the vital nerve and sensory command outpost that would protect and view the prison from all sides if necessary, and linked up to automated gun batteries and everything else of the like.
Multiple men and women of the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front took up positions along the top of the stairwell and swept their guns left and right in order to provide covering fire if necessary, and then held their guns at ready and proceeded slowly up the stairs, and carefully probed around the corners as necessary. A burst of gunfire from one side elicited multiple staccato pops from the soldiers who had probed that position, and several sharp cries of pain marked the death of several Roman prison guards who had had the unfortunate luck of having tonight as their night shift. Li and Verarde brought up the rear of the procession this time, taking the steps two and three at a time before moving into cover and positions along the hallway wherever alcoves and obstructions presented themselves.
Once the rooms and other areas alongside the hallway had been checked and cleared, Li and Verarde took up positions alongside the great steel doors at the end of the hallway, big enough to let a Humvee go through them, and nodded towards each other. Verarde snapped four flash bangs off of his cache, and popped the tops, kicking open the doors to the room and rolling them in. Sharp cracks and flashes of light followed, and Li tossed in two fragmentation grenades to liven things up for whoever was supposed to be in there, before they both kicked down the doors, and swept into the room, the others following behind them.
Inside, they found a gruesome scene. Multiple guards were apparently dead at their post; throats gouged out and slashed open, eyes ripped out of their sockets, blood and pieces of bone along the floor everywhere. One of the men retched in the corner of the room, and Li felt his bile rise in the back of his throat before he quelled it. There was no time to be sick.
Grey Dawn members and the PLF fighters moved in and carried the bodies out of their sitting positions and laid them against the wall on one side of the room, while the hacking team that had been several minutes behind the fire team arrived on position and started to set up shop. At that point, firewalls needed to be breached, redundancy measures were punctured, and a variety of fail safes were destroyed in the cyber-attacks and the breaching of the system that the prison had devised. It took several minutes, several hair raising minutes as footage from around the prison showed a hellish carnage as multiple guards and inmates clashed with firearms and makeshift weapons, and scenes outside as choppers bearing commando teams of mercenaries were shot down in fiery flashes as both the manned and automated gunnery systems of the prison flicked online and began the murder of the attackers and assailants. Not that it did them a lot of good though; there was a veritable flood of the things, and constant long range offshore artillery bombardment had gradually worn away at the defenses of the prison.
TACNET chose this time just after the final firewall and redundancy system went offline to chime in and speak in Li and Verardes ears. By the looks of it, systems in the higher parts of the prison will not allow more than two people up in those areas that are not registered as guards. Even if we manage to hack and breach the main system, it would take weeks to register or even mark you as safe to go up there, and without that, the automated defenses would come online and mark you as targets, and draw a flood of combatants down on top of you. Therefore, you two will have to proceed up to the designated floors and recover the targets before the executions start.
Have they started yet?
Not yet, but by the looks of it, they will be starting quite soon if you dont hurry up and get up there. There is not much time left.
Copy TACNET, thanks for the tips, we will move out as soon as possible.
Li was fired up, and a little jittery from the slaughter that they had faced down on the below parts of the prison, as well as what they had faced when they had first got up here into the control room. A few months ago, before he joined up with the Grey Dawn, it would have been rather shocking to himself to see how much he had changed in such a short time; learning how to use a weapon for one and learning to shoot someone and try to feel no remorse for it, even though you couldnt help it at times but that was secondary right now. All that mattered right now was getting Lech and White Dragon out of the prison in order to help the Grey Dawn and the PLF before anything bad happened and occurred to either party.
You ready for this Li? Verarde had reloaded and relocked, and gave a tired and rueful grin at him. Might be that we are going to face some heavy resistance up there, might be we take a few bullets and feel them hit with a tremendous amount of power might be we wont make it out of this alive if at all. He slammed the round into place on the Dai-Ichii made rifle. So are you ready to do what it takes to get this job done, mate?
Li grinned back at him. Of course, friend; weve got to do whatever it takes after all. He extended his hand out to his counterpart, and Verarde gripped it and shook it vigorously.
As always, it is an honor to serve with you Li.
You as well Verarde you as well friend.
So what do you say? Shall we get this job done or what?
Li pulled back on the lock and ejected the clip from the rifle and slammed another one in, a look of determination spreading across his face. I am always ready; just say the word and I will follow.
Ready mate, hope you are prepared I doubt its going to be mittens and puppies up there in the upper floors.
They left the room, rifles pointed away from each other as they walked at a steady rate down the hall. Probably not, but that means that some of them will want to pick a fight, and hopefully they come prepared theres a difference between us and them, and thats that we always have the top lead ahead of them unless they are prepared and extremely ready and efficient up there. Honestly, Im looking for a challenge right now.
I think the way that we are also different from them is that we also seem to be bullet deflectors to the point where their shoddy aim is even shoddier.
They laughed as artillery rained down around them, and flicked the safeties off of the guns.
Assault on the Fortress
The grappling hooks were out and up the wall silently as the members of the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front moved forward through the night. Li and Verarde climbed the more than fifty meter wall silently, under the cover of night with a crescent moon hanging gently in the sky, a speckled field of stars splashed behind it. The guards on the outer perimeter were dead or incapacitated, the chain link fence breached; now was the time to engage the enemy forces in the breach and marshal.
Li climbed the rope as fast as possible, but Verarde was putting him to shame, and for good reason; as a senator in the American nation, Li had not expected to be a part of a prison breaking operation, and was having trouble keeping pace with the other members of the Grey Dawn and of the Polish Resistance Front, but he was holding his own, but barely. An assault rifle was slung across his back and prepared, locked and loaded with cartridges of armor piercing and hollow point rounds stocked in his pack. So much for the supposedly inhumane ammunition that was hollow points being illegal, but then again, the American government and State Security had made sure that hollow points were used in riot situations and crowd dispersal tactics whenever they were needed.
It took a few minutes, but finally they were on top of the walkway for the first stone wall of the prison; before them was the main prison yard and the guard barracks here and there, and searchlights probed the yard, looking for any escaped convicts that might have tried to make it out during the night. A few guards could be seen here and there, patrolling with anti-material rifles gripped in their hands and loaded with bullets designed to murder tanks, not people, but all the stopping power in the world could not stop a stealth operation if undetected; it was at this point, that the Polish Resistance Front groups and the Grey Dawn cells split up and joined in sections with the other respective party, and the two units made up of Grey Dawn and Polish Resistance Front soldiers moved across the walkways. Li followed closely, Verarde just ahead and leading him through the area. One by one, the guards were taken down and stabbed to death where they were, or incapacitated with the butt of the rifles.
With that part of the operation done, the members spread out across the assorted towers and entryways on the outer wall, and moved towards where the searchlight controls were; slowly, the lights started to dim over the course of about ten minutes, until they were nearly ninety percent dimmer than they had been before. Next step was the operation involving stopping the guards and barricading the barracks, something that was accomplished by barricading the doors and side exits and blocking the windows with spare vehicles and junk scattered about; some of the anti-material rifles, made out of some of the finest and strongest steel in the world, were secured to prevent the windows from swinging open, not that it would matter much; three times as much alcohol had been routed into the barracks tonight, after the Polish Resistance Front fighters in charge of that bit made sure that the extra shipment would be a special batch full of high proof alcohol.
At this point, the main assault on the facility could begin and go underway. Ropes and cables were tossed and thrown between the groups as they split up, Grey Dawn units pairing up with Polish Resistance Front fighters, and likewise. Four groups in all, and Lis group that he was helping to lead alongside Verarde was going nicely, all things considered that they had upon their hands. Climbing up the sheer, concrete and stone wall that made up the second ring of the fortress prison would be difficult, but they managed to pull it off nicely, and without a single casualty whatsoever amongst the units.
For several minutes, careful observation of the perimeter patrols and the main facility were underway, and it looked to be a bit on the side of difficult for infiltrating the rest of the fortress; groups of guards and patrols were out and about in large numbers, and it seemed to be that they were in the areas where the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front would rather have them away from, but they had to work with what they were given.
The general layout of the facility constituted as a multi-level structure, with some of them going as high as four hundred feet at points, with the special sections tightly patrolled and monitored, as well as snipers nests on the very top. Machine gun batteries were everywhere as well, mostly aimed inwards at the facility to keep people in, in the event of a riot or attempted breakout from the prison, something that Li believed that he would rather not experience first-hand. Not only that, flak guns and sections were dotted around the yard, and what appeared to be surface to air missile pads with inactive launchers as well, which did not bode well for the choppers of the Grey Dawn. There were more of them than the Grey Dawn members had hoped for, but in the end, they would have to take them out another way.
It was 2:04 in the early morning when the games truly began.
Li and his team moved along the battlements and the walkways of the inner ring, sweeping around it to put down anyone who tried to resist them, as quietly as possible. Even with silenced weapons, they were not going to risk anything; silencers, often popularized in movies, do not work like they do in media when applied to real life, and firing them would have been equivalent to bringing a jackhammer out and punching holes in the wall. Stealthier options included stabbing and punching the guards out and incapacitating them, although one or two men of the Grey Dawn and of the Polish Resistance Front preferred something more along the lines of strangulation by piano wire, and opted for that when wiping out a few soldiers here and there. Behind the teams, groups of Poles were moving in taking up the positions one by one to hold watch and keep the guards and internal security of the prison from growing suspicious about stuff, which would have happened if mass amounts of guards started to inexplicably abandon their communication lines and suddenly drop off of the radar almost instantly in many cases, without permission to do so.
After almost an hour of all the teams slowly doing the work that they had been assigned to do, they reported at their specific locations around the base of the facility in many areas, and prepared themselves. Li and Verarde checked their rifles and cartridges, had their grenades ready, extra clips and magazines, secondary weapons at their hips in their holsters, and gave the signal for their respective teams. All across the base, cutting torches, designed as industrial tools to slice through steel and rock with ease, activated, and began the long and tedious twenty minute process of getting through the thick walls of the fortifications. It sure as hell took as much time to do so, and every minute, one expected to hear the sounds of guards running and shouting along the battlements or alarms being raised and started in the air to alert the entire prison that it was time to start offing potential liabilities.
But no, they finally got through the fortifications, which took enough time as it was. Slowly, they carefully pulled the wall towards them, breaking into the first floor of the maintenance area as they did so. At that point, all the men and women of the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front flicked the flashlights underneath the main part of their weapons and proceeded inwards inside of the darkened areas of the maintenance department.
Inside, it was eerily quiet. Banners and posters hung on white washed walls, governmental slogans and sayings printed on them and broadcast to anyone that happened to be walking by, and some were clearly propaganda posters. One displayed a happy Roman family working in the fields of an agrarian commune, and another displaying young Roman soldiers smiling as they held their rifles up and forward, displaying them fully. Some of the Poles made cracks about them as they went by, mostly about how they looked like they had been forced at gunpoint to do the pictures, and Li couldnt help but agree with them on that note.
The dark hallway that they had initially entered gave way to a larger hallway that was brightly lit and obviously led into more of the main part of the facility. Inside of it, just around the left hand corner away from the group that Li and Verarde were leading, a janitor whistled softly as he mopped and swept the floors, polishing them into perfection. One of the Poles, Lech (no relation to the man that they were heading for), put his finger up to his lips and motioned towards the janitor, pulled out a knife and ran down the hallway as fast as he could. The janitor did not look up until it was too late, allowing Lech to grab the man by his neck and shake him around while whispering urgently in Roman about how he would gut him like a fish if the janitor screamed or said a word. The man nodded at each instance Lech asked him a question, including one asking for directions to the central part of the facility.
At that point, they shoved him into a maintenance closet and barred the door with the mans own mop and proceeded until they reached the first juncture.
Now what, the Grey Dawn soldier named Ashman said. He was short and stocky, and quick to anger, with a face like a Russian with detailed Slavic features, and he seemed to be quite annoyed by the security cameras that were up ahead. We cant proceed until those damned things are downed.
Verarde smiled and nodded at him, before picking up his radio and whispering into it. Fire Team two, are you in position?
Ja, the German on the other end of the line said. We are good to go when you are ready. Cutting out the optics to that section of the facility right about . Now.
Like poked his head out from behind cover and checked the cameras; they were stationary, and unmoving, and the tiny blinking red dot that usually showed that they were on had been extinguished like so much candle flame. A half dozen on the hallway to the right, seven on the left, and several motion sensors, which had undoubtedly been cut as well.
Thanks for that gents, we will be on our way as soon as we can.
There was a muted boom from above on the upper floors of the building briefly. Lighting in the ceiling flickered and dimmed for a few seconds before resuming its normal tone, and angry voices could be heard dully from up above, carried down through some vents. A thin layer of dust and concrete chips were shaken down from the roof of this floor to fall onto the floor and gather on the work that the janitor had been doing before he had been so rudely incapacitated.
Ashman was the first to speak up. What the hell was that?
Li didnt answer but he was already on the communication lines, and from the sounds of it, the other fire teams and breach groups had heard it as well. TACNET, this is Li of the Grey Dawn, could you tell us what the hell is going on up there at the moment?
There was a brief burst of static before a TACNET operator came on the line. Rogue mercenary group in the harbor, they apparently have some men in the prison as well, and they have started shelling the south bank of the harbor, as well as key places all along the city and near the prison. They apparently are gearing up for a raid, but by the looks of it, they arent really interested in giving any quarter. Polish ships are engaging them, as well as the guns around the harbor, but it is advised from local STATCOM that you hurry up and complete your mission as soon as possible. STATCOM is saying that they might be deploying rocket artillery on the city soon.
Damn it. The others had chipped in and listened to the sound of TACNET informing them of their possible imminent demise, and by the looks of it, they were prepared to go to war with these mercenaries. TACNET, whats your call on using unsilenced weapons?
You are clear to use them, sir, enough shells are coming down on the city that nobody will be able to hear and tell the difference between a few gunshots here and there.
Understood, signing off.
Looks like we have some work to do then, dont we gentlemen? Li drew out his assault rifle and drew back the lock on it, making it weapons free at this point. Time to go, everyone.
Fire Team Four, responding, we have shells cascading down from the southern side of the city, how many ships do they have in the harbor, TACNET, over?
Enemy mercenary groups have about three hundred ships mobilized in the harbor; four carriers, almost three dozen battleships, four dozen battle cruiser, nearly a hundred cruisers, with the rest being a smattering of destroyers and auxiliary vessels patrolling the waters and raining down missiles and surface to air missiles whenever the chance presents itself.
TACNET, is Fire Team Seven responding, whats the status on evacuation plans and vehicles scheduled to help us mobilize out of the locale when the operation is successful, over?
Fire Team Seven, this is TACNET, over. Status on the evacuation plans and evacuation routes and vehicles are good at the moment, though we are having some problems due to unfriendly forces that remain present in the harbor currently, but we are working on solving this issue as fast as we can, so rest assured, we will not be leaving anyone behind, to the best of our ability. Stay true to your mission, and we will attempt to guide you to the best of our ability.
The communication lines were much like that while Li and Verardes fire team made their way up to the top of the central command building, through a wing on the maintenance department of the prison. Multiple guards had been killed or incapacitated on the route over, but they didnt have time to think about the fact that some of those people may have been innocent or anything of the sort similar to that. The mercenary attack, which seemed to be made up of an odd band of Germans, Russians, Poles, Romans, Americans, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese peoples mixed together in a paramilitary organization known as the Nation Without Borders. Radical men, even by standards compared to the Black Marchers, the Zuschlag Und Stahl Liberation Front, and the Rising Sun Separatist Group.
Where they had gotten the massive amount of military material to orchestrate this attack was unknown, but by the looks of it, this operation to rescue their compatriots in crime and in war had been in the planning for a long time, and by the looks of it, this continual shelling was beginning to put strain on even the massive fortress such as this prison, which had been built to withstand assault centuries ago.
Alright, fire team two, up ahead, you will come up to yet another juncture; at this point, you will proceed straight through, as we have already made sure that the cameras and optics through this area have been cut off and fried, letting you guys run right through. However, we should warn you that up ahead is the central command room that gives access and oversight over most of the facility and is heavily guarded by guards at many positions the rest of whatever the TACNET operator was going to say was drowned out in a hiss of static that smashed through the lines as more artillery shells rained down on the prison.
He hadnt been lying; as they came up to the next juncture by the way of a stairwell leading up from the floor down, they could see dozens of cameras and sensors arrayed around here in order to protect the main room from assault at any chance and opportunity that they would have been allowed. Oddly enough though, no guards were present, though it should have been the case; this was after all, the most central point of the facility, and the vital nerve and sensory command outpost that would protect and view the prison from all sides if necessary, and linked up to automated gun batteries and everything else of the like.
Multiple men and women of the Grey Dawn and the Polish Resistance Front took up positions along the top of the stairwell and swept their guns left and right in order to provide covering fire if necessary, and then held their guns at ready and proceeded slowly up the stairs, and carefully probed around the corners as necessary. A burst of gunfire from one side elicited multiple staccato pops from the soldiers who had probed that position, and several sharp cries of pain marked the death of several Roman prison guards who had had the unfortunate luck of having tonight as their night shift. Li and Verarde brought up the rear of the procession this time, taking the steps two and three at a time before moving into cover and positions along the hallway wherever alcoves and obstructions presented themselves.
Once the rooms and other areas alongside the hallway had been checked and cleared, Li and Verarde took up positions alongside the great steel doors at the end of the hallway, big enough to let a Humvee go through them, and nodded towards each other. Verarde snapped four flash bangs off of his cache, and popped the tops, kicking open the doors to the room and rolling them in. Sharp cracks and flashes of light followed, and Li tossed in two fragmentation grenades to liven things up for whoever was supposed to be in there, before they both kicked down the doors, and swept into the room, the others following behind them.
Inside, they found a gruesome scene. Multiple guards were apparently dead at their post; throats gouged out and slashed open, eyes ripped out of their sockets, blood and pieces of bone along the floor everywhere. One of the men retched in the corner of the room, and Li felt his bile rise in the back of his throat before he quelled it. There was no time to be sick.
Grey Dawn members and the PLF fighters moved in and carried the bodies out of their sitting positions and laid them against the wall on one side of the room, while the hacking team that had been several minutes behind the fire team arrived on position and started to set up shop. At that point, firewalls needed to be breached, redundancy measures were punctured, and a variety of fail safes were destroyed in the cyber-attacks and the breaching of the system that the prison had devised. It took several minutes, several hair raising minutes as footage from around the prison showed a hellish carnage as multiple guards and inmates clashed with firearms and makeshift weapons, and scenes outside as choppers bearing commando teams of mercenaries were shot down in fiery flashes as both the manned and automated gunnery systems of the prison flicked online and began the murder of the attackers and assailants. Not that it did them a lot of good though; there was a veritable flood of the things, and constant long range offshore artillery bombardment had gradually worn away at the defenses of the prison.
TACNET chose this time just after the final firewall and redundancy system went offline to chime in and speak in Li and Verardes ears. By the looks of it, systems in the higher parts of the prison will not allow more than two people up in those areas that are not registered as guards. Even if we manage to hack and breach the main system, it would take weeks to register or even mark you as safe to go up there, and without that, the automated defenses would come online and mark you as targets, and draw a flood of combatants down on top of you. Therefore, you two will have to proceed up to the designated floors and recover the targets before the executions start.
Have they started yet?
Not yet, but by the looks of it, they will be starting quite soon if you dont hurry up and get up there. There is not much time left.
Copy TACNET, thanks for the tips, we will move out as soon as possible.
Li was fired up, and a little jittery from the slaughter that they had faced down on the below parts of the prison, as well as what they had faced when they had first got up here into the control room. A few months ago, before he joined up with the Grey Dawn, it would have been rather shocking to himself to see how much he had changed in such a short time; learning how to use a weapon for one and learning to shoot someone and try to feel no remorse for it, even though you couldnt help it at times but that was secondary right now. All that mattered right now was getting Lech and White Dragon out of the prison in order to help the Grey Dawn and the PLF before anything bad happened and occurred to either party.
You ready for this Li? Verarde had reloaded and relocked, and gave a tired and rueful grin at him. Might be that we are going to face some heavy resistance up there, might be we take a few bullets and feel them hit with a tremendous amount of power might be we wont make it out of this alive if at all. He slammed the round into place on the Dai-Ichii made rifle. So are you ready to do what it takes to get this job done, mate?
Li grinned back at him. Of course, friend; weve got to do whatever it takes after all. He extended his hand out to his counterpart, and Verarde gripped it and shook it vigorously.
As always, it is an honor to serve with you Li.
You as well Verarde you as well friend.
So what do you say? Shall we get this job done or what?
Li pulled back on the lock and ejected the clip from the rifle and slammed another one in, a look of determination spreading across his face. I am always ready; just say the word and I will follow.
Ready mate, hope you are prepared I doubt its going to be mittens and puppies up there in the upper floors.
They left the room, rifles pointed away from each other as they walked at a steady rate down the hall. Probably not, but that means that some of them will want to pick a fight, and hopefully they come prepared theres a difference between us and them, and thats that we always have the top lead ahead of them unless they are prepared and extremely ready and efficient up there. Honestly, Im looking for a challenge right now.
I think the way that we are also different from them is that we also seem to be bullet deflectors to the point where their shoddy aim is even shoddier.
They laughed as artillery rained down around them, and flicked the safeties off of the guns.
Bair_the_Normal
転輪聖王
Brilliant writing, Tycho. It was simply amazing! I just remembered that this was based upon a game...
Tycho
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hoplitejoe
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Nah
Tycho
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Nah
Next update will be a paraphrase of history, because we are still essentially in the Stone Age/Early Bronze, and we aren't getting any farther, so it's time for a fast forward through time!
... Unless something pops into my mind soon.
Bair_the_Normal
転輪聖王
because we are still essentially in the Stone Age/Early Bronze, and we aren't getting any farther, so it's time for a fast forward through time!
... Unless something pops into my mind soon.
...My face is absolutely buried in my hands right now, can you get someone to help me out?
Tycho
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Historia Amerika
Prosperity and Peace
Not many can say that the days in which the people of Amerika lived in within that time in the ages long past was not peaceful; on the contrary, the budding nation that was gradually being built up, expanded, and growing ever stronger was peaceful and full of content. Even though people had their problems here and there, the Amerikan nation held together for the most part, even as new cultures and beliefs rose up amongst the ranks of people that were a part of the nation. People from Byzantine, from England, and Germany, would come and travel to Amerika to come and join the new nation, while likewise, the some people from Amerika would head to other nations and join them. These days, in which the world was, for the most part, harmonious and balanced are known as the Prosperous Days, in which war, famine, disease, blight, and other such things were distant and far off, some closer than people would have hoped for.
The Prosperous Days were times of legend and of myth for these times; the great kingdoms and nations, the city states and tribes that had formed and acted like children would, thinking that they were kings and mighty powers over the entire world, is now mostly ash and ink on the pages of history books. Nations rise and fall, seas change, rivers grow and shrink, the stars fade, and yet, the people remain, to spread the tales of greatness that once permeated all of the world it seemed. Tales from the Byzantine court about the King of Rats, the Thief of Life, and Great Fanged Wall, were stories that one could consider fanciful tales of what people believed in for the time, and what they feared. From Germany, you have the tales of the Sorrowful Lord, the story of the Banner, and the Nine King's War. England offers up it's tales of Penumbra and the Spear, and the tales of the Outer Heavens, back when England subscribed to paganistic beliefs like much of the world believed in at that time. And from Amerika, the tales of the Mad King, the Undying Leader, the Sword of Mourning, and the tales of Caparin and Ulysses, were often retold and passed around the campfires.
These stories influenced many things in life around them, and it is believed that many of the people who are in these stories are and were not even real. Tales of the King of Rats from Byzantium have been disproven, because for the most part, you don't have a man riding a flow of rats through the streets, devouring any children who are naughty and do not obey their parents. Amerika's tales of the Undying Leader who came back from the dead, are widely regarded as false and improbable, as well as the tales of the Mad King, and the stories of the Mourning Blade, and how the woman known as the Wanderer brought it back from the icy wastes and used it to slay three barbarian leaders who would attack the nation. But the tales of Caparin and Ulysses, tales from the Deep Roads and from the lower levels of them, bring to mind many horrors and wonders.
Those stories, of underground cities, lost civilizations, plants that could heal any wounds, and Ulysses's tale of finding the Well of Dreams, are widely regarded as untrue and false, but even to these days, some people draw parallels between the stories told by the Amerikans of the time, and by stories from far ranging areas. For example, the Argentinians tell tales of a deep underground set of crisscrossing routes buried beneath the crust of the Earth, that some would use during the Prosperous Days. The Germans, and the English, recount tales of the same sort as well, stories of deep underground monstrous structures and strange beings from times well before human civilization under there, with people, almost entirely like humans living there. They have been called demons, angels, ghosts, ghouls, vampiric parasites, and more, but yet, when people like to point out stuff about the Deep Roads to others, people roll their eyes and laugh. Mainly due to the fact, that if that was the case, large amounts of those roads would have been found already.
But enough of ancient tales and stories, this is the tale of Amerika, and it's continued growth.
From this illustration right here, you can clearly see the bustling city of Washington, readying settler groups to venture out into the jungles south of the current borders of the nation, and establish the next major city, of New York. Already, hundreds of people have settled the land down there and have slowly been making it more habitable, but once the final settling party is made and readied, and the materials collected, the foundations of a brand new city will be established and become highly productive. Massive amounts of stone, wood, and other materials are being cut and harvested from the Earth in order to produce the items needed, to build housing and other structures that will be highly important for the creation and ongoing making of the city as it is slowly built up.
Since Old York, the area where the new city will be built, is soon to be transformed, people are gradually starting to call the new city that will soon be established and made New York, in honor of Old York soon being torn down to make way for the new city that will come up upon the horizon eventually.
In the hills as always, teams of workers and laborers struggle to create enough materials for the settlers that will soon be venturing out. Their current job is to produce an excess or open up new mines out on the hillside in order to collect stone and building materials faster and quicker, without having to slowly use hoes and other farming equipment to peel the dirt off of hills and slowly hack into the rock and bring it out of the Earth. This faster process, called mining, allows more material to be harvested efficiently, and is already hailed as a new method of industrious power that the people of Amerika have. Teams of Chinese and Amerikan laborers work together to haul the stone out of the mines and carry it back to Washington, where it will be worked upon, chiseled into smaller pieces, and have cobblestone made out of it, as well as kilns firing clay into brick and other hardened materials in order to build stronger buildings that will be an important part of the city. Despite the influx of materials, most people still prefer their stone foundation house with walls of wood and a thatched rooftop, mostly because the inexperienced masons have a habit of messing up the processes, which results in a few scattered deaths when errant bricks fall out and smash someone in the head.
The fair city of London, as large as the Amerikan city of Washington if not a touch more so, is growing rapidly and spreading it's arms out over the lands. To the west of the English is the Germanic tribes, who are gradually expanding towards England, and many say words that may soon come true... There can be only one nation in the south.
The mine is finally completed and an influx of stone and minerals flows into Washington to help the settling party go underway and continue to build up resources faster for the final push to the south, so in that way, the new city of New York can be established and the American Kingdom expand slowly and gradually. The work of laborers and craftsmen and miners is now coming to fruition, and is shown to help influence the continued buildup of Washington and of the needed materials for the settling party as Old York begins it's slow, arduous decommissioning process.
The scouting parties to the south that have fanned out discover a tribe that has access to the technology of the wheel. The scouts trade deer furs and weapons for the access to the wheel and send many forms of it back to Washington in order to be studied and carts and other such vehicles to be created, as well as roads and highways between areas of the nation, some of which will help guide the settlers to go to the place where Old York is and create the city of New York.
Prosperity and Peace
Not many can say that the days in which the people of Amerika lived in within that time in the ages long past was not peaceful; on the contrary, the budding nation that was gradually being built up, expanded, and growing ever stronger was peaceful and full of content. Even though people had their problems here and there, the Amerikan nation held together for the most part, even as new cultures and beliefs rose up amongst the ranks of people that were a part of the nation. People from Byzantine, from England, and Germany, would come and travel to Amerika to come and join the new nation, while likewise, the some people from Amerika would head to other nations and join them. These days, in which the world was, for the most part, harmonious and balanced are known as the Prosperous Days, in which war, famine, disease, blight, and other such things were distant and far off, some closer than people would have hoped for.
The Prosperous Days were times of legend and of myth for these times; the great kingdoms and nations, the city states and tribes that had formed and acted like children would, thinking that they were kings and mighty powers over the entire world, is now mostly ash and ink on the pages of history books. Nations rise and fall, seas change, rivers grow and shrink, the stars fade, and yet, the people remain, to spread the tales of greatness that once permeated all of the world it seemed. Tales from the Byzantine court about the King of Rats, the Thief of Life, and Great Fanged Wall, were stories that one could consider fanciful tales of what people believed in for the time, and what they feared. From Germany, you have the tales of the Sorrowful Lord, the story of the Banner, and the Nine King's War. England offers up it's tales of Penumbra and the Spear, and the tales of the Outer Heavens, back when England subscribed to paganistic beliefs like much of the world believed in at that time. And from Amerika, the tales of the Mad King, the Undying Leader, the Sword of Mourning, and the tales of Caparin and Ulysses, were often retold and passed around the campfires.
These stories influenced many things in life around them, and it is believed that many of the people who are in these stories are and were not even real. Tales of the King of Rats from Byzantium have been disproven, because for the most part, you don't have a man riding a flow of rats through the streets, devouring any children who are naughty and do not obey their parents. Amerika's tales of the Undying Leader who came back from the dead, are widely regarded as false and improbable, as well as the tales of the Mad King, and the stories of the Mourning Blade, and how the woman known as the Wanderer brought it back from the icy wastes and used it to slay three barbarian leaders who would attack the nation. But the tales of Caparin and Ulysses, tales from the Deep Roads and from the lower levels of them, bring to mind many horrors and wonders.
Those stories, of underground cities, lost civilizations, plants that could heal any wounds, and Ulysses's tale of finding the Well of Dreams, are widely regarded as untrue and false, but even to these days, some people draw parallels between the stories told by the Amerikans of the time, and by stories from far ranging areas. For example, the Argentinians tell tales of a deep underground set of crisscrossing routes buried beneath the crust of the Earth, that some would use during the Prosperous Days. The Germans, and the English, recount tales of the same sort as well, stories of deep underground monstrous structures and strange beings from times well before human civilization under there, with people, almost entirely like humans living there. They have been called demons, angels, ghosts, ghouls, vampiric parasites, and more, but yet, when people like to point out stuff about the Deep Roads to others, people roll their eyes and laugh. Mainly due to the fact, that if that was the case, large amounts of those roads would have been found already.
But enough of ancient tales and stories, this is the tale of Amerika, and it's continued growth.
From this illustration right here, you can clearly see the bustling city of Washington, readying settler groups to venture out into the jungles south of the current borders of the nation, and establish the next major city, of New York. Already, hundreds of people have settled the land down there and have slowly been making it more habitable, but once the final settling party is made and readied, and the materials collected, the foundations of a brand new city will be established and become highly productive. Massive amounts of stone, wood, and other materials are being cut and harvested from the Earth in order to produce the items needed, to build housing and other structures that will be highly important for the creation and ongoing making of the city as it is slowly built up.
Since Old York, the area where the new city will be built, is soon to be transformed, people are gradually starting to call the new city that will soon be established and made New York, in honor of Old York soon being torn down to make way for the new city that will come up upon the horizon eventually.
In the hills as always, teams of workers and laborers struggle to create enough materials for the settlers that will soon be venturing out. Their current job is to produce an excess or open up new mines out on the hillside in order to collect stone and building materials faster and quicker, without having to slowly use hoes and other farming equipment to peel the dirt off of hills and slowly hack into the rock and bring it out of the Earth. This faster process, called mining, allows more material to be harvested efficiently, and is already hailed as a new method of industrious power that the people of Amerika have. Teams of Chinese and Amerikan laborers work together to haul the stone out of the mines and carry it back to Washington, where it will be worked upon, chiseled into smaller pieces, and have cobblestone made out of it, as well as kilns firing clay into brick and other hardened materials in order to build stronger buildings that will be an important part of the city. Despite the influx of materials, most people still prefer their stone foundation house with walls of wood and a thatched rooftop, mostly because the inexperienced masons have a habit of messing up the processes, which results in a few scattered deaths when errant bricks fall out and smash someone in the head.
The fair city of London, as large as the Amerikan city of Washington if not a touch more so, is growing rapidly and spreading it's arms out over the lands. To the west of the English is the Germanic tribes, who are gradually expanding towards England, and many say words that may soon come true... There can be only one nation in the south.
The mine is finally completed and an influx of stone and minerals flows into Washington to help the settling party go underway and continue to build up resources faster for the final push to the south, so in that way, the new city of New York can be established and the American Kingdom expand slowly and gradually. The work of laborers and craftsmen and miners is now coming to fruition, and is shown to help influence the continued buildup of Washington and of the needed materials for the settling party as Old York begins it's slow, arduous decommissioning process.
The scouting parties to the south that have fanned out discover a tribe that has access to the technology of the wheel. The scouts trade deer furs and weapons for the access to the wheel and send many forms of it back to Washington in order to be studied and carts and other such vehicles to be created, as well as roads and highways between areas of the nation, some of which will help guide the settlers to go to the place where Old York is and create the city of New York.
