>>OOC<<
>Theme<
>Halo Discord<
>Halo: Trepidation<
>Halo: Penumbra<
OP: Anowa
Co-OP: Beiarusia
TO3 Sam Marcus
Location Unknown, UNSC Pillar of Autumn, Cryo Two.
September 19, 2552 // 0127 Military Standard Time
A Sullen Plunge...
"Sam, you gotta hurry up, they're breaking through the goddamned door!"
Thom had never sounded quite as scared as he just was. A dozen feet above, looking through reinforced glass, and even through an intercom, Sam knew the man was resolute in what was about to happen. Sam on the other hand wasn't quite ready to die, he still had Ellen, his wife to come home to. He kept pressing keys on the small pedestal in front of him. His right arm aching from the grisly plasma burn on his tricep, going all the way to the bone. But he soldiered on.
The sound of plasma burning through the door behind him put him through to overdrive. A few more key presses and the status bar on the pedestal lit up in a positive glow. he gave a half hearted cry of glee as he turned, the door busting open, a team of split jaws and grunts walking through. His left hand went to his belt, grasping his M6 he brought it lazily to bear, pain and fatigue pulling any sense of purposeful aim out of his grasp. He started firing, in a vain attempt to ward off his attackers. All the while he basically stumbled back and took a spot behind the only empty cryo pod in the room. All the others were full of the members of Blue Team, and the few other Army, Marine, and Navy personnel they pulled back with them.
MCPO Ingrid-045
Location Unknown, UNSC Pillar of Autumn, Cryo Two.
September 19, 2552 // 0127 Military Standard Time
Ingrid heard gunfire, sounds of combat, yelling, screaming. That alone wasn't an oddity to the woman, she was born to kill, bred for war, and trained to revel in fights. What was the oddity was that she was supposed to be in cryo sleep. Your senses didn't work in cryo sleep, and you didn't dream either. Meaning she was being woken up, and what she heard was not the serene calm a cryo bay was supposed to have.
Her body still hadn't woken up fully yet, the damages that could be caused otherwise would be, in some cases, fatal. But the people she had fought with to get to the Autumn needed her. So she willed herself into movement, her body screaming to stop, she ignored it, told it to sit town for ten minutes and exploded into action.
A frost covered tube veritably exploded as seven and a half foot tall beast busted open the cryo tube she had stuffed herself and nearly 750 pounds of armor into. Her skin rippling with discomfort, she surveyed the scene in others might confuse with Planck time. Billy called it 'Bullet Time', an old reference to an equally older game. She spotted 12 hostiles, 7 in immediate sight, 4 Elites, the rest cannon fodder. All of them in a state of either butchering, or finishing their butchery, of people who had just woken up. Tubes opened, and bodies scrawled across the ground. Directly ahead was an Elite Minor holding someone, her vision still slightly blurred, her HUD came to her rescue, the neural implant the smaller trooper had registering her as 'RIER'. She was green, and in a sense, reminded Ingrid of herself in her very first days under the tutelage of Mobuto. She didn't deserve to die, no one here did, and yet here they were.
Ingrid' arm snapped upwards, grabbing the lid to her cryo tube, while her right leg stepped off. She could feel the plating buckle beneath her foot as she willed an ungodly amount of force into moving herself, her armor, and her improvised weapon forward faster than that plasma rifle's projectile could hit Maple's head. SHe knew she wouldn't intercept, but the lid could. Adjusting her stance in a microsecond, her arm whipped forward, carrying nearly a hundred and fifty pounds of titanium and reinforced glass with it. At the apex she released, and the door flew forward, it's edge impacting the elite's arm with the force that shattered it's shielding, and lacerated a good portion of the arm with it. It's size created an impromptu barrier between the Elite and the young trooper, now released to fall.
Ingrid' perception of time returned to normal, well, her normal at least. It was still leagues ahead of what everyone else perceived. She stepped forward, half a ton of weight focussed into a single footfall echoing around the chamber, her hand snapping forward into the bewildered split-jaw's eye socket, the sound of crumpling bone and metal reaching her ears in an long instant. Once again her hand gripped the metal and glass of the cryo pod door, whipping it around at a yellow dot on her motion tracker. Her eyes caught up with her movement to see a red silhouette reacting rather quickly to the event that just transpired. Elites were as strong, as fast, and almost even more durable than SPARTANs. But they couldn't react and act as quick as their human counterparts could.
So the bloody thing basically ate the metal and glass object, jamming right between his duo of mandibles. At that point, everyone in the room had clued in, alien and human alike. Ingrid; hand went to her waist, strapped to her left hip was a twelve inch knife, titanium made, serrated, and ready to gut any poor bastard that was going to attempt to tangle with her. And as the Covies did, they always tried, always failed.
The first elite, Minor, charged at her with reckless abandon, either not hearing the tales, or believing himself worthy. Regardless, Ingrid acted. His arm came down in an attempt to bop her over the head with his plasma rifle. She sidestepped, and as the arm swung by, Ingrid swept his leg, sending him reeling as her arm came down, knife in hand upon the back of his skull, a sickening squelch resounding in response. As the xeno's rotation continued, Ingrid pulled back on the knife, with ease it came out. Plasma fire splashed across her shielding, and she directed her attention to such. Another Minor, smarter than his prior comrade, but still no where near as deadly as he could've been. Shame.
Ingrid let her shield tank the damage as she closed the distance. The grunts either making way out of fear, or already panicked from the deaths of two of their leaders in such a short time frame. She tackled the alien to the ground, it's shielding flared as his weapon fell free. A section of his gauntlet lit up with a miniature plasma blade. Ingrid's free hand slammed down on the arm, breaking the shielding and it's gauntlet, shaping the arm into an uncomfortable mangled mess. Her knife once again tasted flesh as it was jammed upwards into the alien's mouth, poking into it's brain and killing it, if not now, than later.
As Ingrid turned to the last, red, Elite in the room, Ingrid found herself not within her rights to react to it's threat. Firstly, because a weapon had been tossed her way by a wounded technician, and secondly, because Grim would never shut up about having his kill stolen.
The elite collapsed as the aged man started hammering away at it's neck with a combat knife, breaking through the shielding with surprising ease, and further doing damage by reciprocating the knife in and out of what Ingrid could only assume was the alien's collection of jugular and carotid arteries. It went down without much fight.
Ingrid, now fully armed, along with Grim and a few others who happened to sleep with their armor on and knives, mopped up the remaining grunts. Within moments the bay was clear and everything came reeling back to a human speed for Ingrid. A corpsman was tending to the technician, and most everyone in the bay was still alive. And then Ingrid remembered something.
With a wet and ragged cough, the bronchial surfactant located in her lungs finally came free. It settled in her mouth for a moment, as Ingrid gave a small grin before swallowing. One thing she remembered from her childhood was a distinct like for sour things. And with the goo that covered her lungs came the flavor of lime. It wasn't something she got too often, citrus fruit pretty much didn't exist in her diet, hell, they didn't even exist on the ships much nowadays, replaced by vitamins and supplements in the food.
Her mind reeled away from the past, back to the present, a moment passed as she checked the M6D she was gifted from the wounded tech. "Anyone who's either ready to fight, or looking for a weapon... or clothes. On me!" Her gaze cats to Rier for but a moment, registering that the girl would likely be going through some shock at the moment. Registering, but not wholly understanding.
She also watched as the eldest among them, Grim, walked over to the girl to check on her.
His voice was, well, old and weathered. Like Mobuto's but with much less gruff and much more care. "You alright kid? Wounded, or just freaked out?"