Origin Complex - Outside
While Kira faced her own complications indoors, the bounty hunters outside faced their own as the industrial complex that seemed to be abandoned suddenly came to life. As the former NPF officer started to make her way along with Irene and their prisoner, the first shots started to ring out. From what the two of them could hear, at least, it seemed that only the bounty hunters were firing.
"I need the two of you to get the hell back here!" Helric said on the comms inbetween the loud reports from his rifle firing.
Origin Complex - Inside
Kira looked at Irene, the urgent look on her face concealed by her helmet, but Helric's radio message, not to mention the bursts of gunfire, was all it took for the two women to understand one another. "Copy. En route now," she barked back into the wireless, and looked over to Irene. "Hold him," she said, nodding to the captive's bound wrists and the back of his ragged "shirt." Once Irene had a hold of him, she unslung the rifle from her shoulders and sprinted to one of the boarded-up windows. Rearing back with the butt of her weapon, she began to smash it against the boards as hard as she could, blow after blow. They didn't budge after the first few impacts, but soon enough, sharp cracks rang out in the room and the boards began to splinter, coming loose from their mounts. After a few minutes of effort, she had broken through, and the pale sunlight flashed through, revealing the state of the building in more clarity as she knocked the more stubborn hangers-on free of the window frame before slinging her rifle once more, and climbing out.
Outside, the occasional sound of gunshots could be heard not too far from them.
"Push him through!" Kira yelled back inside over the din of battle, holding her hands out to accept the poor raving soul as he was shoved forward by Irene. The other bounty hunter lacked the finesse which Kira had in handling the man, and simply pushed him along with the stock of her gun. The squatter had offered little resistance by then, but when he saw that the was being pushed into the plain daylight, he started to resist, digging the heels of his feet against the floor as he got closer.
Initially, Kira moved forward to drag him out, but hesitated. For a second or two she sat there, looking alternately over her shoulder and back at the broken person they'd subdued, at a loss for what to do. At last something seemed to break inside of her, and she groaned. "Darn it," she muttered, moving forward and pushing back through the window. "Watch out," she said as she climbed back in. "We can't take him out like this. Is there someplace we can secure him?" she asked Irene, frantically looking around the destroyed room, but the other bounty hunter just shrugged, eager to get out of there and into the fight.
"I suppose we can just punch his lights out and carry him," she suggested.
"I'm not doing that!" Kira protested, but couldn't think of any better ideas.
"Alright," Irene said apologetically, raising both hands in reply. "But we got to hurry up," she added.
Beneath her faceplate, Kira was gritting her teeth in indecision. Finally, after seeing nothing nearby that looked like enough of a secure place to tie their prisoner to, she placed both of her hands as cautiously as time would allow on the ragged shoulders before her. "Listen," she told the mass of emaciated rags as gently as she could muster. "I'm going to need you to stay put for a while. I have to go, but I'll be back. Can you do that for me?" she asked, but the squatter just seemed to have gone back to his own little world, mumbling and moaning to himself. She gave him a very, very light shake, trying to rouse his attention. "Please, listen to me," she begged, not seeing that Irene was already moving.
There was a dry crack as the other bounty hunter's weapon stock connected to the back of the man's skull, making him tense his muscles for a moment, and then sag limply on the ground as he fell. Kira jumped, startled, and released the person's shoulders as he fell to the ground, then her head snapped up to stare in disbelief at the other bounty hunter. "We're wasting time, let's go," Irene told Kira.
All Kira could do for a second was stare helplessly in shock. Not only had the other woman bashed a bound, defenseless, and obviously raving mad prisoner in the back of the head, but she didn't seem the least bit sorry about it. She felt like screaming at Irene, or even shaking her, but there was no time for that. Clamping her teeth together to maintain her composure, she simply nodded, although her body language made it more that clear that this was far from over. With a tight sigh, she turned back to climb out the window once more, and make a break for Helric's position, with Irene following close behind.
The two of them exited the building on the same heigh that the pile of debris which the main group had to cross was, and it was a matter of making their way through the treacherous and uneven terrain as fast as they could to get there. Since they were also outside, it was all too clearer to hear the gunshots that were coming as Kira made her way there.
Drawing her sidearm, Kira bounded over the rubble like a gazelle, moving as quickly as she was able without tripping or catching herself on any of the twisted metal and shattered chunks of destroyed structures. "What's your situation, Helric?" she shouted over the radio, checking to be sure her pistol had a round in the chamber. Inside her helmet, the comms groaned with static before Helric replied.
"An angry mob showed up out of nowhere, but we're scaring them away," the other bounty hunter replied. "They don't have too many guns," he added.
"Copy," the ex-cop shouted back, bounding over another fallen piece of rubble. The sounds of gunfire was getting much louder now. "Almost there."
As soon as the two bounty hunters crested the artificial hill of debris, they managed to see where the bounty hunters had hunkered down as well as seeing what the
problem was. Taking cover behind whatever they could find and forming a hapzard semi-circle with the debris behind them, the bounty hunters were facing what appeared to be -at best- an angry mob dressed in rags. Every now and then Kira could spot movement coming from the alleys between the ruined buildings or when one of the complex's denizens leaned out to fire a weapon at where the bounty hunters were. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of weapons, since as far as she could tell at least one in five had a barely serviceable one, but there were many more of them than there were bounty hunters.
The 'plate' of the landing pad also loomed over in the distance in a straight line from their position.
In no way did this look like a good situation to the ex-police officer. She had been expecting armed resistance of some sort, not a crazed mob of ragged survivors, and given what she'd witnessed from the poor soul who had barricaded himself in the building from before, she had every reason to believe that what they were facing was a crowd of innocent people fighting for their lives. Of course, it didn't change the fact that they were outnumbered, and the faces in the crowd had the looks of those who wouldn't hesitate to maim or kill her if she got in their way. These were the sorts of situations she could barely handle, if not because of her training to protect the innocent, then because it just felt
wrong to her.
Still, she knew that there wouldn't be any time to muse or try to talk any of them down. Deep down she sincerely hoped she wouldn't have to kill anyone, and if she could help it, she wouldn't. But if it came to it, she feared she wouldn't be left with a choice. Quickly holstering her pistol again and unslinging her rifle, she maneuvered into formation with the other bounty hunters, hopping from cover to cover.
Up and run... they see me... down. Up and run... they see me... down...
Taking cover behind a lopsided chunk of shattered concrete and rebar, she rested her rifle between a crevice in the stony chunk, and prepared to fire. Hopefully she could get by with disabling shots. Besides her, Irene did the same, but was already opening fire with her IBR. Around them, the occasional bullet impacted against the cover or the asphalt underneath, raising a small geyser of dust and small chunks. The return fire was sporadic at best, but that only seemed to be so because the bounty hunters weren't giving room to let them do so.
"Alright, they're here!" Helric shouted over the comms once saw the two women arrive. He neatly vaulted over the chunk of masonry he had been taking cover behind and ran forward. "We push to the landing pad to clear an LZ for the Ferret!"
The best she was able, Kira let loose with a few precisely-placed shots near the closest and most tightly packed groups of assailants, taking care only to hit near them to keep them suppressed. None of the return fire landed close to her just yet, but that was bound to change. "Covering fire," Kira shouted over the radio in response to Helric, waiting until he and his group had advanced enough to warrant leapfrogging forward along with them. The Longbolt buckled against her shoulder as she fired, but the former cop was able to see that the bullet landed where she intended, far from their assailants against the side of a building, raising a large plume of dust because of the rifle's caliber. What was surprising, though, is that the people firing at them ignored that; they had flinched, surely, as that was the natural biological answer, but didn't scatter or take cover like she expected, and the only person that had a gun in the group kept firing, emptying what looked like a very rusty semi-automatic pistol at Helric when he moved to cover.
Besides her, the other bounty hunters added their fire, raising from cover to fire a long burst with their weapons to allow one half to move towards Helric. The others didn't seem to be so lenient towards people trying to kill them like the former cop, and Kira could see the casualties piling up on the other side.
Kira gritted her teeth as she watched one survivor after the other fall over dead, trying to keep herself focused on what needed to be done, but it became increasingly difficult. Locating the only armed survivor through her rifle's scope -another person wearing nothing but tattered rags, but wielding a not so harmless SMG, she exhaled slowly, taking aim at the shoulder of his pistol arm, hoping to disable him and stop the carnage. Slowly squeezing the trigger, the rifle's report sounded. The bullet arrived almost instantly because of the relatively small range, clipping the person -it was hard to tell their gender- a little over the collarbone. As soon as they fell, someone else in the mob went for them, and took their weapon.
"Go, go! Covering fire!" Helric shouted, firing with his gun along with the other bounty hunters that had joined him there so that the other half of them could catch up.
The ex-policewoman's shoulders sagged when she saw the next person pick up the gun. She should have thought of that, but then again she had sincerely hoped that, coupled with the mob's mounting deaths, it would have demoralized them into scattering. Taking advantage of the brief lapse in return fire, she jumped out of cover and sprinted for the next safe spot from which to shoot. Something fast whizzled angrily past the side of her head as she moved, and the occasional projectile hit the ground next to Kira, clearly aimed at her as she made way to the side of a building. More of the ''survivors'' crumpled and fell as they were shot, but they didn't seem to relent from that, and kept firing at the better equipped, and better trained, bounty hunters without a care for their safety, hurling insults and yelling at the people who were ''invading'' their turf.
This deadly dance of jumping from cover to cover continued for several minutes as the bounty hunters carefully moved towards the landing pad of the industrial complex, cutting down whoever they didn't push back with their advance and taking cover where their enemies had been shooting them just a few moments before. As they neared the tall structure, another problem appeared: they were were starting to be cut off from where they came from, as more people showed up cresting the pile of rubble that they had gone over to get where they were before, promising only more moments of brutal fighting.
"Damn it," said Helric on the comms, throwing away a spent magazine and putting another one in the still smoking rifle that he had been firing for the past few minutes. "They won't quit," he added in a worrying tone. In the firefight, the bounty hunters had spent too much of their ammo, bringing them to their last reserves. Besides Kira, Tannozako crouched behind a pile of trash, where a dead person was slumped over after being shot, while further down the small alley between two buildings that she was taking cover in two more dead survivors lay sprawled or slumped against a wall.
"They're desperate," Kira shouted back, ducking on reflex as another bullet screeched overhead. "They have nothing to lose."
"Doesn't look that way to me," he replied, aiming back from where they came from and firing at the group as they crested the pile of rubble.
Digging her heels into the ground to scoot herself back against the rubble, Kira slung the rifle once more, and drew her pistol again. Staying in cover, she held the gun backwards over her head and blind-fired three shots to keep anyone advancing at bay. "How far to the LZ?" she called.
"Close!" Helric answered, lowering his rifle and spinning on his heels to face the assailants to their front. "Go go go!" he shouted, firing.
Without hesitating, Kira fired one more blind shot and sprang from her cover, sprinting forward to advance, her pistol gripped tightly in both of her hands. Besides her, two other bounty hunters did the same, while the rest that were behind continued firing. By then, they were already on the shade provided by the landing pad's hexagonal plate, and could see the state of disrepair that teh structure was in, like the entire rest of the complex. The metal struts were rusted and broken in some places, while the concrete had been corroded in several spots, showing the crisscrossing rebars underneath. Kira looked up at the decaying structure incredulously, wondering just how much thought had gone into this plan.
As soon as they found cover in front of the building, Helric and the remaining bounty hunters started moving. Kira could also notice that some of them had taken hits as the body armor their wore was pitted and scarred in places, while Helric himself had a grazing shot to his right sleeve. "Jacob, we're clearing an LZ on the landing pad. Get your ass here," Helric said as he slid into cover again between two buildings.
The ex-policewoman sprinted again, sliding into cover not far from Helric, and looked over in his direction, then towards the swirling mass of angry "citizens." "Is this thing even going to
hold the ship!?" she yelled over the noise.
"It better!" Helric answered, firing a few shots forward and then turning around to fire at their pursuers. That was a bad situation to be in. "Go go!" He yelled again as he fired. This time, they were right at the entrance of the landing pad's structure.
Squeezing off a couple more warning shots at some of the advancing mob members, Kira bolted once more, sprinting as quickly as she could for the door and ducking around the portal's frame, providing cover for the rest of the hunters as they made their breaks for it. One by one, they sprinted past her as the bullets pinged against the metal or impacted against the ground, increasing in intensity after the group had just kicked the proverbial wasp's nest. More than once, the metal fragments from a projectile would hit the metal next to her and the fragments would pepper off against her Muur, scratching the painting off.
Helric came dead last, sprinting past the portal and taking cover behind a metal column. The bounty hunter took a moment to assess his situation as all hell broke loose outside. The portal that they had just gone through was a one way entrance, which led to what seemed to be a square and quite wide cargo elevator that would take them to the top. Assuming it worked.
"You," Helric said, pointing at Liam with one hand, while the other kept the barrel of his rifle pointing up. "Get that elevator working!"
Kira remained quiet, standing with her shoulder braced against the door frame, peeking her head out every few seconds at random, trying to keep stock of any of their visitors that might draw too close. She returned fire with her pistol sparingly, just enough to remind the mob that they had fire superiority, but never intentionally shooting to kill anyone, and trying to conserve her ammunition. Aside from that, she looked back inside every so often, almost urging Liam to get going with her eyes behind her faceplate as the wiry bounty hunter went about trying to get the elevator to work, without a word.
In the minutes afterwards, the mob had drawn closer to them, surrounding the small entrance from whatever cover they could use to fire at them. Like before, they didn't seem to be intimidated whenever one of them was killed, and when that happened another one would simply go up to the dead person, pick their weapon up, then continue to try to kill the bounty hunters. On the occasion that one of them was injured, they would simply ignore the wound and keep on fighting. It was, in a way, a fanaticism of sort, or they were just really desperate to kill them.
What in the world
happened here!?" Kira exclaimed, not to anyone in particular. "These people are crazy!" Continuing to take pot shots at the nearest ones, but increasingly becoming convinced that her hand was going to be forced sooner than later, she pressed her shoulder hard into the wall when more bullets slammed into the structure, sending dust flying from the impacts. "Stay back!" she shouted as loudly and threateningly as she could manage.
Jacob didn't answer, being drawing into the firefight as he was. The other bounty hunters kept on the same rythm, keeping the residents of the "abandoned" complex at bay as minutes passed like they were hours. During that time, the entrance to the landing pad became riddled with bullet holes, the poorly maintained concrete becamed chipped and cracked, revealing the metal rebar underneath, while the ground itself was dotted with several empty brass casings from the ammo spent. By then, most of the bounty hunters had also switched to their sidearms, having exhausted their main weapons, and it didn't take long for the first of them to run out of ammo.
Tannozako was the first one, shouting a curt and clear "Out of ammo!" with her very uncomfortable and monotone voice. Jacob was next, holstering his pistol again and pressing his back against the wall besides the entrance to the cargo elevator. That was when the good news finally came.
"I got it!" One of the bounty hunters, Liam, shouted, and the large cargo elevator rumbled to life with a dull thrum. The lanky Nepleslian beckoned the other hunters towards the square metal platform, and the rest of the group moved there in an orderly fashion. As Jacob keyed the UP button with a closed fist and the elevator started to move up, the first of the complex's denizens started to come through the entrance arch of the landing pad, but seemed content in just hurling whatever they had in hand at the ascending bounty hunters or shooting the underside of the elevator with their small arms.
As the elevator continued its slow ascent, about twenty feet upwards to where the hexagonal landing plate was located, Jacob sat down on the rusted, dirty and cold metal floor of the elevator. Some of the other hunters followed his example or simply leaned against the rail on the sides, watching the complex's occupants below, who were starting to scatter and go about their business like nothing had bappened.
"Helric, we've got an LZ secured," Jacob said, pressing a finger against the comm's piece on his ear before looking up.
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Later - Origin Industrial Complex - Landing Plate - Afternoon
The small
shuttle broke off from the cloud layer above the complex seemingly without any sound, banking around the edge of the complex before turning to head directly towards the landing pad. The shuttle moved at a steady speed, but seemingly going off course from the pad as it got closer, until it turned sharply as it was beside it to reduce the speed, then slowly lose altitude as it headed down to the plated metal surface where the Iron Ferret had finally landed.
The landing pad's surface looked as much out of use as the rest of the complex. After having sustained one invansion and one operation to reclaim it by the YSE, it could be said that the structure was lucky to be standing; only one piece of the hexagonal surface had fallen off, although it still left plenty of open space on it despite the shuttle and the Iron Ferret being landed on it. The smaller spacecraft extended its landing struts as it approached the platform, and bounced once against one of the large metal plates that covered the landing pad before coming to a stop. A thin mist ebbed away from the shuttle as the condensation from the upper atmosphere evaporated and its engines cooled down.
Apart from the two spacecraft, the only other things on the landing plate were the entrance for the cargo elevator shaft, a blocky protusion from the smooth surface which also contained the machine house that kept it working - if barely. Closer to the Iron Ferret, a couple of wooden crates had been unloaded from the nimble freighter to replenish the bounty hunter's used ordinance on their 'trip' there. To anyone standing near them, they would see that it contained several loose bullets from different calibers, as well as a few different crates containing different types of
grenades.
The loading ramp of the back of the shuttle hissed and popped as it equalized the exterior atmosphere's pressure with the one inside of the spacecraft, then slowly lowered itself down onto the cold metal platform. As soon as the metallic ramp touched down, the first occupant stepped out, a red-haired Nepleslian female, wearing a full set of the Styrling Muur and shouldering a battle rifle. Behind her, came a group of six other mercenaries with mixed gear. Most of them had worked with the bounty hunters on their last assignment on Delsauria, and apart from the new recruits, were familiar with the group.
"Glad ou people finally made it," Jacob said with a cheery tone as he approached Jaina, letting the freshly loaded rifle hang in front of his chest from its strap. The black duster that he wore over the Everyday Vest was punctured on a couple of places between his legs, where bullets had gone through, and the edges of it were torn and dirty from the extended use. The bounty hunter extended a hand towards the leader of the mercenary band, and waited for her to return the gesture expectantly
