Phoenix

Interlude

The Guns of L.A.

The armored beast stood tall, as the ruined city lay in flames. The skyscrapers that once showed the marvel of Humanity reduced to mere rubble. Tens of thousands of innocent people dead.

This would be his final gambit to save Humanity. If he failed, then this would be the final sunset of his people.

But… the man knelt down, his rifle pointing in the air as he laid a hand on the shoulder of a uniformed officer leaning against the wall, his ballistic vest torn apart, blood running down his mouth and chin. His head was slumped back, his eyes wide open.

Blood mixed with dust and concrete, powdered by the strikes of high powered rifles.

The patch on front his mangled vest identified him as ‘Harb, Muhammad. Sgt. O+’

The helmeted giant took a deep breath, as he gently closed the deceased officer’s eyes.

The face plate of his helmet slid up, revealing the blue and green eyes of the Legion general, Jaeger. The general sighed, as he moved his hand back to the shoulder of Harb, patting it gently.

“I’ll see you on the other side, brother. Your watch is over.”

The faceplate slid back down, once more turning the man in the faceless black beast that had been the last thing so many people had seen before they took their final breaths. The reflective visor betrayed no hint of the Human underneath it, the helmet gave no homage to the Humanoid skull as so many did.

Jaeger pushed himself from the ground, turning around to look at the only other Human around. A young officer, attempting to resuscitate another officer.

He brought his rifle to a low ready, as he began walking of the destroyed building they had taken cover in.

“Come on, we need to go.”

The officer continued his chest pumps, desperately attempting to get the other one back up.

“Come on… come on… come on...” The repeated, desperation evident in his voice as he continued compress the fallen officer’s chest.

Jaeger had stopped in the doorway, waiting for his police comrade to join him, but he refused.

“Smith.” He said once more, his voice quiet, gentle.

The officer, named Smith temporarily stopped his compressions to look up at Jaeger, anger evident on his face.

“We can’t fucking leave them here to die!”

Jaeger responded calmly. “They’re dead, Smith. And you compressing his chest isn’t going to change that. He has no brain activity at all. We need to move, now.”

Smith continued his compression, but a loud explosion sounded, causing him to flinch, though Jaeger merely looked behind him to see a US jet being blown out of the sky by a surface to air projectile. Anti-air. NPR anti-air.

Jaeger looked back to the young officer, nodding over his shoulder to the gun on the horizon. “We need to get those guns into our hands and get the US back into air supremacy. If we can do that, the US can run CAS in LA and we’ll have a better chance of holding until the Imperium arrives.”

Smith paused, his hands resting on the deceased officer’s chest. He let out a deep breath.

“We can’t leave them here.”

“Smith,’ Jaeger spoke, taking a step further into the room and closer to the officer, transferring his rifle to his left hand, the sling taking most of the weight. He lifted his right hand straight up, bent at the elbow, palm out. “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”

Jaeger lowered his hand. “That was the oath every man in this room took. They’ve discharged their duties, fully. Their mission has ended, their duties are complete.” Dante took another step towards the officer. “You still have yours to fulfill. But if we don’t move, their deaths will have been for nothing. They gave all so that we can bring an end to this.”

Despite the war going on around them in the city, the air stood still, silent.

A few seconds passed before the officer finally pushed himself up from the deceased, his head hung low as he took a deep breath.

Finally, he raised his head to meet the faceless giant. His eyes red from the tears forming on them.

Jaeger nodded behind him to the door. “Come on. We’ll mourn them after we stop this.” The giant moved, his pace the equivalent of a light jog as the his steps seemed to shake the very round which he moved upon.

The officer caught up to him, barely reaching the lower half of his shoulder.

“We’re only about two miles from the guns, but we’re going to have to fight our way through an absolutely NPR infested city. You know how it goes, Stay low, move fast. I need you alive for those guns.”

The officer nodded as he continued to move with the giant, the two making good time due to the speed they were moving at. They hadn’t been that far from downtown proper and soon found themselves surrounded on all sides by ruined buildings and weaving their way in between abandoned cars.

“Multiple tangos rounding the corner in twenty seconds. Get ready.” Jaeger stated, as he slid to a stop, quickly taking a knee behind cover, as Smith followed his lead, finding a collapsed concrete column.

The general raised his rifle at the intersection up the street, Smith following suit.

“Don’t shoot until I do.” Jaeger stated, as the sensors in his suit continued tracking the squad moving down the street.

“Copy.” Was all Smith responded, his patrol rifle raised and ready.

Jaeger himself was equipped with a gauss rifle firing ten millimeter slugs, which were shot out at approximately mach five.

“Ten seconds.” Jaeger stated over to his companion, who nodded, his rifle on target.

“Get ready.”

Smith watched as the squad of NPR soldiers rounded the corner. Horrible formation, all of them were clustered together. They were lightly armored, but they were carrying the same rifle Jaeger had.

Due to their positions, the squad couldn’t see either one of them, both of them had taken cover on opposite sides of the street.

As the squad cleared the intersection, they began walking towards the couple. There ten of them in total. Smith was just waiting for Jaeger to begin the attack.

As the last man crossed the mark which Jaeger had determined as a hundred feet into the block, the general stood up.

The average city block in Los Angeles is about five-hundred feet long.

This meant they were now engaging at four hundred feet.

As he stood, Jaeger squeezed off three rounds, the ten millimeter rounds traveling nearly instantaneously, two hit in the soldier in the chest, as the third tore his arm off.

The shots caused the squad to scramble for any cover they could, Jaeger picking off another two as they attempted to find safety.

Smith took an aimed shot, catching one of the NPR soldiers in the neck, the man falling to the ground instantly. The chemicals in the round preventing his cells from regenerating.

Jaeger hopped onto the hood of a car, climbing onto the roof and putting a single well aimed shot into the head of a soldier who had attempted to hide behind it, destroying it. The chemicals in the gauss round arresting regeneration.

Five soldiers left.

Jaeger refocused his effort farther down the street, sending a shot that decapitated one soldier.

Four.

Smith saw soldier aiming at Jaeger, taking quick action, he popped him in the chest with three rounds, the troop falling down.

But a shot hit him in the shoulder knocking the rifle out of his hands from the shock.

With practiced ease, Jaeger drew the Glock that rested on his thigh dropped four rounds into the man who had shot, two to the head, two to the chest, at two hundred feet.

Two.

Jaeger holstered the Glock, picking his rifle up quickly.

He crossed behind a car, quickly dropping another soldier with a single gauss round to the chest.

One left.

Smith moved up to meet with Jaeger, who ushered him over.

He motioned in a general direction close to the intersection the squad had passed through. “Blue Volkswagen.”

Hiding behind the blue Volkswagen was indeed a terrified NPR trooper.

The Horseman! The False-God. The Demon. The Wretch. He wasn’t supposed to be here.

Well, it at least explained why the NPR was having issues with taking ground. This was only supposed to last a few hours. It had been nearly half a day now.

Forcing his trembling to stop, he peered around the corner of the car he had hidden behind, bring his rifle barrel to bear and scanning for threats.

He saw nothing, a fact which only chilled him ever more.

The Horseman doesn’t miscount. That was something drilled into the head of every NPR recruit during training.

He shook his head.

He was a soldier of Olephus, for her sake! To act this cowardly in the face of her enemy was an insult to her.

He wasn’t afraid of death, he had no reason to. Not with the loving embrace of Olephus promised to him.

He cleared the side of the car as he attempted to figure out where the great beast had gone. He swung his rifle around the side of another car, as he attempted to find him.

Metal hitting metal caused him to swivel around to be faced with… nothing.

Something large and fast slammed into his back, throwing him to the ground as he shouted in shock he could feel a weight on his back as a large fist grabbed his hair, slamming his head forcefully into the concrete, breaking his nose.

He cried out in pain, it would regenerate, but it still hurt.

The hand lifted his head back up, a knee keeping his right arm down, and by extension, his rifle.

“It’s pretty unbecoming of an LT to hide while his men are being slaughtered.”

His face met the faceless Horseman.

“Drop the gun.” It demanded.

“Go fu-” His face was slammed into the concrete even harder then last time.

“Listen, there are three things that can happen right now. Work with me, drop the rifle and live. Don’t work with me and I cut your hand off and pull out your eyes, then kill you. Piss me off, and I kill you in the most painful, slow way I can think of.”

The faceless beast brought his head closer to the soldier’s head being forced into the concrete.

“The choice is yours.”

The grip tightened on his rifle, as he attempted a pathetic attempt at a spit.

“Okay, that answers that question. Smith.” Jaeger nodded behind him. “Get in my pack. I have a saw in there.”

Keeping his right hand on the soldier’s head, he used his left hand to grab the soldier’s left arm and forced it behind his back roughly, holding it up so Smith could get access to his wrist. He dug his knee into the left shoulder of the soldier.

Jaeger slid his hand up the soldier’s arm, stopping at his hand and grabbing it, controlling his wrist so he wouldn’t be able to slide it around.

Smith brought the saw to the wrist, resting it just below Jaeger’s hand.

“Take it off.” Jaeger said, Smith following without hesitation as he began to bring the saw back and forth to take the hand off.

The screams of pain that followed would haunt Smith in his dreams for years to come, but in the moment, all he saw was red. This man was responsible for the bloodshed that had come to this world. All Smith felt at the moment was an excitement he never thought he would feel. He had seen action in the Sandbox, but nothing had ever come close to this.

The saw finally cut through the last pieces of flesh after an agonizing, for the soldier at least, three minutes.

Smith noticed as the arm hand was pulled away an almost cauterized wound.

“Toss that saw back in my pack.” Jaeger told him, as the armored marine refocused his attention on the sobbing soldier.

“Are you going to cooperate with me now, or do I need to do your eyes as well?”

The soldier merely nodded, as Jaeger noted the rifle had been dropped.

“Awesome.” Jaeger stated as he pulled a pair of restraints from a holster on the webbing covering the torso of his black armor.

Jaeger used his right leg to push the rifle away, standing up from the soldier, he picked him up, standing the soldier up.

He closed the shackle around the soldier’s right hand, tightening it to make sure it wouldn’t slip loose. Jaeger pulled the right hand to the front left of the soldier, as far left as his shoulder could reasonably pivot, the man in too much shock to do anything. Having your hand sawed off tends to do that to most people, even phoenixes.

Jaeger looped the woven cable around the soldier’s left leg twice, then around his waist twice more, the cable extending out of the body of the restraint. He finally locked it by closing it around the cable.

The left arm was unrestrained, but given he had no hand to manipulate anything with, it wasn’t too much concern to Jaeger, and the chemical on the saw would arrest regeneration.

Jaeger picked the gauss rifle previously wielded by the now injured prisoner.

“Smith.” He caught the officer’s attention, tossing the rifle the few feet to him, the officer smoothly catching it. “Ditch that AR and take this. These guys were just scouts, that’s why there were so few and they were so lightly armored. As we push in further to the city, we’re going to be encountering heavier guys with better armor and more guns. He’s got extra mags, but keep your AR mags in case we run into friendlies.”

Smith cleared his AR, reloading the previously chambered round into the less then full mag and putting it in a pocket. He slid the sling of the gauss rifle around him, he went to the front of the prisoner soldier, pulling the rifle mags from the front of the vest the soldier had been wearing.

Jaeger wrenched the NPR soldier by his unrestrained shoulder.

“Let’s go. We need to get those guns down.”

Smith jogged to his side, though gestured to the prisoner also walking by Jaeger’s side, the phoenix’ face bloodied from the rough treatment Jaeger had shown him.

“Why are we keeping him?” Smith asked, anger evident in his voice, as Jaeger merely continued to pull the NPR troop along.

“Those guns use an old operating system, I encountered it during the civil war. Takes a natural born officer to approve changes to the IFF system, take a look at his sleeve.”

Smith glanced at the troop’s sleeve, seeing an unknown symbol.

“I… don’t know what that is.” Smith admitted.

“It’s the NPR’s equivalent of a first lieutenant. The system will recognize him and Venus won’t have to spend a stupid amount of time trying to get through the firewall and manually change the IFF.”

The soldier began trying to pull away as he heard the plans, but the supersoldier was having none of that, as he merely lifted the struggling man off the ground by his shoulder and continued walking.

Jaeger shook his head. “Have to give you props for still trying to get away, but you NPR bastards can never quite figure out how to do that. You are trying to physically break away from someone your dogma calls an unstoppable abomination. Word for word, that’s what your holy book calls me. Are you dumb or just putting up a token amount of resistance so that when you do finally meet Olephus in Hell you can at least claim you didn’t help me willingly?”

“Fuck you!” He shouted, and proceeding to come up with even more inventive curses, both in English and in, what Smith could only guess, was his native tongue.

Jaeger shook his head, as the trio continued walking… well, rather two of them walked, the third was carried, dangling by his mangled arm.

The Human police officer silent took in the utterly destroyed city. Just hours ago, it had been a bustling city. Sure, it may not have been New York City, or Taipei or Beijing, but it was a respectably sized city, but now… now it reminded him of the photos he had seen of the aftermath of bombing raids during the Second World War. Few buildings still stood, and the one or two skyscrapers that still stood were severely damaged and quite likely close to collapse.

The city seemed devoid of all life, Human or otherwise. But still, there had to be more ground troops out there.

Cars sat where they were, dust and debris covering the windows of all of them. Smith quite glad, as he was certain he would find some… graphic scenes in many of them.

Approximately three hundred meters in front of them stood one of the few standing skyscrapers still in the city.

The world around the three were silent, save for the protestations of the NPR soldier and the crunching and destruction of debris by the metal boot of the tall beast that strode through this Hell as though he were Satan himself.

As they closed the distance between them and the skyscraper to about one hundred and fifty meters, a large metal beast hovered around the corner approximately another three hundred meters down the road.

Jaeger stopped, as did the Human officer.

And there on that lonely Los Angeles road, surrounded by the corpses of buildings, cars and likely their owners, the two beasts stared each other down.

“Armor!” Jaeger shouted, as Smith found himself suddenly being picked up and tucked into the supersoldier’s right side.

Perhaps he had shouted it out of a habit, or he shouted it expecting a squad capable of taking down a tank, only to remember that his comrade was a squishy, easy to kill Human.

All that mattered is that as Jaeger ran with the Human officer and his prisoner, attempting to put more distance between the tank and his easier to kill companions, the main gun on the NPR tank slowly repositioned itself so the turret was aiming to its left and up. At the standing skyscraper.

A round was fired, striking the thirty-fifth floor, the round continued traveling, until a timer detonated it at the sixty-third floor. Anyone who still happened to be alive on that floor and the one above and below it, were instantly killed by the explosion and blast pressure.

The sudden explosion was enough, as the building’s damage finally overcame its failsafes.

Smith heard the screeching of steel as he glanced back form his position in Jaeger’s arm. To be greeted from a sight he had only ever seen in the videos of the September Eleventh attacks.

The collapse seemed to be in slow motion, as debris and large clouds of dust fell to the ground, billowing out like large waves.

The brownish wave was soon upon them, overtaking them as Smith found it difficult to breath. Every breath he took, his lungs screamed at him not to.

Smith lost consciousness. It may have been from shock, maybe exhaustion. The possibility is there that a piece of debris may have struck him in the head.

The last thought that ran through the officer’s mind before he lost the ability to do so temporarily was a simple one.

‘They dropped a fucking building on us.’

Author's Notes:

Oh, hello there!

I'm still here, damnit!

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