Recon South: That must be the effect of one of the other contestants. Carefully make our way through the screaming crowd thing - if I can get any residual thoughts that might indicate where the guy causing this is coming from, do so. Look for those seemingly unaffected by the effect and kill them. Stay hidden if possible, and if I spot any supersoldiers, assess if they have any vital parts and teleport those out. Throats or heads if possible. If I need to kill any of the crazy ones, do it quietly.
Recon North: Head to the Tal Afar Citadel thing that the sucker gave me the info for. Stay hidden, assess defenses. Any patrolling people or anything? See if I can provide opportunities for the snipers to make X-COM style squadsight headshots.
Drones: Head to those fires and the explosion. Try to get a view of whatever caused them from afar. General scouting along the way, stay stealthy.
Snipers/Trappers: Keep an eye out for any potential targets. If I spot any supersoldiers through squadsight/telescopes/drones/etc, try to score an early kill on them after determining if I can kill them in an early alpha strike.
Zane: Do as above, but also consult my stonemind counterpart to see if I'm not thinking of something.
Crazy crowd is mostly inside the buildings, few on rooftops and even fewer on roads. So recon south continues along edge of the forest.
Recon north follows the narrow road to northwest until they reach an intersection with the road that leads to the Citadel. Incidentally the house on northern side of this first road is also one of those which hosts terrorists. The handy informant wasn't exactly privy to details, but you would estimate there could be easily anywhere from ten to fifty men. In fact, when of your eyepairs peeps over the corner you see two men guarding the entrance weapons ready. They are eyeing the sky and westward while chattering quietly with each other. Unfortunately they are well in shadow of the building, meaning there's no line of sight with your snipers. However sniper team spots one dude on the rooftop. But they don't snipe them because things are starting to get weird.
At that point recon south is 126.56 meters from happily burning people, with a triangle shaped city block in between, when they, and by extension you entirely, start sensing new things. Whispers in your head saying words that literally hurts you, itching feeling like spiders walking inside your thirteen skins, darkest shadows moving around edge of your vision and urge to bite something. It's not bad, not yet, but it is rather uncomfortable.
And stonemind is part of you as much all the other brains are. Consulting yourself is kinda crazy thing to do.
Another muffled explosion from far west.
Heh. It was a Monster Maker. Search the area looking for combatants, use the mace on any I find. Go for stealth kills, otherwise go all jumping spider on them. Try and get up high to get an idea of the layout of the area. If I see a supersoldier in the distance, use a Monster Maker mortar round on them, then get the hell away. If it looks like they aren't affected, use a standard mortar round and run like hell away from them. I'll need a better plan then.
Alright, that rounds goes explodes and releases its viral payload into air. Faint wind blows north, so it won't be your problem. The only problem may be the lizard monsters it makes. Apparently these are more realistic and dangerous than the ones you faced in the labs and failed to subdue. Now that they are released without restraints they may just kill the entire city. You are starting to hear sounds from north that indicates shit going south. The proverbial south, not the literal one. Screaming for one, and some more animalistic sounds.
For starters you move south. The first intersection leads to west, second leads east directly to source of that hor airpillar you detected. The source of it is not visible in this light, but infrared reveals there being a small crater. At this point you hear quiet sound from above, like tiny rotors. You focus your eyes up, but see nothing. Of course it is hard to see anything against black sky, but none of the stars flickers or is otherwise obstructed despite of sounds moving around. Hallucination? Something else? Impossible to tell, so you decide to ignore it for now and jump on rooftops. First jump takes you onto window on westen side, where from you bounce to east onto roofs.
From there you see... well, not a whole lot more. A budding fire in far east. Lights of a car in east, 10° north, going towards where your transport crashed. That southern fire/smoke pillar comes from a transport helicopter crashed into lonely building in middle of open area. There's two not very large blocks between you and it. And if you listen carefully you can hear rapid thumping sound coming from that direction, almost as if something heavy was running like Usain Bolt. It moves westward along what you presume being a road connecting with the southward one you were running along just a moment ago. The thumping sound stops suddenly at the intersection in south. You can make out the point where two roads meet to make a T-intersection, but you can't see anything there. No visuals, no thermal, nothing. Magnetoreception? Something, faint.
Might as well shoot at there, even if it puts you in risk of infection. Single practiced motion you point the mortar at the intersection and fire. Without stopping to see if it hit you more to another position to avoid counter action. Just twenty meters to east, over those small stone fences that are the only thing separating rooftops of two houses. Those annoying sounds from above seem to follow you.
use all vision modes, but put significant emphasis on non-photon methods such as magnetic detection and thermal, looking for any odd gaps of thermal radiation and displacancies that may be caused by photon dodge.
Drones to the north seek out the source of the projectile but do not attack yet until the rest of us meet up with it or we get in range of the cause. only follow.
Move north torwards the source of the explosions, stay off the main road and fire from the end of a secondary road or alley way.
all gun drones, except the one detecting the vehicle (action for it below), sweep through buildings taking out any armed men found. Mortar drones and particle drones stay near me
Have the smg drones take out any lightly armored foes, mortar drones take out any entrentched infantry,
Any super soldiers or armored vehicles get 3 particle cannons to the face followed by a pike missile if they survive the particle cannon.
If I find a large group of people just start firing fragmentation grenades at each group of people to flush them out of cover before mopping them up with conventional weaponry
If I find any super soldiers entrentched in a building, level the particle cannons at the building (some distance away of course) and open fire. Then throuw in one chaff grenade, move in and sweep though avoiding the road and cut up any survivors.
Then move southwest cutting through buildings,
That drone to the south tracking the vehicle:
Have the the drone detecting the vehicle attempt to shoot the driver and passenger before flying away into a nearby building out the back door and then around to the back of the car and quickly taking out any survivors who emerge. Then move to meet up with us.
Legs are good, might need to be carefull when running realy fast but should be fine forn normal movement.
Thermal radiation is infrared light which is electromagnetic radiation which is carried by photons. So when your everything is cloaked you are limited to sound, sonar, ground vibrations (those sensors probably doesn't exist anymore because of removed feet), sensing air currents and magnetoreception.
Northern drones tries to make math of the point of origin and move over there to investigate. And they indeed find something unusual. It's bacially almost one meter wide disk with eight legs. Quite agile one, it jumps from ground to window and with single smooth motion to rooftops. It seems to have four more appendages on its topside. Drones can't get any better readings out of it. Well, looks like a target for you. You run straight north over the road and then northwest along another narrow road until you reach a crossing where another narrow road branches north. From there you have direct line to your possible target. It doesn't seem to be moving or doing anything in particular.
Except when it suddenly and very unexpectedly does. It points a tube excatly in your direction which you takes as your hint to dodge, mostly because the tube it is holding appears have rather large caliber. Handheld mortar basically. Thanks to your fast body and equally fast mind you have enough time to jump out of the way. Whatever it fired at you explodes before hitting wall in end of the road sending suprisingly small amount of shrapel around. The explosion too was rather lackluster. Shockwave either isn't anything to write home about. Drones tells you that the spider disk moved away from its position to east along roofs.
You start hearing sounds from surrounding buildings. Whining. Gasping.
Well shit, head to cover and try to observe the weird superscience's dogs.
To cover. Right. You kick closest door in and rush inside taking care to not damage the railgun. The sound of door being broken causes some minor commodation on upstairs. And when you peek outside you clearly see those "dogs" speeding straight towards you. Those tubes on their backs are too pointing directly at your face which means you should pull your head back in.
Turns out being very good decision. Thermography highlights a line of air suddenly heating up rapidly exactly where your head was a moment ago. The line, you presume, originates from those dogs. Laser, probably. Now how laser proof your armor is? You don't quite know and you don't feel like testing it out either. Especially when the line of hot air seems to have burned small hole through remains of the door.
Element of suprise is pretty much gone. At least you have an idea what kind of weaponry your opponents are using.
Alex's hands are a mess. He should join the Support squad.
Should have brought tools. Idea for next time.
Could do a crude jury-rig for whole hand using wires from the sensors.
No fine control, but at least a kung-fu grip action.
Car incoming. These people are not our problem.
Get out of sight. Focus on finding other test subjects.
Observe surroundings, look for pockets of heat and activity.
No active radar yet. Let's not shout "we're here" in case anyone is listening.
The assault on top of the building will use their sensor's (minus active radar) and try to locate any other test subjects or pockets of interest while support will move to the other side of the building from the container recons will sneak that way as well staying hidden.
Straight forward (east from now on) is a larger building. You see lights on first floor windows. And you are not entirely wrong, there's an anti-air emplacement there. Seems unmanned, though. Passive radar detects frequent series of pings from south. Corresponding pings, but very faint, are reflected from air in east. Three are about 300 meters away, moving in wide V formation along the main road from north east. They are approaching fast. Passive radar also picks something it files as noise from much closer.
Gunter and Felix on north side proceed to sneak behind corner and move in direction of that building with AA gun and peer around. They see ten of those Toyota Hilux cars lined up by it. One of those has a heavy machinegun mounted on and four men are carrying ammoboxes onto it from inside.
Daniel, Erik and Henry on southern side hesitate to move. There's a car coming from east, rapidly approaching the large roundabout. But they get ready for shootout. It turns out to be unnecessary preparation as something hits the car when it passes the roundabout and moments later it crashes into first building. You didn't hear anything being shot, but you definitely heard of glass shattering and metal being torn from the car. You guess the driver was hit by something. Other passengers seems to somewhat fine. Three armed men climbs out of crashed car.
Kill the woman, get the soldering iron, and make the night vision goggles. If there is enough material, make night vision goggles for as many zombies as possible.
You heartless murderer. But it's probably mercykilling anyway based on what you heard happening in the first lab. Single shot into head releases her from misery. The great part is that the backroom is veritable treasure trove for a gadgeteer. It looks like the business owners used to fix all kinds of electronics and home appliances here. Radios, old CRT tube televisions, digital videocameras and the like. You won't have any troubles making your night vision goggles here.
After some creative tinkering you have something that passes as nightvision system. It has basically whole bunch of IR LEDs welded into wide angle flashlight, pieces of optics taped on sides of your head, and a pair small displays salvaged from those digital video cameras hanging in front of your eyes. The whole system is powered by heavy array of 9V batteries hanging from your neck like some sort of primitive jewelry. Theoretically you could use the nuclear reactor on your back to power it, but building system to drop voltage and regulate current from it takes more time and equipment than you have.
Now this thing you built, it has lowish framerate, nothing you can't deal with, but minor annoyance anyway. And you will be blind if you take it off for few minutes before your eyes get used to dark again. It's nothing impressive, but not many ex military people can say they have built functional nightvision goggles from scrap in middle of hostile territory while being surrounded by batshit crazy people and zombies. That's only for hardcore dudes!
well, More to the already absurd bodycount, I guess.
Squad 1: now that the building is clear, it's time to move on to one of those high activity areas. Shift to mobility form and move out. For future reference, I'll control Artillery since I don't have any spare clones.
Squad 2: continue scanning for targets at long range, but keep a sonic sensor out for anything that might be closing in.
Artillery: Swarmbots will move in ahead of squad one and begin IDing armed targets. After which, they will drop their payload/detonate on said targets. Fliers will regroup with squad 1 and begin scanning for hostiles in a radius of a hundred meters. Ground drones will move in behind squad 1 and use data from the fliers to dismantle heavy armor with a gray goo barrage.
Squad 1 transforms and somehow holds on their equipment while running downstairs and out to the main road towards points of interest in southwest, your sixlegged things in tow. By the way, two of the ground kh drones notices something big moving inside one house in 200m east of the building complex you just were in. It was carrying something long. One flyer confirms sighting. The two ground drones run closer, spot a full face helmet peeking from the said building and fire laser at it, but apparently missing narrowly. Squad 2 doesn't have line of sight, so you hesitate which way you should go and end up jogging along the road instead of running full speed.
Besides far ahead at large roundabout a car comes into sight from east. It's headlights are a dead giveaway, so clone 4 takes a shot at it using tungsten slug. Good thing about these CF launchers is that they are quiet. Only sound comes from the bullet as it travels through air and hits glass on the side of car, the driver, door on opposite side of car and finally ground behind it. Nearly perfect shot at highspeed target with very little time to aim. You deserve some high fives, man!
The driver doesn't take well for being shot and crashes the car at first building he can find, which leaves it in sight of Squad 1. They are about 350 meters away from the car.
Where did ATHATH disappear to?
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Topic: Roll to create a supersoldier! Bloody air resistance (Read 139370 times)