This was enjoyable turn to write. Maybe not so enjoyable for others. At the moment turns are only few seconds long due various things happening around.
after reading and rereading the result of my turn I am getting paranoid, especialy about the wind and the drones. Making me want to get out of here really quickly))
release a chaff grenade to throw off any non photon based detection systems (mainly magnetic ones, ought to help against vibrations and soundwave due to explosion and particulates.)
If I detect any odd signatures moving torwards me go west as fast as I can go while still remaining stealthed then south after several blocks (at least 5), drones go high in air and remained stealth watching for signs of other super soldiers but not attacking yet, especial seek out the source of what ever is fucking those people up.
If I am attacked, unload everything into them, if they get into melee slice them up with katanas before unloading the sputter gun once their armor has been breached
otherwise
Move forwards torwards where it last was and search for any remains (it went north, right?)
If by chance I do find it, try and scavenge what ever I can.
Try kIlling it again if it somehow dodged, with everything I have...really put those neo skills to the test
If I get into melee use katanas and unload the sputter gun
Any and all drones still functional move to intercept and fire on those five unkown signatures have particle drones fire on them first.
If they are destroyed then have the rest of the drones scout around in a 400 meter area going through buildings but remaining stealth. Avoid hostiles for now.
Grenade released and dropped. In a moment you are engulfed by cloud of thin aluminum dust, effectively rendering yourself blind. Well, magnetoreception still works, aluminum isn't very magnetic. All that moaning around turns rapidly into animalistic howling, few pained screams mixed in between. Scary as it is, nothing appears to be coming in your direction. Not that you could tell if something was coming. You are invisible and almost all your detection systems are disabled by your own actions.
The spider thingy was running to east and jumped to south over the road.
So you walk east towards new craters and ruined buildings you made, looking for any traces of the spider thingy. You mostly use your grenade launcher drones which are otherwise unarmed right now, occasionally taking them out of stealth for few moments to get clearer view. And you do actually find it! It's on second floor of a house with collapsed outer wall. It appears to be mostly immobile due lacking most of its legs. Interestingly enough it doesn't appear to be dead yet, nor is it bleeding based on visual confirmation you got from drones before one got shot down by a small caliber SMG. FN P90, if you saw correctly. Frankly, it doesn't look like it has anything to hurt you with.
It would really be overkill to use particle cannons from such close distance, and its armor appears to have protected its body sufficiently well from various forms of shrapnel and even from close range plasma explosion. So less penetrating weapons are out. Either your crotch gun fired from very close distance or going in melee with monoatomic blades. And frankly you have no idea where its vitals are in its disk like body. Middle? Side? Front? You could also consider giving it chance to surrender after cutting off its limbs, then it is technically out of the test according rules.
You think that while making your way upstairs through insides of a building too small for your tall frame.
Meanwhile your drones make their way northward towards flying things only to notice those suddenly changing direction back to northeast where there's apparently a plume of dust in distance. Drones equipped with SMG's are too far to fire with any realistic accuracy, but particle cannons have considerably long range so you could use those. Sure that will gather more attention to you, but it's not like everybody wouldn't already know where you are. Those cannons are rather loud after all and you have been firing them like it's end of the days. And you might as well show them you are aware of their presence, welcome them into your special hell.
Cannon drones uncloak long enough to get proper aim and fire away, their triple thunder tearing though air once again. Two closest flying targets disappears from drone radars. Superb aim, man! Three remains.
And that dusty area in northeast? The area is now shining like a small sun. It's not your handijob, I promise.
I call hax, by the way. I'm super outgunned, and my one maybe advantage of speed is dust in the wind. Jam some of the healing jelly in my ears, and put the rest on my leg stumps.
Quickly rig up everything I have for a suicide bomb. There's no way I'm dying with out taking whatever the hell that was with me. Wait no. Stupider idea. Those vials are leaking on me, right? Let's turn this up to 11 and force some mutations. Maybe I'll remain in control. Ha! Who am I kidding? I'm going to die horribly and mutated.
While waiting to die mutate and die, use the smg and shotty against anything that comes through looking for me.
You squeeze some of the jelly around your where numerous ears are with your functional upper arms and wait with SMG ready.
It was neurotoxin vials that broke, by the way, and you are immune to those effects. Mostly. And you have armor between your flesh and the toxic liquid, so your changes to get any damage from those is minimal as long as you don't go licking it. Monster maker rounds are intact on your back.
You spot one drone more while waiting and manage to shoot it down. Your hearing returns faster this time and you enjoy few seconds listening as something moves on downstairs before you go deaf again. That's like third time in less than... five minutes? It would be great if it were to stop, but you feel a bit too outgunned to do anything about it.
I'm assuming you did the smart and eat your belly full of nutrient slurry, so your legs will almost certainly regenerate, but it probably takes few hours and by then this city has been fully leveled. Your broken bones will mend much faster, however, so you could try bipedal walking later on. More likely you'll be just dragging yourself along ground.
And despite of the all dust in air you can see sun rising from northeast. It's... flickering?
"Daaaaaaaaaamn."
Switch back to the laser rifle and head towards the sounds of the explosions. Want to conserve ammo for that.
The people upstairs should be probably be okay... probably.
Apologies in advance, there was unfortunate string of 6's and 1's in most inopportune moments.
With railgun resting against your right hip from its heavy duty chainstrap you proceed outside and into the dust cloud in west you raised. Because that's only way towards explosion that doesn't involve climbing over buildings. You could do that with your jetpack and move onto rooftops, but that would simply put you on every snipers line of sight.
The moment you are about to step out of the obstructing dust cloud you notice an armed man running towards you. He's coming from same direction as the dogs did, but he's much closer. Distance between you two is no more than twenty meters. Few things about this guy strikes rather odd. For starters his thermals registers only slightly higher than ambient temperature, his exposed face and boots are same temperature. His clothes are typical desert camo suitable for this enviroment. In his hands is a futuristic looking rifle, thick barrel like your laser and no obvious hole for a bullet to come out. Second weapon hanging on his hip looks like a large tetris T block with a magazine and scope fitter on top of it. On his back is a one meter wide circular flat object whose purpose is unclear for you. Hmm, that rifle in his hands has cable going on his back, exactly like your laser has.
Anyway, he's taking aim on you. It's a wild west moment where fastest drawer wins. You lift your gun faster and instinctually press the firing button with far more strength than was absolutely necessary, your reaction greatly strengthened by your power armor. The end result is that your laser makes funny noise as its plastic parts shatter in your fist.
Your opponent doesn't waste any time taking advantage of the situation. On top of that he has better control of his power, maybe because he's not wearing a power armor. His gun doesn't make sound and produce any light, but you instantly feel its effects on your upper left arm. Armor scales are glowing hot and heat is very clearly felt through your secondary armor and insulation suit, but thankfully laser didn't go all the way through. Hooray for multiple armor layers!
Well, the laser is useless now. Railgun is too big and slow to be used in this situation. That leaves you with the flamer as your only usable counter measure. So you drop your laser, lift the flamer by its handle and fire at the same moment as you jump on to side and active your jump jets. Stream of liquid fire sprays over his legs. His face turns into very image of fear when that happens. He swings his laser weapon around aimlessly while walking backwards and trying to swipe fire off his legs only to lit his hands on fire as well. As funny as that would be to watch, his careless firing sweeps over your flamer's fuel tank, carving a hole in and igniting everything inside.
And, you know, that fuel burns hot enough to melt steelbar in mere seconds. And it's on fire now. Inside the tank. Right next to your legs. So what happens here is that the entire tank melts and 50 liters of Satan's Fiery Piss splatters on your own legs. Armor scales melt instantly. The Piss and molten armor flows inside leg mechanisms and melt everything. At this point the pain from legs flares like thousand suns and you start trashing in midair and sreaming. You crash into wall and thrusters spread the portion fallen on ground everywhere in the alley. Walls, ground, windows, doors... everything is on fire.
And then you fall down, entire weight of upper portion of your power armor coming in rest on your fleshy human legs. There's no way your fleshy bits can withstand that much weight, especially not when that burning shit is litelly turning your legs into ash. Thankfully all nerves in your legs just dried so it doesn't hurt so much anymore. You fall on your face, fire on ground starting to burn through your chest. At least your thrusters on back are still intact. Just think about what would have happened if those got damaged somehow...
This went went into hell really fast. Sorry. Frankly, your changes to get out of this alive are very, very small. It's not impossible, if RNG blesses you, but it's hard. Oh, and your power generator has a self-destruct freature. If you die, it goes boom. Big boom.
Squad 1: Remain stealthed, and wait for a good opportunity to ambush.
Squad 2: Clone 4 will take a minute to reposition somewhere along the roof using camo, while clone 3 does what they never actually did when ordered last turn: Engage and disable the full face helmet guy non-lethally.
Artillery: fall back and flank around the long way, if possible. Swarm bots are to remain in the location and deploy any armaments they have on nearby targets. have one that's armed with explosives prioritse using them on the guys who just ran to cover.
Apologies in advance, there was unfortunate series of 6's and 1's in most inopportune moments.
Squad 1: Chilling.
#4: Repositioning. He takes place of #3. It was good, though not as good as #4's.
Artillery: You recall your drones. Two of them cease transmitting at the very same moment when a thunder clap happens again. There's a veritable sound of explosion following the thunder, pretty much where your two now missing flyers used to be. And the thunder is loud enough to shatter glass in surrounding buildings. Probably loud enough to rupture eardrums. Good thing you don't have those. Swarm drones go dropping grenades on the two dudes, who prompty get shredded.
#3 sprints down the alley laser ready and halfway down you notice the guy stepping out of dust blocking your vision. He's... wearing a power armor covered in bluish scales. It looks very back heavy. On his right hip is hanging a massive three meters long gun from a chain. The opening in end of the barrel is bigger than your arm. On his left hip hangs another weapon. It's big too, but in a different way. It kinda looks like flamethrower with a sizable tank hanging on its bottom. But if someone brought a flamethrower you can be certain it won't be oridinary one. In his hands rests a neat futuristic looking rifle, similar like your laser in terms of thick barrel without openings. And he raises that rifle to point you, little faster than you.
It's a moment of truth, and in truth you have much better control of your strength, because the dude crushes the grip of his rifle. Whew, for a moment you thought you were screwed there. Your turn to fire. Single sweep with laser over his left upper arm is enough to turn his scales around red hot and carve through.
Unfortunately that didn't disable him, or indeed even hurt him. Kind of makes you wonder if he has no flesh under there either. He drops his broken gun, crouches, lifts the flamer and jumps sideways accompanied by massive blast of fiery air. For a moment you think he exploded his fuel tank, but it rapidly turns out to not be the case. White, blindlingly bright liquid fire bursts out of his weapon over your legs. First you think you are safe from fire, because apparently the material your nanites are made of are extremely heat resistant, requiring ridiculous temperatures to melt. When the nanites in your legs indeed start melting, you realize this liquid fire must be really horrifyingly hot.
Despite of being no longer flesh and literally unable to die from mere fire, the fear of being burned alive is still tightly stuck in your subconsciousness. You fire your laser in panic, not really looking where you are firing, and step back trying to wipe liquid fire off your legs, only to get it stick in your hand as well. This shit is like napalm! No, it's even worse! You do the only thing that comes into your mind: sacrifice your hand and legs for fire to save rest of yourself. You jump backwards and leave burning parts behind.
Now that you are not in immediate danger you have time and focus to spare for your enemy. Non-lethal takedown is very rapidly turning into suicidal lethal takedown. Apparently your laser hit his flamer's fuel tank, ignited the fuel and made the whole tank melt. Sitting on your ass you watch as the big glob of liquid fire almost as bright as sun pours over his legs and melts his armor and frame almost instantly. Thrusters on his back blast the burning shit literally everywhere. Ground, every wall, door, and window frame is covered in what could be called as devil's piss. That includes you.
His sideways jump ends with collision with a wall and he falls down on his burning legs. Which naturally, considering heat of this fire, turn into ash he falls on his face, screaming. You would scream too, but that won't help you at all. The alley is shining like a small sun.
There are people with serious firepower here.
Best way to survive a hit is to not get hit. Best way to not get hit is to not be seen.
Need to start moving. We won't stay undetected for much longer.
Deny them the air observation.
Light them up.
South is a bad direction at the moment. Keep clear of the vehicle column.
Once the enemy is blind, they will come closer.
But against firepower of that magnitude... don't stay in any one building too long.
Alex will prime and ready a pair of TOC grenades, holding onto them ready to release. Then he will light up the sky with active radar for extra accuracy and more accurate intel, and start shooting at the closest and/or most threatening drones, using SPU to predict their movements and HATAK ammo to ensure penetration against any possible armor. Once several drones are down, or he feels considerably threatened, he will deploy TOC smoke, extra thick from both grenades, and descend into the building via the hatch. Any lock on the hatch should be of little use against the claws, and he can just dig the claws in and lift the hatch without needing hands.
Other members of the team can either add to the extermination of drones, or dig in further and wait in ambush for enemies to react to Alex's distraction.
Alex will go through with the above plan while the support will move to shoot down drones as well and recon will scout and and clear a excape route for everyone to GTFO once the TOC grenades go off
Too bad this entire action is basically invalidated by others.
The bigger drones turn back actually while you are getting ready to shoot them. A moment later ear shattering thunder blasts over the sky and two of those drones are literally turned into plasma and thousands small shrapnels. The remaining ones you see and detect are hastily retreating back to northeast. But those small swarm bots are not. They dive towards where the two dudes are trying take shield and drop few fragmentation grenades on them.
The brief moment before that stupidly high power laser evaporated those two drones your active radar detected two larger objects literally popping into existance in south. One moment they weren't there and on the next they are. Then air turned hot plasma, clearly originating from those two objects, and destroyed the drones. Right after the deed was done they disappeared from radar completely.
Assault units on the roof have their ear microphones damaged rendering them deaf, the others survive. Ben and Carl on roof and Felix and gunther on north side observe how headlights of the terrorist cars shatter and go dark. IR and UV sensors tell that all 25 guys are holding their ears, and are screaming in pain. This is the most opportune moment to eliminate them!
Henry and his group spots a bunch of people coming out of houses in west. They are... not humans. They have scaly growth all over their skin, fingers elongated into sharp points, and bony spikes poking out at random points hindering their movement.
A bright light starts shining from east-northeast behind buildings. Almost like a second sun, but frequency distribution is a bit off.
((Do I get the credit for the casualties caused via terrorizer? (including the indirect stuff)))
Ok lets start trying to figure out where the leadership in this city is. Head North while keeping in mind to be stealthy.
You should, but those are hard to confirm if they are not recorded by any camera.
Civilian leadship should be in city hall, but you are fairly certain any form of government is erased by occupying forces long time ago. But leadership of local military? Definitely most heavily protected place you can possibly find in the city. So far you haven't seen anything that comes even close.
You don't make if far before it thunders again in west. Geez, it's like they are trying to invite everyone over there! Tune it down guys, some people want their own party!
You hear sound above you. When you look up you see a good quality quadcopter drone. It's very quiet considering how low it is flying, and it's definitely very much out of place here. Your shoulder guns are having hard time getting lock on it because it's directly above you.
And while we are observing things, you see sun suddenly rising in north. No, that can't be sun. It's way too early. And it's north, for gods sake! Whatever it is, it's very bright and kinda flickers.
Recon South: spread out and keep track of the crazy effect's movements. Stay hidden if possible, but if I spot any visibly non-crazy people kill them - either they're psychically resistant or some shit or they're one of my competition.
Sniper South: Secure the building I'm heading into - cameras by the door and entrance to the rooftop for now - and keep an eye out for anyone I need to kill.
Epicentre Tracking Drone: Keep following the projected centre in coordination with Recon South. Attempt to determine who's causing the effect; if spotted and able to be sniped, well, I know what to do.
Recon North: Make sure I didn't miss anyone outside of the building, then enter and ... hmm. Know what? Might as well try to exploit religion in my favor. First make sure I can speak the language (increased learning ability ho) and then enter the building. Use interrogative telepathy to basically tell anyone I encounter personal details that only they would know, etc. Claim to be a group of mortals taken hold of by Allah to punish certain individuals within the city for their sins, and if they help me they will be richly rewarded in the afterlife. Use whatever other means they need - visually impressive teleportation or speaking in unison or whatever - to be convinced. If it works, send them out to go kill other 'demons', being my fellow competition.
If this plan fails or I can't speak the language at the moment, just kill everyone in the building as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Other Three Snipers: Keep watching for any potential targets, but also assess better sniping positions through the drones and what have you. If there are any good ones not too far away, go ahead and relocate. If they're a while out/occupied by enemy forces, just note them down for later. If any potential targets are spotted, well, I know what to do.
Soaring High Drone: Investigate the specific form of destruction taking place to the west. Keep well away from it, I just wanna see what's going on.
Drone By Cars: Check out the car lights to the west, south of the fiery area. Wait, fiery area? Was this there before?
Equipment:
4 Snipers:
Camo gear
Telescopes
Sniper rifles
Ammo: Four 5 bullet magazines
2 Mines each
3 Trappers
Camo gear
Combat armor
Little flying drones with cameras, one for each
3 mines
30 Blowdarts + blowgun
10 Remote cameras
Silenced pistol
Ammo: three 12 bullet clips
6 Stealth recon
Camo gear
Light combat armor
30 Blowdarts
Binoculars
2 Knives
3 Flash grenades
3 Smoke grenades
10 Remote cameras
Silenced pistol
Ammo: three 12 bullet clips
Recon south splits in two groups. Two bodies continues to west along the forested area while one sprints to north, climbing on top of a house and sprinting over the roof to first road. If the recon body were to follow the road to east it would take him back to the landing spot. Had it been faster, it could have seen the sniper. Well, that's if you had more light to see with. Anyway, the sniper south moves north towards the minaret and finds it empty and unlocked. Awesome! He climbs all the way up and begins setting up his personal store of long range death.
Epicenter drone scans and scans and scans, or rather is operator stares at the small display trying to discern unusual behaviour amongst total nutcases. And he finally finds it! Four men. Three men wearing desert camo like you are and one in a some sort of power armor. It has two weapons on its shoulders. You have to lower it quite low to see details, but one appears to be a grenade launcher and another is machine gun of sort. The man in power armor looks up directly at your drone. He has some things tied over his eyes, like some crazy person wearing random scrap pulled out of radios, but he verry clearly sees you because those weapons mounted on his shoulders swivel around trying to get aim on the drone. Unfortunately he's shielded from your snipers, thanks to walking on roads between two story houses sharing walls with each other. It would make your life much easier if people were walking on rooftops. He's straight north from Recon South. The one closest to him would be the lonely recon south person, 140.94 meters away. By the way, the paranoid sensation is back.
Recon North: You knew few arabic phrases before, but learning entire language via telepathy is something else entirely. You are not even sure if that's possible. Peeking behind the door you lock on first person you see inside and copy as much information related to arabic language as you possibly can without overloading yourself. It... kinda works? You learn more words, maybe enough to carry on simple conversations, but nowhere enough to pull of your ambitious plan. It's murder time after all. All three of you splip in, firing three shots and decapitating four people by teleporting a slice of their neck away. Rest of them react suprisingly fast and take cover behind various wooden furnitures.
Sniper nest: No new targets pop out and beg bullets in their heads. But you spy a mosque 265 meters north with higher roof than other buildings in your immediate vicinity. Right in the direction the psychic insanity inducing guy is going. The very same place near where Recon North is.
Skyhigh: So, two crashed helicopters in west generating pillars of smoke. In area between them about equal distance from both in middle of city block is very fresh dust cloud. Some buildings have collapsed. In north of you and west of the Citadel where you saw dust plumes earlier, is now very fresh and very bright area, about as bright than mid day sun. This didn't exist few seconds ago.
Ah yes, the fiery area I was referring to to helicopter fires in west. Well there's now one budding fire within domain of insanity.
And more thunder from west. You are not certain about this, but you think you saw pair of explosions in north east about two seconds before thunder.
Dangit, Whisperling, I wanted to do this quietly. Now I have to find a new sniping position.
If I can't retro-actively do my action instead of Whisperling's:
Use a drone to speak into the microphone in the language that the speech from the microphone is from:
"You have failed Allah. Now you and your army shall pay for your sins."
Move over to the next-highest building and start over, since Whisperling blew my stealth. Don't forget to recollect the dazzleball on my way out.
In my books that was very quiet operation considering how loud and visible some others are being. Ninja sword is very quiet as are your fists. I'm not fan of retroactively changing stuff considering how long it takes to write these turns.
You have no idea what the language is. Probably something they speak in Saudi-Arabia or wherever this place is. So you say your line in english and leave.
Second best place would be some distance in south, you think you saw a shadow of minaret there. You professionally sneak out without being seen by patrols on outside, climb on roofs, quickly run over and drop down to road in south. The road is mostly east-west direction. In eastern end you spy three men wearing military type desert camo slipping inside a building there. You don't think they saw you. And there's two warm spots on ground on both sides of the door. Blood?
More thundering blasts in west. And something rather bright in north behind all those buildings.
((OUTER GOD SEMPAI NOTICE ME.))
You want to be noticed? Then do what Curious George is doing. I'm not sure if he's still with us or if he ascended faster than others.