Jericho, Clad in Psionic armor(Insists on wearing it instead of the titan armor everyone else had in the assault) walked out of the skyranger, the five soldiers with him, Ali Fowler, Axel Axel, Vladimir Dimitri, Patrick Henry and Alexander Hope, follow suit. What lies ahead, nobody knows, however they all know this... People will die. Everyone was prepared. Despite how they were told to wear their normal armors, the commander had titan suits fabricated for Patrick and Hope. They move into the first room, and almost out of nowhere, sectoids and cyberdisks appear. Jericho seems... Calm in this. His eyes glowing the standard purple as they move and take the contacts out... The only injury is Patrick taking a plasma shot to the shoulder. The next room contains a heavy floater and normal floaters. Still the weak enemies they faced during the early days of the invasion. Jericho, yet again, seems calm and his eyes glow. The enemies are dispatched without injury. Then... Chrysallids. These appear the same as the sectoids, however... Jericho ends up taking them all out in the same 'round' as the commander called them. The door up ahead opens as if waiting for them to finish. As they move into the next room, mutons appear. A beserker, an elite and four regulars scatter. Everyone takes cover. Jericho takes a shot, however he brushes it off, summoning an almost hellihs looking singularity over two of them, killing them instantly. Hope however, was caught in it and he suffers a near fatal blow, left with barely any health left. Patrick rushes over, drags him to cover and begins to patch him up while the team advances to a large open room... Jericho's eyes glow once more and... Two Sectopods emerge from the darkness. Vladimir swear and opens fire on the first, damaging it, however it isn't phased. Hope... pushes Patrick away and rushes to cover closer to the sectopods and... And out from the sectopod's 'back' comes a plasma cannon. It nails Hope in the back. His pained cry and breathing are heard before he dies painfully...
Jericho pauses, lowering his sniper and simply stares at the corpse of his friend... The footage couldn't recover the audio due to... Difficulties, however we can clearly see the look of guilt on his face. He is only stopped by the commander's voice on the radio telling him to snap out of it. He sighs and puts his guilt away for a moment and aims his sniper at a sectopod... Moments later, his target is down and he's working on the second one. Fowler runs off to where Patrick is -in cover next to Hope's corpse- and begins suppressing the machine. It fires it's laser... It hits Patrick and he seems to be bleeding from his abdomen. Something must've got him, but we digress. Jericho takes another shot at the machine and it explodes and collapses in a heap. As soon as the fight ends, Jericho rushes over to Hope's corpse and simply stares. He seems to be in deep thought, however the purple glow in his eyes says something else... He moves towards the other end of the room and the others follow. Two elite mutons almost seemingly teleport in and catch Jericho's flanks. Vlad, who was covering Jericho seems to have been told to run and soon after, Jericho seems to be in the middle of using Psionics... moments later, the two mutons are ripped asunder by the same singularity from earlier. Jericho however misjudged the distance it seems and he ended up tearing himself asunder as well, however he's no dead like the mutons. Patrick rushes over once the singularity dissipates and well... Heals him. Jericho pushes him away after the last medkit is used and moves to the door, which stays closed. Fowler gets the bright idea that maybe it's like the last room. He rushes off to the unsearched platform and, truth be told we didn't expect this, finds a muton. Sitting there. Fowler gets pegged in the abdomen and soon he retaliates, the mutons torso a goopy mess soon after. He begins to rush back as the men begin to get into breaching formation. Jericho seems to want Fowler and Axel up front, they seem to be in agreement and head in...
Axel opens the door, or whatever you wish to call the UFO's doors, and fowler and Axel take up positions... However, there's an... Ethereal with a rather ornate head dress. It speaks to them. We're unable to recover the audio here, not because of difficulties, however it's clearly making Jericho a bit angry. He pushes past Vlad and rushes in, pistol drawn. The Ethereal(It shall be referred to as The Royal to avoid confusion.) sees this and raises it's hands. Two elite mutons and two ethereeals appear, ready to fight. Patrick and Vlad rush in and take positions... Patrick on the side of Jericho, Vlad with Fowler and Axel. Jericho Psi Controls an elite muton and it seems pacified in the recording. Vlad and Patrick shoot the second one and soon they're left with the Ethereals. Fowler and Axel go on overwatch to catch the ethereals... However, the end is... Far from what we expected. Patrick and Fowler's eyes glow and, despite assertions that they're 'fine', they look hostile. Vlad rushes over to Jericho and, despite how... Assertive Parker is about being fine... Jericho orders Vlad to shoot. (Sidenote: Normally, onsite CO would fall to Axel, due to his service time, however since Hope's... Outburst after the death of a squaddie, he resigned from onsite CO and put Jericho as the main onsite CO.) Vlad... Hesitates... But in the end, Parker's head ends up splattered against the cover... Jericho pulls his sniper out and aims at an Ethereal... He fires and it seems mainly unphased by it. Jericho curses and yells at Vlad to get up to a higher level while he takes care of things. Vlad nods and rushes up a ramp and aims at Fowler... Fowler fires at Jericho... Jericho's arm is hit and the heavy plasma seems to have... Burnt through his armor. His arm is clearly visible and look fairly burned. Third degree /at least/. Jericho chuckles as he runs up next to Vlad... He summons another singularity on Fowler and he is torn asunder, his body bleeding heavily. Axel seems to be in pain as well, however he's alive...
The Royal looks at Axel and raises a hand. Axel's eyes glaze over and it's revealed he'd been mind controlled... Jericho sighs and aims at The Royal and prepares to fire... It looks in his direction and raises a hand, however he's able to kill it before it could do whatever... Jericho smiles as the other Ethereals in the room die. (Sidenote: It seems the transcripter forgot something. The muton Psi Controlled was Psi-Lanced as the researchers called it.) The room however begins shaking... He looks Vlad and the now free Axel and raises a hand... The two are pushed out the door and metal debris is down over it and it is shut completely. The two make a bee line for the skyranger, however that's not the intriguing part... Jericho makes his way to the other Ethereal device in the room... As the room's shaking intensifies, his eyes glaze over... After recovering, he... Puts his hands on the orb and the violent spiking of it slows. Using footage put together from cameras in the XCOM HQ, we can see that the ship seems to be moving into the atmosphere... The researcher on duty tells us that it would've become like a black hole. The ship, she says, was behaving like a dying star. Regardless, the feed on Jericho's suit is cut off by now, however, it's not needed. The ship explodes moments later, shaking the entirety of earth and raining metal debris into the ocean... The two surviving soldiers arrive back at XCOM HQ at 1350 hours. Their cameras cut off by now. We are left to the XCOM HQ cameras... We can piece together a funeral held for those that died in the machine. Their names, added to the memorial wall, are held higher than others. Pictures of them are adorned with the medal of honor. The Council agrees that XCOM has served us well. The men and women that served today will be remembered for their actions. *Council report end.*
Recovered from a steam chat.
Newcom's ending felt /badass/. The build up was nice. I didn't even savescum for deaths
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Topic: How did you last *own*? (Read 1344396 times)