Date Point: 3Y 08M 4W 1D 5H AV
Beam of Hope Colony
When Maxim had told him that these weren’t your regular PG ammunition, Sergei didn’t payed too much attention to him. Besides, how often would he be needing to use an infantry anti-tank weapon in space?
He’d hoped to break confusion on the Hunters’ ranks with a rocket, and then approach them with gunfire to finish them off.
He’d certainly didn’t expect the 50 ugly bastards to almost disappear in a fucking ball of fire.
It was glorious, though.
After descending with a single jump from the roof where he ambushed the Hunters, Sergei finished off the one that was still breathing with a shot to the chest from his modified APS rifle.
He could make out the shape of the Hunter ships against the blue planet that was covering half the sky, and he knew that it wasn’t going to take much longer for the full-fledged invasion force to arrive.
As if reading his mind, the first boarding pods started raining down on the town, making a dreadful noise when they momentarily disrupted the forcefields that kept the atmosphere in place.
This time they were playing it smart. They were landing the pods in a seemingly random pattern and then keeping their groups of five, doing a sweep of the station.
Sergei was hiding observing one of these groups, and he noticed that one of the five Hunters was different from the rest. It had more metal than flesh on its body, and the face had so many modifications that it looked like if it was wearing a helmet. Or maybe it really was a helmet, who knew.
But what caught his attention the most, was the weapon mounted on the Hunter’s shoulder. It wasn’t a nerve-jam grenade launcher like the one he ripped out of Misha. It looked bigger and more menacing, like some cannon of sorts, and it was making a strange sound, as if it were a giant microwave oven.
He finished preparing his Dragunov sniper rifle, intending to see what these new ‘Robo-Hunters’ were made of. He aimed for its head, and fired.
The head was ripped-off clean from the body, and the angle of the shot made for the bullet to follow its trajectory and hit another of the more standard Hunters, which pretty much exploded from the impact.
But Robo-Hunter was still on its feet, headless and moving spasmodically. It fell with its chest facing the ground, and then the microwave sound stopped. The shoulder-mounted weapon fired straight at the floor with an intense blue light, and Sergei had to cover his eyes from the blinding flash. He was easily 50 meters away from the Hunters, but he felt some of the scorching heat himself.
When he finally was able to look at the scene again, there was nothing left. No Hunters, no blood. Just a black stain on the floor, and some burning rests of machinery.
“I really need to look out for this Robo-fuckers” Thought Sergei as he moved out of there.
Date Point: 3Y 08M 4W 1D 5H AV
Original mine foundation
When the first two Hunters appeared on the ramp, Mugyiu felt as if his throat was made out of stone. One of the two Kwmbwrws in the squadron just dropped his weapon and ran for it.
The squad leader had to act fast.
“Come on people, the one on the left! FIRE!”
The team of defenders fired their weapons, with a slightly worst aim than before. But that fact proved to be playing in their favor, as some of the stray shots hit the Hunter on the right, finishing the two of them before they even had time to react.
“Yes! We can do this! There are two more coming, be ready!”
The other two Hunters shared a similar fate as their companions, but one of them had time to fire a heavy pulse to one of the Rauwryhrs, killing her instantly.
“Stay sharp, there’s one more of them coming!”
The last Hunter was widely covered in metal, with a big weapon mounted on its shoulder. The weapon was emitting a noise that transported Mugyiu to his days as a cub in Gao, when he was learning the basics of plasma reactions… Wait. That’s a plasma weapon!
“FIRE!! Now!! Don’t let it use its cannon!”
The concentrated kinnetic pulse hit the armored Hunter, which fell to the ground just in time for it’s plasma cannon to fire on the ceiling, releasing an enormous amount of heat.
The Hunter was heavily burnt, but alive, and in the process of standing up again.
“Don’t let it get up, fire!!”
They kept firing for a while, until it was certain that the monster wasn’t going to stand up again, and then some more.
They had just killed 5 Hunters, including one that seemed literally unstoppable, against one loss for their side. Maybe they really could win this fight.
“Alright team! That was incredible, but let’s not lower our guard just yet. Let’s be ready for more incoming Hunters. It is crucial that we don’t let the metal ones fire their plasma cannons, or we are done!”
The squadron mounted guard, as ready as it would ever be, while Mugyiu thought about what the human might be up to.
“Would you hurry Ser-hai? I don’t know how much we’ll be able to hold them off.”
Date Point: 3Y 08M 4W 1D 5.7H AV
Sewer service tunnels
Sergei Pavlovich was a large man, but for the standards of most alien species, he was tiny. That’s why he chose the mostly unserviceable -unless you belonged to one of the smaller races, such as Gaoians- sewer ducts to move through the facility, getting out just for enough time to ambush a group of Hunters, destroy them, and then continue his sweep of the station.
In this low gravity, Sergei was able to carry an almost complete arsenal with relative ease. He had a big backpack full of different firearms, the modified RPG-7, and their respective ammunition. Sixteen fragmentation grenades clipped to his uniform, and his two P-96 pistols holstered on his sides, along with a fusion sword.
For these in and out incursions, he’d opted for the much more powerful AK-103 assault rifle, which cut down through the groups of five Hunters in mere seconds, even the metal-covered ones.
But he was beginning to get tired. In one instance when he poked his head through a ‘manhole’ cover, he was greeted by a Hunter just a few meters from him, and before he’d had time to fire his weapon, the Hunter shot him right in the face with its heavy pulse cannon.
Sergei fell inside the sewer again with his nose broken, almost fainted. he clumsily crawled through the duct just in time to avoid getting caught on a ball of plasma that was shot through the manhole, but not fast enough for him not to receive some burns on the more exposed parts of his body.
Sergei ran to safety as fast as he could, and sat in a deeper tunnel to catch his breath, glad that the plasma didn’t manage to ignite one of the PG grenades. His head hurt like hell, and he didn’t know how much more beatings like this he could bear. Maybe none.
After a while he got up and started walking, following the map on his datapad towards the foundational mine. If he was going to die, at least he wanted to go defending these people, if they really were still alive.
The only problem was that in order to do that, he was going to have to eventually get out of the sewer ducts and onto the main promenade, were he was going to be in an extremely vulnerable position.
Well, maybe he’d already killed enough of these buggers for it to make the job a little easier…. A man could dream.
When he eventually reached a service entrance, which connected to the main hall where the ramp that went to the old mine was placed, Sergei took a few minutes to prepare his strategy.
He didn’t know what he was going to find on the other side, but he did know that Hunters were slow, and their reflexes were shit.
He decided to resort to shock and awe.
Sergei readied his assault weapon, climbed up the ladder, and jumped out to the promenade with the intention of starting running and screaming, ready to bring hell to his enemies.
What he saw brought him to a halt.
The Hunters were once again amassing near the ramp, undoubtedly with the intention of storming the old mine all at once and overwhelm the defenders. And there were a lot of them. But that at least meant there were still defenders inside!
They hadn’t seen Sergei, who quickly took in hiding behind the corner of a food store.
“They must have given me up for dead,” thought Sergei. “Big mistake.”
He took out the safety pin of one of his rockets, and loaded it onto his RPG-7.
He then got round the corner, aiming the weapon at the army of Hunters as fast as he could, and fired.
The ensuing explosive hellfire engulfed dozens of Hunters at once, and without delay, Sergei dropped the RPG-7 and took out his AK-103 once again, immediately starting to fire while running towards the hellish army.
There were still easily a hundred of them, and they started responding with kinetic pulse fire right away, coupled with the odd plasma discharge from time to time.
But Sergei was running in zigzag as randomly as he could, and his great speed made for the Hunters to have a really hard time when aiming their shots. Not to mention the confusion the sudden explosion had brought to their ranks.
They were literally being blown to pieces by the 7.62×39mm rounds, and their numbers were quickly decreasing.
When Sergei finally arrived to the Hunter army, he unloaded his last magazine on them, with not enough time to bring out another rifle.
He quickly took out his pistols, killing the last of the robo-Hunters with three shots to the head, and receiving in the process four kinetic pulses to the chest, which cracked up some of his ribs.
He shook it off and continued firing on the rest, until he was out of bullets and had to draw his fusion sword.
This was a very lucky occurrence, because at that point, some of the Hunters started firing nerve-jam discs on him, which he started repelling with the fusion blade.
But just before dying with a severed torso, one of the Hunters managed to launch a nerve-jam disc in an odd trajectory, which landed the deadly grenade on the floor, four meters behind Sergei.
It went off, submerging him in a flash of deep, incredible pain like he had never felt before, his muscles twitching in a mild seizure.
He knew that if he didn’t react, then this was it.
His mind wasn’t working properly, and all he could think of was getting up, completely unarmed, and launching himself at the 11 hunters that were still standing, like a rabid bear fighting a pack of wolves.
He landed on the first Hunter feet first, crushing it into the floor with a splatting noise, and he continued by bashing together the heads of two others, which turned into a pulp in his hands.
He punched, smashed, kicked, even bite at the Hunters with a blind rage, receiving kinetic pulses at all times.
When he finally came to his senses, he found himself standing on a disgusting pile of shattered flesh, with no live Hunter on sight.
Sergei fell to his knees, his body so numb from all the blows that he couldn’t feel anything, but he knew that that couldn’t be a good sign.
He looked up at the Hunter ships still hovering above the moon’s sky.
He could have swore he could make out new invading pods coming from the main ship in the distance, ready to resume their planned invasion as if nothing had happened at all.
“You bastards! Come on, let’s get this over with!” Shouted Sergei, with defeat in his voice.
At that precise moment, as if there was a God who had being watching the battle and decided to intervene, there was an orange flash of light in the sky, and the main Hunter ship was broken in two parts.
It took some time for Sergei to make out what was happening:
The flagship had been rammed by a huge Celzi cruiser, which literally had torn it apart, replacing it as the main feature in the night sky.
Sergei was dumbfounded by the event, unable to make sense of what he was seeing.
At that moment his datapad made a beeping sound, reproducing a general broadcast from a familiar voice:
“Comrade Sergei Pavlovich, are you there? Captain Lyapunov here.
We intended to pay you a visit, see how you were doing. Not very well I reckon.”
Sergei was too astonished to answer.
“Don’t worry, we’ve got this. There are 40 Hunter pods descending upon the station.
I’m dispatching some of the boys to help you with that.” Maxim informed him.
“I will stay up here taking care of the skies.
It will be just like old times. Lots of fun!”