Circa 1700 hours on day 106 of the apocalypse, a squad of seven ard individuals moved through the eastern side of Brighthaven City, carrying both futuristic and regular firearms in what seed to be a light exploration formation designed to minimize exposure and boost movent speed.
Spearheading the group was Corporal Sharp, a Marine man-at-arms with a long-barreled Blazer rifle made for long-range firing and calibrated for maximum damage per shot. To his left and right were Sergeant Elena Skarn of the 223rd Venus Auxiliary Squad and acting Commander Adam Clay, civilian commander of the new, stranded Solarium front on Planet Earth.
Privates Buzz, Biscuits, and Hamrhead, along with civilian asset Kave, followed the formation in two separate groups, covering the rear, with the entire group moving from cover to cover, coordinating their movents to cover blind spots beyond their cover.
Corporal Sharp halted the group's movent with a fist signal followed by two fingers pointed forward, indicating the presence of an unidentified contact at 12 o'clock.
"Scout team to base, entering sector 31/44. Encountering UCs."
Whispering into his radio gear, Private Buzz gave a report to base.
"Acknowledged, Scout team. No anomalous readings or radio signals from your sector on our terminals… limited as they are." From the other end, Private Dusty, tasked with the base's terminal operations, relayed his reading.
Private Buzz made an O-sign with his hand for Sergeant Elena, and in turn, she ducked her head and approached Corporal Sharp, who was looking through his scope.
"Your estimate, Sharp. What do you see?" she asked.
"Sothing moved. Human, most likely." Sharp replied.
Joining them, Adam took the other side of Sharp.
"Anything special about them?" he asked.
"No, only a glimpse." Sharp replied before his eyes suddenly sharpened, before hissing: "Cover!"
All heads lowered in a heartbeat, with Sharp and Hamrhead pushing down Adam and Kave respectively, as their reflexes were far from those of the n-at-arms.
"Multiple hostiles." Sharp said, and with a morbid look in his eyes, he added: "Xenos!"
"Sol guide us!" Sergeant Skarn's eyes went bloodshot as she tightened her grip on her large Blazer pistol and looked at Adam.
"Green, small, nurous?" Adam asked Sharp.
Without looking at the commander or blinking, Sharp gave a short nod.
"Gobzkins!" Adam concluded. "They must have been chasing a survivor."
"No, they went in opposite directions." Sharp denied the possibility.
"Then we don't know what is going on. We can't stay in the open. If a group of Gobzkins is nearby, another is close behind." Adam said.
"To the spires, then. Alleys will be our last option."
Sergeant Elena gave the command, and she gave two hand signals to the other four soldiers: one for "close ranks" and the other to prepare for combat.
The best buildings to use were the partially destroyed ones, as monsters preferred to stay in the enclosed environnts of intact buildings for nesting and ambushing. While partially destroyed buildings offered only temporary shelter, their open nature gave urban beings like humans the ho advantage of knowing how to navigate such environnts.
The first building they entered seed like a fancy office building with most of its lobby lying in rubble, as if it had been hit by a hurricane. The stairway was still intact, but the elevators seed to have overflowed with skeletons from the first day of the apocalypse.
With every corner covered and secured, Adam was advancing steadfastly along with his companions, but the one who was lagging behind and had to be pushed ahead a couple of tis was Kave, as this was all new to him.
The dragon's attack on his suburban district was a tragic scene, undoubtedly, but the deaths and suffering that covered the area around him were truly diabolical to witness.
He thought that there was nothing as bad as the dragon that had laid waste to his ho, but seeing a skeleton or a corpse at every corner weighed heavily on his mind and sent shivers down his spine.
The gravity of the situation was that 19 out of every 20 people who had ever lived four months ago were killed. Humanity was dwindling by the minute, as the monsters had now inherited the Earth.
This was a mass extinction event, a genocide of the human race, the end of the fucking world, plain and simple.
He gripped his chest a few tis, but seeing Adam, soone he was certain he could have physically overpowered 107 days earlier, walking around with coldness and composure, almost scared Kave for the first ti.
Even his demons and unicorns wouldn't dare ss with the incredible psyche of soone like Adam.
"Corner… Corner!"
The voice of Hamrhead woke Kave from his daze, forcing him to take a step beyond the corner, his rifle aid up, before giving Hamrhead the "clear."
"Don't lose focus on , boy." Hamrhead seed upset with Kave, but the latter only accepted it and followed the veteran's lead.
The group managed to clear five stories before the building beca too exposed to serve the purpose they were after. Sharp took the lead and arrived at the edge of the building, using his scope to survey the monster movents.
"Will we set up a position?" Elena approached Sharp and asked.
"No, sir. The monsters' movents are too chaotic. I can't read any of it." Sharp replied, frowning.
"May I?"
Adam asked for Sharp's scope to see what he was seeing, giving him the chance to add his input to the situation analysis.
Sharp handed over the scope reluctantly, allowing Adam to observe for a minute before frowning and giving the scope back to Sharp.
"Commander?"
Sergeant Elena urged Adam to speak, but he waited until he processed his thoughts.
"There's a fight between monsters." he said.
"Territory fighting?" she asked.
"How would I know?" Adam shrugged before continuing, "Gobzkins have clear markings of territory; Hosts rely infect the area around them with their stench. Other types of monsters are mostly solitary, so unless it's a monster caught in a trap, Gobzkins wouldn't act like that."
The situation felt unfamiliar to both the n-at-arms and to Adam. The n-at-arms had never faced any of these monsters yet, so they didn't have enough intel on them beyond Adam's testimonies. Adam, on the other hand, had actively survived by avoiding monsters, not by chasing them out.
"Hamrhead." Sergeant Elena called for the team's auxiliary, who ca to her while maintaining a low posture.
"Sir."
"How far is the distance between these spires and the next one?" she asked.
"They're close. So spires have alleys, but they connect in places."
"Mark them, we'll open up so walls, but we need to do so quietly."
"Yes, sir."
Hamrhead began moving imdiately, and Sergeant Elena started preparing her gear for the upcoming process.
"Are you doing what I think you're doing?" Adam asked.
"Yes, Commander." she replied without turning to him.
"Breaking the walls between buildings will attract monsters." Adam protested with a serious look on his face.
"Don't worry, sir. We'll use precision destruction. That's why I brought Hamrhead." Sergeant Elena replied nonchalantly.
"Precision destruction?" Adam frowned and turned to Kave, who also shrugged. "Never heard of that," Adam said.
"You didn't?" Taken aback, Sergeant Elena looked with a single raised brow at the two n who knew all the Standard Solarium Tactics in the finest detail before saying: "That's new."
The two seed rather curious, but no matter how many tis they asked, Sergeant Elena savored the mont she finally got those two 'nerds' all excited about sothing they didn't know as she waited for Hamrhead to report back with his findings.
Once Hamrhead led the group to a wall in a fancy office restroom, he aid his rifle, switched it to Auxiliary Mode, and began firing intense beams at the wall, creating holes a foot apart, outlining what appeared to be a doorway.
He then cleared the way for Sergeant Elena, who stood before his work and put her bionic arm's hand against the wall very gently, and closed her eyes.
"What's she doing?" Adam curiously asked Hamrhead.
"Standard Solarium Tactics, Auxiliary Chapter: Precision Destruction." Hamrhead replied with a wide grin before pointing and saying, "Watch and learn, Commander."
Sergeant Elena was still simply putting her chanical hand against the wall, but suddenly, the arm that was powered with a power cell emitting Blazer energy started to radiate, its inner servos rotating and the hydraulic pistons stretching beyond the limits of the bionic arm, causing its outer shell parts to move apart, as if the arm itself were bulging. As the internal pressure reached a critical point…
"HA!"
… Sergeant Elena pushed her body ahead and released all the built-up compression inside the arm.
Without further theatrics, the chanical hand of the bionic arm snapped shut with an unimaginable force, sending tremors through the wall as it crushed a chunk of the wall to smithereens. Suddenly, the part of the wall inside the doorway Hamrhead had highlighted with holes all ca apart in small chunks, leaving nothing but an open way to the building next door.
Adam and Kave looked at the newly made doorway, created in less than a minute and without causing any significant ruckus or attracting any monster attention: no explosives, no sledgehamrs, and no noise.
Kave was truly impressed, but Adam hit his shoulder and said:
"Bro, imagine…"
"What?"
Adam held up a soft chunk of broken debris from the ground and crushed it with his hand before replying:
"Your balls."
The re thought sent shivers through Kave's spine and made him sweat profusely as he looked at the casual smile on Sergeant Elena's face. Being her willing boy-toy, such horror would now haunt him as a potential occupational hazard to the end of his days.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
As the group moved into the next building, the process of opening walls continued, causing little or no attention from the squabbling hordes of monsters in the streets.
This process was repeated until the group reached a certain building with a spacious entrance lobby that had no lighting, as there were not many windows on the top floor, and the ones that were there seed to have been sealed by sothing.
Right away, Adam realized that they must have wandered into a monster's den, and he was absolutely correct.
Hundreds of spiderwebs hung from all corners of the building, causing a state of utter confusion to spread through the ranks of the scouting team.
With such a space and number of webs, the estimate that crossed the minds of every mber of the team was either a truly gigantic spider monster or a swarm of spiders that weren't giants per se but still large enough to make a grown man soil his pants and faint at the sight of them.
No one dared to speak, or even breathe aloud, and they were all grateful that whatever monstrosity was lying there wasn't aggressive enough to jump them on sight… or at least not yet.
Sergeant Elena looked at Corporal Sharp, who took the lead, carefully stepping past the webs until he reached a balcony looking down into the entrance.
A gust of air stirred just as he looked down into the entrance lobby, carrying the decaying stench of a thousand corpses lying mingled all over the ground floor. Green bodies, grey bodies, pale bodies, animal bodies: all of it ford what seed to be a mass grave, clearly visible to those looking from above, yet masked from the view of the building's entrance.
The entrance had been left innocently open, shedding sunlight onto the horrific scene below. The spider(s) seed surrounded by an array of spiderwebs designed specifically to funnel any prey foolish enough to wander through.
Corporal Sharp was a sniper, a sharpshooter who earned his nickna for the mounds of Rogue Deathbots, Demonic Spawns, Eldritch Hivers, and Heretical Cultists he had to put down. To him, being such an excellent hunter compelled him to contemplate his hunts, perched at the best spot he could get to watch and admire his own art, before the cycle of rot took its turn and the warm blood dried out on the ground.
This made him think: for such a glorious view, from which angle would its many-eyed artist sit to admire it?
The answer was clear, simple, and horrific, all at once. After all, Sharp was looking at this art from the best possible angle.
Slowly, he looked up.
Slowly, he stepped back.
Carefully, he moved his lips.
"Contact!"
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