Jordan flinched as the tell-tale explosion of a massive rifle sent a shudder down into the pit of her stomach. A soft, sudden gargle was the response, as far as she could hear, and risked climbing again to the lip of the crater to peer at her assailants. She narrowly missed getting clipped by a bullet flying to her right, leaning into her cover and lifting her rifle to the ready. The ominous scuffling of many legs across the dusty landscape echoed in her ringing ears, faintly, and her heart dropped. She could hear Dylan shouting about them, and her hand moved to the bottle of pills at her hip. Her mouth a thin line, she popped open the top, shook a few precious doses into her sweaty palm, and brought them to her mouth. They went down like dollops of ice water. Bullets and blasts rang out over her head, and, with renewed boldness, she looked to the sky, dared to level her rifle at the sound of a clip being shoved into its slot, and fired. A glob of plasma hit the nearest attacker on the non-dominant shoulder, wounding him, but not incapacitating. As the plasma bubbled into his flesh, he screamed and raised his rifle one-handed.

The shot struck her right arm, piercing the leather bracer there and making her jolt and fall off-balance. She stumbled back into cover and leaned against it hard, all but dropping her rifle to cradle her wounded forearm. Her head lifted shakily at the sound of skittering carapace, and found two small Radscorpions a few feet away, crawling toward the scent of blood, their black bodies gleaming in the scorching sun. One of them made a snapping motion for her right leg, and she kicked wildly, grimly jamming the heel of her boot into its face, smashing a few of its eyes and making it weakly pinch at her calf, damaging her leather guards but not yet slicing through. The other narrowly missed stabbing her in the face with its stinger, lodging it in the dirt inches away. With a rushed shove, it was sent on its back, sprawling in the crater and far enough away for Jordan to grab for her rifle. While one rose up, the one she was currently kicking was no longer being kicked, and instead was being melted. She stopped firing when its head had been worn away sufficiently, and before the second scorpion could go for another attack, its tail, followed by its thorax, was coated with molten plasma. Each kickback of her rifle sent an acute agony shooting from her right arm straight to her brain, a volatile cocktail of adrenaline and shock numbing it just enough to let her keep fighting for a few minutes more. Blood dripped into the sand and trickled down the slope of the crater as she shifted to again face her enemies.

A sort of buzz had hit. Her vision grew sharper, colors were clearer, and each bullet that whizzed by above brought with it a cutting stream of rainbows. She glanced over the lip of the crater. The man she’d wounded seemed to have stayed put in cover, and his companions continued to fervently use up their ammo. She could hear them shout among each other at a lull in fire, closer than Dylan or Raphael as she was, but could only make out the sound, and not the content. She let off a few rounds at a promising target, missing but discouraging him from getting out of cover. Her bullet wound was entirely numb now, a spike of unfeeling the only thing she received in response to her rifle’s kick. Two down, and it looked like only three to go.