The viewscreens took a moment to adjust as the storm of plasma erupting from his unit's upraised rifle sputtered and died out. With a snap-hiss of steam, the coolant sinks opened to vent their expended contents, even as the now-empty main canister clattered to the ground. A compartment on the
Corvo's right arm unfolded, connecting with the now-extended ammo belt as a second canister slid smoothly into the now open loading port of the VESPER. Power was already cycling back to the magnetic accelerators, but not fast enough. The swarm would be upon him momentarily, and in his present overextended position, there was no way he could withstand its onslaught alone.
Jerking backward on the controls, Alto gritted his teeth as a shimmering lattice of blue light bent the air between him and the approaching pawns, and an unseen force began to yank him backward, sending the ash-caked grey frame of the
Corvo sliding backward over the rocky terrain with the effortless glide of an ice skater. Not a moment too soon, as, rather than pursuing him, the pawns... split?
"Warning! Multiple incoming high energy signatures detected. Suggest immediate --"The tactical support interface didn't have time to complete its suggestion before
something tore past them at breakneck speeds, sheering effortlessly through the electromagnetic barrier lattice and only narrowly missing a direct impact. The unit's movement suddenly lurched first one way, then the other as Alto frantically tried to adjust the output to compensate for the sudden loss of repulsion on the left hand side -- an only half-intentional maneuver done more out of habit than conscious awareness that probably saved his life as, a moment later, his sensors finally locked in on the unidentified projectiles -- no, the unidentified
entities that had just nearly turned him into a pincushion.
Hostility. Denial. Death. The eye of everything was upon him now, a heavy weight bearing down upon his mind, even as the circling horde darted upward, fanned out, circled, and prepared to descend for another pass.
"That's --""Targets identified as Knight-Class, Designation: Sparrow.""You've gotta be shitting me!"A living guided missile with the destructive yield of an entire warship behind it, condensed into a sphere of perfect erasure. It didn't matter if you were a Constellation, or piloting a cutting edge war machine -- regardless of your defenses, if one of those hit you, then you died -- simple as.
He'd seen them in the sims. He'd been blindsided by them time and time again when he wasn't paying attention. A lone sparrow could spell the untimely end of an otherwise perfect mission. He knew this. He knew it all too well.
He just never thought there'd be a
dozen of the damn things chasing him.
All around him, he sensed pain -- panic -- terror. Damage reports were flashing up from both the veteran's
Grizzly and the rookie's unit. And somewhere in the back of his mind, that manic frenzy his own partner had been giving off just fell off the edge of a cliff. The iron taste of fear was clawing its way up his throat, choking his every breath with the pain he couldn't feel and the dread he couldn't turn away -- even as the everything that was nothing pounded in his ears as though to drown out the racing of his own heart.
As the Knights descended, it was less like the circling of vultures, and more like the closure of a giant hand. Each one in its place, fanning out and then circling in at a precise angle, to cut off any avenue of escape. Retreat was impossible -- even at top speed, he'd never outrun them -- and the Craft system was still recovering from the first near miss.
...So then what if he didn't run?
He jerked the throttle to the right, allowing the good side of his propulsive shielding to face backward, even if it meant leaving his entire unit wide open. Thumbing down on a toggle, he brought up the Corvo's left arm, as the beam blade stored in its wrist compartment folded outward and blazed to life. Then, he gritted his teeth, held down the trigger, and jammed forward on the throttle.
The Corvo's retreat suddenly reversed in its tracks, sending the unit not
away from the descending swarm, but rather
towards it. Trying to adjust to this unexpected maneuver, the Sparrows rapidly decelerated -- which put them right into his sights.
With a rapid series of pop-hisses, the beam emitter let loose a pulsing torrent towards the oncoming swarm. The Sparrows were fast -- but that came at the expense of armor. And when confronted by a weapon they hadn't yet seen, devoid of cover and with their momentum rapidly bleeding out as they tried to slow down, for just a split second, they were easy targets. One lost its wing and went careening off to the side, landing in no man's land and erupting into a destructive conflagration. Another was pierced directly through its chassis and went nova right in the middle of its allies, sending them scattering off course, even as the
Corvo skidded through the now-opened gap in their formation.
But it wasn't enough. As he pivoted his unit mid-slide and tried to keep firing, the remaining ten targets quickly righted themselves, and began to nimbly climb back into the air again, all-too-easily escaping the range of his sidearm and preparing for another dive. To make matters worse, the pawns had already moved in behind him now that he'd once again been forced away from his own ranks.
"Shit, shit, shit...!" He cursed to himself, his eyes darting frantically over the HUD. The craft system was almost recovered -- not that it would protect him from one of those monsters. The VESPER had finished reloading, but he couldn't fire it -- not in this close proximity. What did that leave him?
...Nothing that could shoot down 10 Sparrows, that was what. But maybe, at the very least, there was a way out. He'd figure the rest out after he managed to break from the encirclement!
Flicking another switch, he swapped sensors to infrared. As he thought, with those insane payloads and that ridiculous speed, those Sparrows were burning like stars on his scanners. His own smart missiles might not be fast enough to actually
catch them if they were running, but they'd be able to get a damn good lock!
Prox fuses enabled. All A-EM fields angled downward. Legs braced. VESPER set to maximum dispersal, low speed. He didn't need to hit, just to get close enough to throw them off again.
"Come on, come on, COME ON!"Six target locks. He held down the trigger. Bursting from his unit's back, a fan of six missiles scattered into the air between him and the oncoming rush of Sparrows, then immediately erupted in a canopy of flames as the Knight-class Aberrants fanned out to pull clear of the blast radius. At the same moment, the
Corvo leaped upward, weightless for a single instant as the Craft system poured every ounce of its repulsive force downward, flinging Alto just clear of the swarming pawns that had surrounded him. Then, with a final twist, he pointed the VESPER down at the ground, and thumbed the trigger.
A momentary roar of energy and a flash of light hammered down onto the swarm below, then dispersed just as quickly as the recoil carried him further into the air. Somewhere beneath him, another Sparrow burst, setting off another in a chain of shockwaves. As all the air around the Aberrant was suddenly erased, the air rushed back in to fill the void, yanking his unit downward as the Craft system reached its limit and gravity once again took hold. With one final burst of force, the
Corvo righted itself, its legs carving trenches through the ground as he crashed back to earth and skidded to a stop.
Behind the safety of his own lines?
...No. As Alto toggled his sensors back to radar, nearly blinded by the radiant cloud kicked up by his own all-out counterattack, he realized that for all his efforts to shake the enemy... Between charging into their own ranks to escape the Sparrows' second dive and then launching himself blindly back out, he'd only managed to make it around halfway back to the trenches he had left behind in his initial attempts to buy time.
But he wasn't detecting the Spearman anymore. Did that mean his partner won? Then why couldn't he sense her? No time to think about that. Because despite being thrown off-course by the Sparrows' explosions, there
was now a friendly unit near him -- the battered but unbroken
Grizzly, digging its way with cannonfire out of a mountain of dead pawns. And while his own armaments might have been poorly suited to the task of shooting down those flyers, they'd be more than adequate to cover for his comrade!
The next wave of pawns approaching the downed machine was met with another quick burst from the VESPER, and the stragglers that managed to avoid the worst of it were swiftly cut down by his
Espada as the
Corvo skated alongside Teddy's fallen unit. Opening the comms, he hastily made to warn his allies. There was probably some concise way to describe his current situation -- a Code 33-Alpha or some similarly over-specific designation. But if there was such a convenient shorthand, in his current haze of adrenaline and near-panic, Alto sure as hell couldn't remember it right now. So instead, he settled for the significantly less dignified but significantly more direct method of just yelling into the microphone as fast and as loud as he could.
"Sparrows! A whole flock of the damn things! Eyes up!"
