“There’s our boss fight!” Gabriel shouted as he gunned down another target.
The Swarm-possessed Ogilvy raised a fist and let out a piercing scream that no Human vocal chords could mimic, causing the remaining Enthralled to freeze up as if in a trance. The possessed Ogilvy pointed at the squad, and the Faithful charged, howling with fanatical fury as they rushed forward to tear the squad limb from limb.
This was an altogether different enemy. The Faithful screamed hysterical oaths as they attacked, all sense of self-preservation erased by whatever the Swarm had done to their minds. Some of them kept their weapons in hand, firing madly in the general direction of the squad. Others dropped their weapons in a mad rush to bring their bare hands to bear.
The squad sprayed bullets on full automatic, mowing down as many as they could. The front ranks of fanatics crumpled and fell, but the ranks behind simply charged on forwards, literally tripping over one another to get their hands on the squad and tackle them to the ground. Gabriel’s weapon was knocked out of his hands as a dozen enthralled fighters pounced on him, dragging him down to the floor and trying to beat him to death.
Being assaulted by a fanatical swarm pounding away at nigh-invulnerable armour was a bizarre experience. Gabriel flailed ferociously, swinging his fists and kicking violently at his attackers. He felt his foot connect with someone’s gut, and the combat claws on his left gauntlet punctured someone else’s neck. But this was hardly standard combat; it was a frenzied brawl, with his assailants’ knuckles turning red as they beat their fists bloody against his armour.
A rifle butt connected with Gabriel’s helmet and he swung his arm around in retaliation, swatting the weapon out of his attacker’s hands and upper cutting him with his armoured fist. His helmet protected him, but amidst the pounding and brawling the next weapon could be one of the jumpers’ xenotech swords, and he wouldn’t survive a wound from a weapon like that.
“SHIELD, OVERPULSE, NOW!” Gabriel enunciated into his helmet’s mic.
His armoured suit’s onboard computer registered the voice command and triggered the over-pulse mechanism. Instead of merely halting or redirecting incoming projectiles away from the armour, the shield emitters could also emit a one off repulsive field, forcibly pushing nearby matter away in all directions as a defensive last resort.
The over-pulse violently threw the attacking mob skywards in a spectacular cloud of flying and flailing bodies. Because Gabriel was on his back, the over-pulse pushed against the floor beneath him, launching him straight up into the air along with his attackers as if he had been bounced into the sky by an enormous trampoline.
A warning flashed in Gabriel’s HUD – the over-pulse had temporarily shorted out his shield emitters – but he was more concerned about falling back to the ground. As he ran out of momentum, he felt inertia tug his innards the other way as gravity pulled him back down again. Gabriel grabbed a flying body in mid-air and twisted around, hoping to break his fall with the body of the flailing foot soldier.
It worked.
The Enthralled’s body hit the hard floor of the platform, breaking Gabriel’s fall and the Enthralled’s back with a sickeningly audible crack. As Gabriel rolled away, he rose to his feet in the same motion and drew the xenotech sword from his back. He flicked the switch to activate the energy field, and looked around for the Swarm-possessed Ogilvy.
Another black widow appeared to confront him, and Gabriel swung the blade at her. She ducked and swung her baton around to strike the back of his knee before jabbing the electrified tip into his shoulder. The million volt jolt shorted out the motors in Gabriel’s suit again, triggering more warnings in his HUD as his armour suddenly felt ten times heavier.
Gabriel swung his sword around in a defensive arc as he crumpled to the floor, slicing clean through the black widow’s body in mid-pounce and instantly cauterising her flesh. Part of her chest and shoulder fell to the ground and her upper half twitched for a few seconds before the trauma of being bisected killed off her mind.
Still holding the sword, Gabriel rose to his feet with great effort whilst the exoskeletal motors in his armour recovered. He was strong enough to move without assistance, but the entire suit weighed more than 50kg, making it difficult to move with speed or agility. That fact almost proved fatal as yet another jumper came at him with a sword of his own, aiming for his head. Gabriel raised his own sword to block the attack just in time.
When the two energised blades connected, they rebounded from one another in a spectacular flash, releasing a metallic keening sound. Gabriel stumbled backwards from the clash just as the motors in his suit rebooted, whilst the preternaturally agile jumper performed a backward roll before righting himself again and charging at Gabriel a second time.
Swordsmanship wasn’t taught in the military, but with his exoskeletal motors restored, Gabriel could make up for lack of technique by moving at least as fast as his opponent and swinging with much more force. Using the swords’ rebounding effect to his advantage, Gabriel deliberately swung at the jumper’s own sword, forcing him onto the defensive before closing in and driving the tip of his sword through the jumper’s faceplate.
As his opponent keeled over dead, Gabriel looked around and saw that the over-pulse had scattered the Faithful all over the chamber, with many of them falling to their deaths. Their broken bodies lay scattered across the platform, some stirring with agonising effort, hardly able to move due to their injuries, but mostly immobile and lifeless.
His squad members’ bio-readings were all still visible in his HUD and green, but they had been thrown clear by the over-pulse. Besides, with an antimatter bomb behind his waist and a possessed former squad member to kill, he couldn’t worry about them now.
Gabriel turned around and saw one of the Enthralled who had survived the over-pulse pointing a gun at him. In fact, it was his gun: the LMG knocked out of his hands during the brawl, now being pointed at him by an enemy grinning triumphantly even as he strained to hold the enormous weapon aloft. Gabriel didn’t try to take cover or even move as the enthralled foot soldier took aim at him and pulled the trigger.
Without Gabriel’s DNA, or the array of biometric transmitters in his gauntlet to relay that information, the gun wouldn’t fire. Instead, a set of microneedles, each as thin as a Human hair, punctured the target’s skin, injecting a cocktail of specially-designed nanobots into his hand which began rapidly killing off nearby cells, before retracting again.
Gabriel deactivated his sword’s energy field, replacing it on its magnetic sheath before approaching his foolish enemy. The enthralled foot solider could do nothing but stand there with a look of horror and agony frozen on his face as his blood vessels slowly turned black from the nanotechnological venom flowing through them.
Gabriel carefully detached the man’s rigid fingers from the handle of the gun and took back his service weapon. By that point, the deadly serum of nanobots had completely paralysed the man’s muscles, leaving him as still as a statue. Gabriel didn’t deign to put the man down, multiple organ failure would do that for him.
Gabriel turned around and was immediately struck in the chest by an armoured forearm. He caught a glimpse of a whirring cloud of particles around the armoured figure of Ogilvy as he went tumbling head over heels back across the floor. Even with a bionic exoskeleton, there was no way Ogilvy should have been strong enough to bring that much force to bear.
Gabriel’s armour protected him from being winded, let alone actual injury, but it was pretty clear he wouldn’t stand much of chance in a hand-to-hand fight. He scrambled back to his feet and prepared a high-powered shot, taking aim at the gravity belt around Ogilvy’s waist and squeezing the trigger.