X op: reaperfall I wanted to try something different to give all my boys a moment and ended up having a little too much fun with it. If it steps on any toes, feel free to ignore. Kept other char mentions vague to allow for own manovering - just in case it looks like I’m not spreading the love. sorta long, sorry. I have too many oc’s lol
--
“Wait, what’s happening?” Luca lifted his hands off the console and swore under his breath as the kit beeped softly in protest. “We just lost the connection.”
“Fucking move,” Kio snarled, shoving Luca out of the way. His hands ran over the holographic keys, entering commands as his face twisted into a grimace. “Shit. Shit! Nothing’s fucking happening, that’s fucking what!”
Luca was studying the readouts over his shoulder, even as Kiosho continued to work. “There!” He jabbed his finger at one of the crackling images. “They’re jamming us. Fuck, Ki, they’re jamming us. This is changes everything.”
“Not inspiring a lot of confidence here, boys,” Archer’s gravely mutter came from nearby. Luca quickly tapped his ear to activate his com as Kiosho’s fingers continued to fly, desperately trying to find a work around.
“Cap,” Luca said softly, his stomach sinking. “We’re gonna need a new plan.”
--
They conferred in the shadow of the ridge, keeping out of sight. The phoenix had toned down the bright shades of their armor, a curious little tech ability Luca hadn’t known existed and was determined to investigate in detail later. Mason, Isaac and the Major all wore identical tense expressions.
“So what are you saying exactly, Lieutenant?”
Luca didn’t let Isaac’s stiff tone bother him. He knew this wasn’t his adopted dad talking to him right now, this was the paladin, the captain. Kiosho shifted unhappily beside him but Luca didn’t spare the time to look at him.
“We need to inject the code manually,” Luca said, even as the thought of what laid ahead made his stomach want to turn to water. “We need to get inside the processing facility. Physically, uh. Hook it up-“
Isaac’s eyes closed briefly, thinking. At his side, Mason’s eyes narrowed and he glanced over Luca’s shoulder at the phoenix in the distance.
“We’ll get you in,” he said quietly. He shifted his gaze to Isaac. “All of you.”
--
Kiosho probably would have relished the mad dash through a haze of biotic eruptions, teleports and exploding bits of flying reaper tech if he hadn’t been trying so fucking hard to keep up. Luca was ahead of him, helmeted head down with the kit on his back, shadowing the fury and the paladin as they moved in the wake of the phoenix up ahead.
“You okay, big bro?” Luca’s voice sounded in his ear. The fucker barely sounded winded. Kiosho suddenly regretted blowing off so many of the training sessions Luca had tried to pull him into. It had been far more entertaining watching Luca’s ass get beat by Hurricane, Harris or his commander than it had been to cop a walloping himself, but now he wished he hadn’t been so slack.
“Don’t fucking worry about me-“ he wheezed, heart pumping. There was a boom beside him and he saw a smashed up overturned car come flying in his direction, only to be swatted out of the way like it was nothing by Sabre’s biotic lash. “Shit, thank-”
The modulated command out of the helmet was sharp and left no time for niceties. “Keep moving!” Sabre barked.
“Yeah, fuck. I’m going as fast as I can.”
“Almost there,” Luca’s voice sounded in his ear again. “Come on, bro. I need you on this.”
Kiosho put his head down and ran faster.
--
The processing centre was as gruesome as Mason had expected it to be, and then some. The filters on his armor churned overtime but he was still hit with the absolute stench of death and decay as they slipped into the opening Nico had nova’d right through the exterior wall moments ago. The vanguard was breathing hard behind his helmet and Mason motioned with one hand, issuing the command to move back then sending Enzo and Ben in to scout ahead.
“Take rear-guard, Zeus. You’re close to being out of juice. You need to cooldown.”
“Yeah,” Nico grunted, hanging by the door as the rest of them filed through.
Mason felt Eva before he saw her, the flickering dark death cloud swirling around her as she stood guard between the two engineers. Mason couldn’t see Luca and Kio’s faces behind their helmets but he could hear the nerves in their whispered tones.
Luca had his wrist up, his omnitool glowing.
“Where to, k- Lieutenant,” Mason corrected himself at the last second.
“Straight ahead, then four levels down. We… we need to get underground.”
Fuck. Mason didn’t want to think about how that was going to complicate their escape route. He glanced at the fury, wishing he could see her face between the eerie face plate. He’d always been disturbed by the Fury’s armor, but he supposed that was the point.
“Lead the way,” he said to the engineer, even as the tell-tale sound of biotic collisions and the shriek of a banshee made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “We’ll stick close.”
Luca nodded and Mason heard the sharp inhalation of his breath to steady himself crackle in his ear. The fury clasped the engineer’s shoulder briefly then they were moving forward into the blood soaked hallways.
--
Enzo was in his element in the labyrinth of corridors in the processing centre. He moved quickly, blinking from spot to spot, drawing up and peeling out shreds of his biotic energy to keep his form tenuous and using the heavy blast of his hand canon to take out what his fists and feet couldn’t.
Husks, cannibals, marauders, even the banshees – they were less than nothing and he disposed of them with an efficiency drilled into him by years on the Cerberus treadmill.
And each crack, each blast, each bone shattering crunch and howl, left him feeling nothing. Just a mindless machine, killing, destroying, tearing asunder, until a tiny flicker in the back of his mind asked what made him any different to the husk’s with the glowing eyes that stared him down in the heartbeat he flicked out his whips and ripped their heads from their frames.
He felt nothing, right up until he did.
“Oh, fuck. Oh… oh gods, what… what is this?”
It was one of the engineers that wheezed it through the comms, at Enzo’s back as he stood in the wide doorway. They’d reached the heart of the facility, but what they found wasn’t the command centre like they had expected, instead they’d found something entirely different. Dragons teeth, but even more horrifyingly brutal.
“Kalahira,” the other one said, Ollie’s friend with his pack on his back, Enzo dimly noted. “They’re… Fuck, they’re still alive? Is… Fuck, is that right, is that… Oh, gods, it moved, they’re moving- We have to help them!”
Enzo’s armored palm slapped against the centre of the engineer’s chest, stopping him from moving any closer.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
His soft noise of protest was lost under the horrified gasps and shudders of the the others.
“You don’t want to see this,” Enzo said quietly.
The engineer didn’t move any closer but Enzo could hear his choppy breathing through the com. He strode forward, staring up at the misshapen shapes, once humans, once normal, everyday people going about their ordinary, normal mundane lives, only for the reapers to show up and be turned into… this.
One of them, grey skin, dull grey blood trickling down their chest turned it’s head. The eyes were still human and it wheezed, a wet, sticky sound that sent the engineer behind him bolting for the corner. He ripped off his helmet, and retched loudly onto the floor.
Enzo was barely aware of them doing it when the other phoenix fell into step beside him. He wasn’t alone as he walked around the room, dispatching the still twitching bodies with merciful crunches of bone or a blast to the temple. There wasn’t any helping these folk, they were too far gone under the reapers clutches, and as difficult as it was for them, Enzo didn’t let himself think how much worse it must have been for the captain.
These were his people after all.
When the grizzly job was done, Enzo circled back to the engineer. His helmet was still off, as though he didn’t trust himself to put it back on in case he vomited again. It was worse off, Enzo thought, the stench of the bodies was sickening. No one commented on how the floors slopped slightly, leading to a drain in the centre like an abattoir.
The engineer’s dark hair and red rimmed eyes suddenly made Enzo think of Oliver. Without thinking, he laid a hand against the engineer’s shoulder, making the smaller man jump then sniffle. Luca wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and straightened with a shaky breath.
“I’m okay,” he said to Enzo’s unspoken question.
“There’s no shame in it,” Enzo said, jerking his chin to the remains of the engineer’s breakfast and back at the horrors behind him. “There’s no shame in being soft.”
Luca stared up at him. He had such brown eyes and Enzo could see each one of his wild flurry of thoughts cycle through them before settling on something knowing.
“Are you talking to me, or to Ollie?”
--
Nico clenched his fist and spooled his biotics around him, pulling them in tight until he was ready to unleash them against the wall. Nova was his strongest ability, more than his shockwaves, more powerful than any of his whips or lashes or charges. He used it now, slamming his braced knuckles against the wall, feeling it give way under his hand like the wall was nothing but flimsy paper.
Dust and light debris rained down around them.
“Holy shit,” Kiosho whispered then he was quickly pulling Luca through the hole behind him. Eva was already in the room, a humming energy source that could only have been the reaper’s glowing heart on the surface of the planet between her and where Ben stood on the other side. They’d already cleared the space, making sure it was safe for the engineers to finally get the virus where it was supposed to be.
“Do we have a connection?” Nico heard Luca ask Kiosho worriedly and the other engineer nodded. “Yeah, which doesn’t give you long to get your shit together to fly our bomb, little bro. You ready for this?”
“Ready. Captain,” Luca opened his comm to everyone. “Link established. Virus uploading in 3… 2…”
