Blitzkrieg

 

We drive the trucks straight into the fortress. The guards at the front raise a hand and tell us to stop, but Elemental leans out of the open side of the truck and shoots them down with his rifle, before ducking back inside and slamming the door shut. The whole assault team, including Luc's team, is in our truck, except for Swono, who's driving their truck in front of ours. Slamming it on full speed, he sets it on course for Halycon Minor's front gate, before kicking open the side door to the cockpit and jumping out of it. The speed sends him flying backwards, but he steadies himself with his jet boots and flies alongside  us, whilst his truck, packed with a hundred bombs and hundreds of kilograms of explosives, crashes into the front gate and blows a gigantic smoking hole in the front, sending debris, girders and soldiers flying in all directions. Kremi charges our truck straight into the gaping hole left behind by the blast, and we come screeching to a halt.

"Get out," I say. "Let's move."
Airo and Elemental, leading a most of the team, equip their jump jets, wish me good luck, and then take to the skies, soaring over the second layer of taller walls, weaving in and out of explosions as hundreds of turrets whir to life and attack the intruders. Neo and Nyx melt into the shadows, nothing but a slight shimmer moving quietly along the base of the walls, and then Luc leads his group and goes straight for the second entrance into the belly of the fortress, blowing the gate off its hinges and charging inside.

 

I myself draw my sword, and also pull the round, metal, chrona-powered shield out of my nano-storage. I'm excited to use it, as for the past few days Elemental has been working on designing it and Kremi has added features. As of now, Kremi himself ducks down behind the truck, setting up a small device which projects a holographic screen of chrona before him, and starts tapping away at the controls. Guards start gathering around us, brandishing melee weapons, and a few with rifles.

"Do your thing," I say. "I'll take two minutes tops."
"I'll take less," Kremi replied, not looking up.

I scoff, before pulling on the shield's grip - and a booming shockwave explodes out from its front, sending thirty guards flying in a semicircle around me.

 

POV Elemental

As they began their downward descent, they started to lose their ability to dodge the hundreds of blasts and missiles streaking towards them. Airo was hit by one and went up in flames, but he reappeared a second later freefalling, and he landed first, grinning like a madman, on the second wall, slotting a grenade neatly down the barrel of an autocannon. A second later, it went up in a spectacular blue boom. Elemental, on the other hand, crashed through a tower's roof and tore through the guards with his chain knives, before leaping from it and landing beside Airo and Chris, who had just dealt with all the guards on the wall. It was more of a platform or a plaza than a wall - it was a great slab of metal embedded in the side of the mountains, and the fortress's building jutted out of the rock, on the platform. The others, led by Leon, dropped through the roof of the main building, followed by 002, 003 and 007 exploding in from the main entrance, tearing through anyone in their way like a storm. Below, Luc's group tore upwards, and they met deep in the first sector of the fortress.

"Where to next?" Luc asked

"Go around to the other side. And then we breach the inner control room."

Halycon Minor was built with a huge outcrop of rock as the symmetry line, perpendicular to the entrance of the valley, and they had just stormed the west side in all but four minutes.

"From the top."
 

Grappling hooks were fired over the top of the rocky outcrop, and 002, 003 and 004 led the team over it, dropping down onto the platform on the other side. Instantly, gunners in their turret boxes swivelled their weapons round to fire upon the intruders, but from a hidden spot down below, Rain dispatched all six of them with six bullets.

"Nice," Elemental said through comms.

"I'm inside," Nyx said. "Going through to the inner gate with Neo."
"I'm piggybacking you guys," Kremi replied, dashing around the outer walls with Sword hot on his hells.

Elemental pulled his knife out of the body of the final guard upon the plaza, but just as he was going to catch his breath, hundreds of soldiers swarmed in from the building on the west side, rushing at them.

 

POV Nyx

Before anyone even noticed, the two of them had silenced the guards outside the few walls that surrounded the entrance to the control room in the centre of Halycon Minor, and approached the main gate, where two sentries stood vigilant. For a few moments, the doors slid open as a squadron of riflemen tramped out to combat the attackers, and Nyx slipped inside. Neo stayed behind to cause chaos outside, relieving some stress on her and the others outside. She darted through the corridors, slashing down anyone in her path, reaching the inner gate, but was instead met with ten guards, their weapons pointed at her chest.

"You did well making it this far," said the fortress's leader from behind them. "But you shouldn’t have come in here alone. Even if you take everyone here out, you'll never be able to-"

At that moment, the inner gate leading to the control hub slid open, and he stared back at it, appalled.

"Knock knock," Kremi said over the whole fortress's speaker system, coupled with Sword's muffled shouting in the background.

"Wha-"

Before he even had time to open his mouth again, all ten guard's heads left their necks at once, and Nyx reeled in her whip.

"Anything else to say, General Arkon Vale, leader of Halycon Minor?"
"Shit!" Arkon cursed, backstepping another slash of her whip, and lifting a hand-held chrona repeater cannon.

A barrage of powerful blue streaks thundered into the wall behind Nyx, who slid under them and chased him into the control room. Several turrets swivelled to attack her, but the next second they lost power and went offline.

"Take her out!!" Arkon yelled, dashing into a box of reinforced glass and slamming the door shut.

Fifty heavily armoured soldiers, brandishing electric swords and chrona-powered halberds, appeared out of nowhere and formed a semicircle around her, but she just shrugged and looked behind her.

"Hey," Sword said, his sword dragging along the ground as he  advanced, Kremi behind him.

"Took you long enough," Nyx scowled.

 

POV Sword

They don't present much of a challenge. I hit a button on my shield, and it whirs to life, expanding, becoming thicker, and an array of jagged blades protruded out from its edges, turning into a giant frisbee-wheel of death. I hurl it at the enemy, and it crunched through armour, flesh and bone, dragging along a chain connected to a small plate on my arm.

"This is sweet," I grin, grabbing the chain and heaving the wrecking ball around and smashing through the torsos of another twenty soldiers.

Two of them charge me from either side, but I slash them apart with one strike. Arkon slides open a window from his box and lets forth another barrage of blasts, which tear through both his remaining soldiers and nearly myself, but Nyx tackles me from the side and we spill to the ground, barely avoiding being pounded full of holes. Kremi ducks behind a barrier, tapping away at his controls, and the next second the automated turrets around Arkon's box droop like wilting flowers. Aaaand before I can even stand up Luc comes barrelling through like a rhinoceros and weaving through Arkon's endless stream of bullets, he leaps up and drives his gauntleted fist into the glass,   sending a spiderweb of cracks through it with the first hit. Arkon slams his window shut and screams curses from inside, but the second hit shakes the whole thing and then the third smashed it to bits. A metal hand closed around his face, the fingers digging into his skull, cutting off his string of dirty words like an executioner's blade through a neck.

 

General Arkon Vale was a respected and famous man in Central. Once a brilliant engineer-turned-commander, he was responsible for the reinforcement and construction of many of Central's strongest fortresses and bastions, and even had a hand in the monstrous 'Floating Castle' that secured Central's aerial domination, rivalling the West's Leviathan. Calm, methodical, cruel, and fiercely loyal to the King, he led Halycon Minor well… until today, when the fortress he'd spent a year maintaining was brought down in all but six minutes. And now, with one of the attackers' hands closed around his face, he thought the himself,

I'm not going down without a fight, you bastard.

 

Luc lifts Vale off his feet and grins, but I shout a word of warning to him as I see what's about to happen. Vale slams his knee into Luc's jaw, and both of them crumble to the ground, but Vale falls less awkwardly than Luc and slams both of his feet into his side, throwing Luc out of the smashed window.

"Damn!" Luc curses, jumping back up to his feet, only to be forced to leap out of the way as a single powerful blast from the handheld cannon leaves a smoking hole in the metal where he was standing a second ago.

"He's going on the defensive," I say.

Vale leaps off his platform and dashes along a walkway at the back of the control room, heading for the entrance to a side corridor leading further into the depths of the fortress, and Luc, angry, bounds up to the walkway and dashes after him.

"He's mine!!" Luc bellows back at us, dodging bolts of chrona flying at his face as Vale runs backwards, shooting all the way.

Then the door to the corridor slams shut and locks itself.

"He better not take too long," I mutter.

"He won’t," Nyx replies. "Come on, we need to clean out the rest of this place."