Chapter 5: Welcome to the City Lost to Time
"Serviceman Emiya, Serviceman Cassani, Servicewoman Shepard. You will be team Charlie-4." The Lieutenant Commander before them said, not even bothering to look up from his datapad as they walked up to him. "You will be heading for shuttle 14, over there. Your liftoff is in fifteen minutes. On-site, you will receive your primary objective and on the way there, you may attempt to fulfill the secondary objectives en route as you wish."
"Will they affect our score, sir?" Franco asked, hesitating for a moment as they had never before had to directly deal with an officer.
But the Lieutenant Commander did not seem to care one whit about the recruit's hesitation. He looked up, his dark complexion that hinted at various ethnicities quite eye-catching. He had dark eyes, dark short hair, and high cheekbones that made him seem more than a slight bit intimidating.
"Obviously," he grunted. "Besides that, you are judged as a team based on how many objectives you are able to accomplish. That is, if you are able to complete any at all. The main objective is imperative; the secondary objectives will not be counted towards your final score if it has not been completed. If one of you is taken out, that will bring penalties to the rest of the team's score, but mostly to that person who got hit. But points can easily overturn that," he droned on, before looking back down to his datapad.
"So... If we all get back in one piece but completed no objectives, we will all be penalized? Compared to if only one of us makes it back after we accomplish several objectives, do we get a much better rating that way? Even the ones who have been... taken out?" Shepard asked.
"Yes. That's about right. A lot of things go into the final tally, but mostly you will be observed in how you handle yourselves in the field. Just remember that you aren't the only ones out there," he answered, nodding towards the valley behind him. "This is a field exercise with participants from several fleets along with your batch. You'll be moving through several other active operation zones."
They were standing on a mountain-top, below them they could see a city that had been half overtaken by a jungle that had encroached on it slowly over the years. A ghost city, once home to tens of thousands, now completely abandoned and left for nature to reconquer.
Gunshots and engines of vehicles in the distance could be heard, echoing over the rooftops and around the alleyways and street corners of the crumbling buildings.
"Your weapons will be set to minimum power like all the guns in use within the city, your kinetic barriers will also be set to record if you have been shot by someone else. The sensor will recognize the shot even as the round will bounce off harmlessly, and the internal servos of your armor will lock up to simulate damage. Your heads-up display will show a relative health which reflects how damaging a shot would usually be," he continued, droning on as he did. This must have been his dozenth team to debrief by now. "Thus, taking off your armor or firing upon someone out of armor is prohibited. There should not be anyone wandering around here, but you can never be too careful. We will be monitoring your progress and internal camera-feed, but if something does happen, contact us with your omnitools before something actually goes wrong."
"Yes, sir," they answered.
"Are they our allies, or will they be shooting at us down there too, sir?" Franco asked, nodding toward the valley's side, from where a large artillery-like gun was peppering one of the buildings. No matter what they might have been told about safety, it was hard to believe they would come out unharmed from that big of a mass accelerator.
The NCO looked up from his datapad, regarding the recruit with disinterest.
"I could not say. It will depend on your mission and luck, I suppose. Worst case scenario? You'll be the main objective of some real tough guys. Lucky them, then," he said, with a malicious grin.
"So worst-case scenario is that we run into some N7's," Emiya noted with dry humor, making Franco and Shepard blink at that thought.
"H-hey, that can't be right, can it? We can't handle something like that?"
The officer smirked at that, saying nothing.
Franco laughed nervously, deciding that perhaps he didn't want to know any more.
"Right... we'll just have to find out on our own, huh." Shepard shrugged, though a small smile seemed to be gracing her lips. It was complete chaos down there, from what she could see. The terrain could change entirely within a single city block, as trees and undergrowth had taken over wherever they could, causing buildings and tunnels to collapse.
At places, even whole trees could be seen growing out of decrepit buildings.
This should be fun, she thought.
"If the power of our pistols is scaled down, do we have effectively larger ammunition capacities?" Emiya asked, patting at his pistol. "The gun should overheat less per shot right now, if I understood you correctly."
The chief blinked, looking up and regarding Emiya with some interest.
"No, they put on a shot-cap and simulate overheating with the software. Same thing with your Onyx armor. One shot in simulation represents one shot in reality. Basic equipment as usually used, they just handle all of the simulations with alternate software settings."
They all blinked at the implication.
"We haven't installed anything like that, though?" Franco muttered, drawing his own pistol and regarding it curiously.
"It's centrally handled. A whole host of virtual intelligence make sure everyone's guns and suits are set to simulation while keeping track of you. It's safe enough, we've been doing this for years without problems. You can't even be down there with an active eezo core without triggering a flag somewhere in the system that checks that you aren't using something dangerous," he reassured her.
"Doesn't that mean that anyone could theoretically hack a gun?" Emiya asked, seeking confirmation.
In his time cell phones had been banned by many active forces for how easy they were to subvert. But then what of their guns and hardsuits, all powered by much more powerful and interconnected computers?
The chief grinned, nodding at Emiya. "Hope you don't run into any combat engineers down there. Suuure would suck, that. Hehe..."
"Aww... Fuck this shit, man..." Franco cursed under his breath as he clipped back on his pistol, only audible to Emiya who glanced at him at that.
"Isn't this a considerable vulnerability? Why not lock down the gear from such attacks?" Emiya asked, frowning.
It seemed like a massive weakness to him, and none of the literature he had access to properly addressed how it was handled. Just that it was done centrally and higher up, just as their omnitools were. But an omnitool was like a cell phone in his time; a useful tool, sure. But one they could live without.
Not like the pistols and hardsuit, which were absolutely vital parts of their kit in the field.
"Sure, but then you'd lose all your smart functionalities; the HUD data from your gun and your smart-lock might turn off since it no longer recognizes you as the owner of the gun. No aim assist, no running diagnostics, no predictive algorithms, no communication masking or clearing... Running completely analog's been proven to just not be worth it, so we stick with it despite the risks. Besides, the Alliance takes its cyber-defenses very seriously. This only works because they've literally got the backdoor key to all your gear," he explained animatedly, for once seemingly actually interested in the three standing before him. "Anyone looking to do that has to contend with the Alliance itself. They're not just facing you, they're facing whatever mainframe supercomputers we've got nearby, too."
Perhaps it was unusual for new grunts to be asking questions like these. Shepard and Franco certainly didn't seem to have any clue what they were talking about.
"That makes sense, I suppose," Emiya said, nodding at the commander.
"Heh, you've got a good head on your shoulders. Thinking about becoming a combat engineer?" He grinned, whipping out his omnitool and bringing out a floating, glowing sphere from it. "The Alliance could always use more drone controllers and tech saboteurs. It's a part of our general doctrine after all."
Emiya considered that, before shrugging.
The Lieutenant Commander turned to the two others.
"Nah, I'm good at running and gunning and not much else. Can't wrap my head around any of that," Shepard said vaguely, frowning as she crossed her arms.
Franco seemed pensive, though.
"Well, just keep your mind open to it. Your flight just arrived over there." The chief nodded at the shuttle with a grin and a thumbs-up, much warmer in demeanor now than he had been at the start.
"I'll think about it," Emiya said noncommittally. "But—Is this really all? I would expect there to be more rules, beyond just what you've told us."
The Systems Alliance Navy's doctrine was to treat its cogs like idiots, after all. Everything was outlined and everything was in writing. No room for interpretation, no space for fucking up.
"Don't worry about it. First-timers don't need to know anything; you'll do fine regardless. Or rather, there ain't much room for you to fuck up. You should get running along now, your shuttle's waiting." He paused for just a moment. "And... good luck out there."
Emiya nodded, before turning to leave for the shuttle as he thought about those words.
It seems they don't expect us to be able to do much at all. Is it a deliberate shock they're hoping to induce, to see how the recruits handle a chaotic battlefield and being left to their own devices; a kind of stress test? Emiya considered that before a small smirk threatened to show on his face. But doesn't that conversely mean that we are allowed to do just about anything since they haven't forbidden it for once?
With those thoughts, Emiya boarded the shuttle.
The NCO huffed, looking down at his datapad with interest after following the shuttle taking off and flying into the city.
"Emiya, was it? Should be an interesting fellow." He considered for a moment, before deciding that he 'might as well', as he brought out his omnitool. "No one will mind if I just plug into the network and watch their progress, right?"
;
"Touchdown in fifteen seconds!" the comm sounded inside their helmets and they shouted back their acknowledgment.
The three all wore the same gear, the equipment they had been drilled in the use for the past few months; Aldrin Labs Onyx light armor and a Hahne-Kedar Kessler pistol. All in all, as Emiya saw it, a considerably anemic load out for what was ostensibly an active warzone.
Hopefully, their mission and the resistance they would encounter would scale to match that.
A notation regarding a new message to his omnitool blipped in Emiya's HUD.
"Team-leader Emiya, have you received your mission parameters?" The comms asked and he replied quickly.
"Yes, sir," Emiya answered, slightly annoyed that due to his generally high scores he had been assigned as team leader. He didn't really need to perform well here, but now that he was here he felt a slight obligation to not simply coast along. And a part of him, which he did not quite want to admit to, felt his old heart beginning to beat a bit more rapidly at the thought of action again.
Especially since this was all just playing around, not real combat.
"Good, team Charlie-4 is cleared to go!"
"Aye aye, sir!" They all answered as the shuttle touched down. Franco took point, his pistol sweeping their surroundings. Emiya and Shepard followed, jumping to touch down on the roof.
As soon as everyone was on the ground, the shuttle took off and flew away.
They stood on a flat rooftop. Around the edge ran a rusted chain-link fence, bent and torn in places. Behind them stood a rotten and broken water tank and what looked like an old utility shed or transformer box. To the right lay a closed hatch, presumably the best way down from the rooftop. All around them, houses of similar height and proportions could be seen. They weren't quite in the center of the city, but they were near the middle of the eastern quadrant.
Emiya motioned for them to gather up around him.
"What's the mission?" Franco asked.
"Not yet — the shuttle landing would have been noticed and we don't have allied forces nearby. We need to move," Emiya answered.
Shepard blinked, taking another look around them and peering for any hidden enemies with a squint. "Right, let's go."
They opened up the hatch to get to the top floor, making their way down all the way to the third floor of the building at a relatively brisk pace, until they found the stairway collapsed from that point down.
"Can we jump down?" Shepard asked, peering down the edge while feeling tempted to kick a loose pebble over. She was fairly certain that a drop this high wouldn't be pleasant, hoping that they would not have to try it out.
"Let's not," Emiya replied.
Too much could go wrong; even assuming that it was safe from booby traps or ambushes, jumping down would be too dangerous. In the worst-case scenario, it could break the floor they landed on and even cause the rest of the building to collapse down on them.
"There's another stairwell at the other end of the building. Let's go."
"Gotcha." Shepard nodded, turning to slowly lead the way with her gun held in her hands.
Many of the windows had been broken already, but though some were still in one piece if dirtied to the point of opaqueness by the passage of time, giving them an occasional view of the outside street and adjacent houses.
They saw no one outside, hearing only the distant sounds of turmoil reverberating in off-beat staccato through the empty buildings around them. The 'frontline' of the battle raging in the distance, somewhere to their east. At least two klicks from their position.
There was another sound that did not belong, almost lost within that far-off cacophony. The discordant noise, came from below them. So quiet that it could not have been more than the scraping of a chair against the floor, or a rusty door hinge creaking. But he had definitely heard it.
Emiya halted, putting his hand on Shepard's shoulder. As the team leader, he was walking in the middle while she took point. She did not turn around to look at him, merely kneeling down against the wall as she kept her eyes open and watching their front.
Behind them, Cassani had been handling the rear and he came to a halt next to them.
"What's up?" he whispered, glancing at Emiya while lowering his pistol.
"...Someone's below us," he stated quietly, furrowing his brows as he tried to picture the layout of the building. Based on the floors they had already walked down, he could make a fairly accurate guess. He could also use Structural Analysis to get the entire building's blueprint into his head, but...
It could have been anything, really.
The combined radar readouts of their suits and omnitools weren't picking up on anything. But he knew what he had heard.
In his experience houses were the worst kinds of place to be when you were engaged in open warfare, though. Urban combat was the thing of horror stories, of ludicrous mortality rates, and of battles that bogged down for weeks and months on end as no one could gain a decisive advantage.
Urban combat was the meat grinder where armies went to die.
Inside of any given house, there existed over a dozen places one could lay in wait for someone, turning each room into a potential death trap. Behind every door, below every window, under every piece of furniture could lay a gun in wait or bomb rigged to blow, just waiting for the opportunity to ruin your day. Every crook, cranny, and corner could be an ambush.
In pursuing his dream of becoming a hero of justice, Emiya had naturally dealt with such circumstances countless times and he had methods for safely clearing a house of any mundane hostiles.
But those methods were not strictly usable right now. This was not a fight for their lives, this was a heavily monitored and recorded military exercise. He couldn't simply whip out his magic whenever he needed a quick solution, lest he reveal his supernatural abilities. And this wasn't merely a matter of maintaining the secrecy of magecraft as had been necessary during his life; he had been specifically told to avoid making waves by Archimedes, which meant that revealing the existence of magic to the Alliance military was about as catastrophic a failure as he could imagine.
Besides, it felt like cheating. Not the exam per se, but rather himself. He had gotten this far without pulling those stops so why break his streak now?
Still, that meant he had to rely on what he had been taught in the months prior for the most part. Which meant going through the house room by room, door by door, corner by corner the difficult, slow way. He could not hesitate either. If someone was below them, they were either setting up an ambush or moving up to intercept them already.
"Change of plans; we have company," Emiya said. "Shepard, take us to the west end. We'll jump onto the nearby rooftop through the window. And once we're on the ground, we run like hell."
He had seen the building next to this one as they had landed. At this height the adjacent roof was only a few meters below them, thus it should be entirely feasible for them to jump down. Hopefully, it would allow them to avoid the ambush he suspected was being set on the floor below entirely.
Unless the shuttle's flight plan had been known or this was someone's base of operations already before they landed, he had to assume that whoever it was down there below them had rushed over to set it up in the scant few minutes since their landing.
That implied a very formidable team; someone they did not want to tangle with. Not with their current resources.
"...Seriously?" Shepard asked, turning back to look at him. "You just said jumping down was bad."
"It was. Now it's better."
She blinked at him and then shrugged. He was the team leader after all.
"Alright."
She got back up as Emiya raised his hand from her shoulder. They turned around, moving at a much quicker pace as they backtracked through the hallway they had just cleared.
Opening a door as quietly as they could, they entered some sort of office space at the west end. An old desk and a broken office chair lay on the floor, with the walls long since stained brown and black by the weather, the windows shattered and spread all over.
They closed the door and then lifted an old desk over to barricade it while Emiya scanned the streets and buildings around them. He stayed low, keeping back from the window to remain shadowed, as breaking the straight lines something like a window frame created with your silhouette was one of the best ways of being spotted from a distance. He saw nothing moving, which was a good sign.
Turning around, he froze as he heard another sound, moving closer to them, just as Shepard and Franco were done with their make-shift barricade.
"Damn, they're—" Emiya tried to speak, but by then it was already too late.
A shot rang out, punching a fist-sized hole clean through the wall at waist-level, through which he could just see the stairway. It hit none of them but still surprised the other two so much that they flinched at the sound and flying debris.
—fast! Emiya finished in his head, his eyes widening as time began to slow down in his perception. Already reacting. Superior tracking equipment and sensors? Definitely can't face them head-on.
"—WE NEED TO GO!" Emiya shouted, changing what he had been about to say as he turned around and vaulted out of the window and fell down onto the roof one floor below him. It was actually a fair bit further down than he had thought, but it was still a survivable drop.
Especially compared to facing an assault from their rear.
The impact was sharp and the corrugated metal made an awful noise, but he rolled with the landing and managed to keep himself unhurt. Looking up, he spotted Shepard and Cassani on the ledge and about to jump down, though, the latter seemed much less willing to follow.
"Come on! Jump!" Emiya ordered, turning around and jumping down from the roof onto the pavement. They needed to be gone before whoever that was on their tail actually got a bead on them.
The two came down, landing more or less intact though far less gracefully than he had. A second later a bright light and a deep sound exploded inside the room they had been in. They shot through the wall to make a hole for a flashbang grenade, Emiya thought clinically, approving of the tactic. If the combination had been done faster, it would have absolutely overwhelmed his teammates. Not dealing with experts, then; they're still rough around the edges.
Shepard rolled and grabbed the edge of the roof she had landed on, making her way down to the street as Cassani looked up, eyes wide as they went back to the just-vacated room.
"What was—"
"No time! Let's go!" Shepard shouted at him and it only took Franco a moment to realize that she was right.
As he too jumped down with a heavy 'oomph', the sound of the door and table breaking in the room they had been in chasing them down. Someone had rushed inside, and—
"Clear!"
"Clear!"
"Clear!"
—three almost simultaneous shouts could be heard a second later. They're trained in breaching tactics. Dividing the room into parts and being able to count on your team enough to only worry about your slice-of-the-pie requires considerable training and trust.
They hadn't even touched the concept of it in basic training, yet.
He could roughly place their pursuer's skill level now.
"Cross the street, around the corner!" Emiya shouted, kicking off at his top speed.
Behind him, a second later Shepard and Cassani followed, sprinting at breakneck pace for cover. If they remained out in the open streets their attackers would have the cover and height advantage on them, almost like a shooting gallery.
"They're outside!" They heard over their own rough breathing.
Halfway to the other side, Emiya felt a cold chill run down the back of his spine. A danger sense of a kind; the ability to feel bloodlust and killing intent had saved his life many times, and even just the ability to sense someone's attention on him, had been his lone saving grace many times.
He jumped to the side the instant he felt the danger, moments before he had even heard the sound.
A gunshot roared from behind.
But the limitations of this body, unenhanced and un-Reinforced—merely human—meant that it was almost too little too late. Human beings could not dodge bullets after they were fired, that much was obvious. Someone up on the second floor had gotten their sights on him and he had only been able to react the moment just before the trigger had been pulled thanks to their spiked intent.
Emiya could only mitigate it, trading a direct hit for a glancing one.
He stumbled—feeling something but not quite what he had expected—recovered and kept going. The realization that there was no pain and that he hadn't been knocked over by the shot, even if there was some stiffness, came another second later. He jumped and rolled for cover behind the corner of a building, as the gunshots continued echoing.
No, not cover. Their guns, even at the dialed-down state could still easily chip away at the walls and windows, a piece of glass shattered from a ricocheting piece. It was merely concealment, something which prevented the shooter from getting an accurate shot on him.
Emiya raised his pistol, reaching around the corner and blind firing at the windows to give covering fire for the two still lagging behind. Shepard and Cassani came a second later as another duo of shots ricocheted off the ground, cracking pavement and kicking up a small cloud of dust.
Neither seemed wounded.
Shepard had seen him get hit and had begun taking evasive action, running in an unpredictable manner to avoid getting hit and Cassani following her had followed suit as well as he could. It had been enough to prevent the shooters from getting an accurate bead on either of them. That and the covering fire from his blind-fired pistol had seemed to work as a distraction, too.
Even around concealment and without direct line of sight, he could hit a man-sized target at least a few times.
Stilling the moment, he analysed his 'wounds'.
A single-shot weapon that hits several times with a wide spread; a shotgun? Emiya noted distantly as he recovered his breathing, eyeing the HUD readout for his simulated damage. Makes sense; suitable for breaching action, but it appears to scatter heavily even at medium-range.
He wondered about the shaving pattern used for such bullets in the mass accelerators. Maximizing damage at short range but dissipating at even a slight distance. Some kind of expanding flechettes?
"Are you okay?" Shepard asked, running up to him and patting at his body. "Did you get hit?"
"Yeah," Emiya noted and turned around, nodding with his head to motion that they should keep going. "The HUD is telling me it was a glancing blow; wouldn't have punched through the armor but still bruised my hip, so the servos are locking down to simulate a blunt-force trauma."
"Can you keep moving?" Shepard asked, licking her lips as she ran alongside him.
"It's fine. Did either of you get hit?"
They shook their heads to indicate a negative.
Emiya nodded. "Good. Shepard — we need to find a place to hide. Thick walls. They have better sensors than we do."
"Okay, leave it to me. I can find a hundred places to hide in a city like this!" Shepard nodded with a determined look as she took point again.
They ran for two minutes, turning corners and cutting through buildings and yards wherever possible.
Ideally in urban warfare, you never wanted to be on the streets; the shooting galleries where they would have no idea where they were being fired upon. They had been taught two methods of moving through cities. Either you set up two or more teams and moved in rotation, so while one team was advancing the other was in cover and kept an eye out to return fire on any attackers until the moving team found a good place to hunker down, at which point the roles switched. Like your two feet, left-right-left-right... Alternatively, you tried to move inside houses and other abandoned structures that broke line-of-sight as much as possible, breaking walls between rooms whenever necessary to stay out of the open while slowly digging forward.
Regardless, it was always slow going if you wanted to be safe.
But they didn't have time right now for either method and after another minute of desperate running, Shepard banked and chose a large house. The lowest floor, where she entered, looked like it had been a café once, with large windows and plenty of space in front of a sturdy counter. She vaulted over it, disappearing behind the stained wood and shattered glass.
Emiya and Cassani followed after her, jumping for cover, the latter stumbling at the sudden drop behind the counter, where it fell into a lowered recess of some kind, leaving them below ground. Like some kind of half-cellar level, where your standing head height would be just enough to see the pavement outside.
They all leaned back against the darkened and weather-beaten wood as flakes of old lacquer came off at the contact, taking deep breaths to recover from their sprinting, keeping an eye on their radars. The sun had been shining all day on the wooden counters and floor, making it warm and sticky to the touch of their hardsuits as they tried not to fidget.
Thirty seconds later, running footsteps could be heard.
They held their breath, lying as low and still as possible.
Their pursuers passed by well over fifty meters away, judging from the sounds of their shouting. Shepard reached up to pull herself to peer over the counter for a look, but Emiya grabbed her arm and shook his head at her when she looked at him. He raised a finger to his mouth and then lowered his hand down, signalling her to be quiet and to stay down. He didn't know what their sensors worked on, so even if this cover broke their radar, that didn't necessarily it would break their pursuers'.
Better to wait and listen, than try their luck just yet.
Emiya raised a hand, motioning them both to keep quiet and stay on guard for a moment. As they nodded back, he opened his omnitool and began to look into all the information he had received now that he had a moment to spare.
A map of the town, the main objective, and a list of secondary objectives. He raised his eyebrow as he looked at the latter list. It was several pages long and constantly changing. One mission would disappear, another would appear, in one the parameters would change abruptly as if it was moving fast.
The overseers who are monitoring all of us must be updating and controlling them in real-time.
He sighed as he read their main objective: arrive at a rendezvous location marked on the map for extraction at 19:45 this evening. They had to survive an entire day in this chaotic battlefield? He almost laughed at that. For a team of fresh recruits, they certainly weren't being handled with kid gloves; no, they had been thrown straight into the mix.
Add to that the fact that they were completely alone, specifying to treat all other active forces in the city as hostiles.
It was certainly doable, but given that they knew nothing about what was going on around them, and that they had to cross the city to get there, it seemed more than a little bit too challenging for a team of fresh recruits. Not only were they lacking in training—well, the other two more so than him, but he was an outlier here—but also in equipment and weapons. That much had been obvious from the sole encounter they had had so far. Better guns, specialized grenades, sensory equipment, and who knew what else?
He glanced at the side missions before dismissing them as worthless distractions.
The freedom they offered the recruits here was to observe how they behaved once alone and under pressure in a boundless environment. To see what they were really made out of, he guessed. Who would get cocky, who would accurately read their situation, and who would go after the bonus objectives anyway...
As they had been told, the main objective was the only one that really mattered. And he had no interest in showing off.
So, just the safest route through the city...
Wasn't that what they had trained for all month? Hell, Shepard was practically a prodigy at that stuff.
Emiya closed his eyes and listened. Even without using Reinforcement or other kinds of mysteries, it was possible to hear surprisingly accurately what was going on all around you if you simply know how to listen. It wasn't necessary to recognize each sound, merely to recognize their bearing and distance. Then, if anything stood out, you could start trying to classify it.
Mentally filtering out the far-off firefights and the echoing clashes, he exhaled slowly. He couldn't hear anyone nearby. Which meant that at least it should be safe to talk.
"Right. Our main objective is simply to survive until the evening and to make it to a rendezvous location across town," Emiya whispered.
Shepard seemed surprised while Cassani seemed exasperated.
"Oh yeah, shouldn't be a problem so long as we don't run into anyone. Oh wait, five minutes in and we almost ran into a death squad! Fuck, fuck, fuck."
Shepard glanced at the cursing man, hitting him lightly with the back of her hand to keep him quiet. "Don't worry, we're good as long as it's just a couple of guys looking for us. I can find a dozen hiding places along the way, no problem."
"Well, there's that at least," Cassani replied with a defeated shrug. "Until they start throwing more grenades at us again. We haven't even gotten to grenades yet. What the fuck is up with that?"
She shrugged, though there was an annoyed set to her brows. She wanted grenades, too, Emiya reckoned.
"We'll be better off getting out of the city and into the jungle. We'll take the long way and circle around all the heavy fighting. Better to stay away from all that, since we would just get shredded. Other squads will be the least of our worries, if we walk onto the wrong street," Emiya said, shaking his head.
"What do you mean?" Shepard asked, furrowing her brows.
She was used to cities, having lived all her life in them, so the thought of abandoning its familiarity for the jungle left her more than a little uneasy. Did he even know how to navigate through a forest, she wondered silently.
But at the same time, she trusted his judgment.
"Can you hear... that?" he asked, raising a finger as he spoke the last word. A deeper sound rang through the air, much lower in pitch and louder than other ambient gunfire. "That's not just any small arms mass accelerator. That's the artillery Cassani pointed out earlier."
"Huh?" Cassani blinked. "Shit, I completely forgot about that thing."
Emiya nodded in understanding. You started to forget about things you really shouldn't when you were put under too much pressure too quickly, your mind barely keeping up and unable to properly process it all.
"We need to stay away from that thing at the very least, but we have no way of knowing where it's set up. So better to get out of the city and into the forest. They say that infantry is the queen of the battlefield, but artillery is the king."
"Ah." Shepard nodded, understanding Emiya's point. She looked at Cassani who didn't seem to understand, tilting her head. "What does the king do to the queen?"
"...That's a really good point," Cassani said as he nodded nervously. He looked at Emiya, gesturing with one hand. "He makes a good point. Big guns are bad, yeah? I really don't think our hardsuits rated for that stuff."
Shepard frowned still at the thought of leaving the streets, considering it for a moment longer before she nodded.
"You have a plan?"
Emiya shrugged. "Not so much a plan as a... 'let's see what happens and hope no one shoots us'."
"I'd like the sound of that." Cassani nodded, still babbling.
Probably the first time he's been shot at. He's forgotten it's just an exercise already.
Shepard huffed but did not protest. Emiya took a deep breath, then stood up and began to peek out in the street. Scanning left and right, he looked for anything unusual outside on the streets or in the buildings.
He crouched back down again, looking at Shepard, "Looks clear. Take us east and we'll get into the forest there. After that, I'll take point."
Shepard nodded and rose up, pistol held at the ready as she looked around a second time. Not that she didn't trust Emiya, but the law on the street was to always verify yourself too.
"Alright, follow me."
;
They continued quietly through the abandoned city.
To Shepard and Cassani the broken down and overgrown ruins must have seemed like a visage from a distant world out in the stars, but to Emiya it was far more familiar than the barracks and Navy headquarters had been. Both the architecture—closer to a more familiar time—and the forms of decay were something he was accustomed to. The cracked asphalt and shattered blocks of concrete lying around. The potholes and bullet marks dotting the scenery. The ad-hoc barricades and roadblocks. And on top of that, the havoc wrought by the sheer passage of time.
The strange tension in the air as every house, hole, and street around them stood silent and hollow, like gaping wounds.
In the distance receding behind them, they could still hear the sounds of heated combat. Sometimes a more powerful gun could be heard, along with explosions and other stranger noises. It was so just far away that it felt like an entirely different realm, yet it never abated enough to allow the strange mood of the abandoned city to settle into a complete lull. It still pressed against their senses, where he might have fallen asleep to it like an old lullaby.
He had been through many places like this in his life.
"How much further?" Cassani asked as they continued to jog.
Emiya looked around for some reference points, then glanced down at the map that had been uploaded to his omnitool. He had a mental image of it in his head, but there had been a lot of changes in the city since this picture had been taken, that kept him from relying on the map too much. Streets had been blocked off as buildings had collapsed and sewers had crumbled, causing other cascading collapses that redrew entire blocks.
They must have been given old intel on purpose to reflect how quickly the terrain could change.
"Half a klick and we're in the suburbs. Another two and we should be good," he said. As long as we don't run into anyone on the way, he added to himself. So far had been so good.
"Who do you think those people from before were, the guys with the grenades I mean..." Cassani asked, again.
Shepard shrugged in front off them.
"Probably a previous batch, who have already gone through basic and chosen their career lines. Can't be too experienced though, given how they dropped the ball on that first attack." Emiya answered quietly. "Just speculation, though."
Shepard inhaled sharply, sounding something between pissed and impressed. "Like a hazing or... induction ceremony?" Then muttering more quietly: "Yeah, I can see it."
"Huh?" Cassani asked him, not seeing her point. "Why?"
"Throw the fresh recruits into the meat grinder and see how they react. Weed out those who can't handle the stress, while letting the older, better trained and armed boys bully us around a little for experience. Gets us used to getting our teeth kicked in, and to see who of us can keep our heads on straight..." Emiya paused in his explanation to give Cassani a smirk. "Which gets us humiliated and angry. Then, when we've gone through and graduated from basic, we get to do the same on the next recruits. Deferred payback; a cycle that feeds itself." Then he shrugged. "It's what I would do, anyhow."
After that, Cassani didn't ask any more questions. Perhaps the thought of facing off against their seniors made him thoughtful. Or perhaps it just made him want to keep quiet, so as to avoid any other encounters. Which was just as well.
They went through hollowed-out buildings and through narrow alleys whenever possible. Though those were more easily booby-trapped, it was still safer than running out in the streets and being spotted half a mile away. And generally, traps were only placed once the combat continued for prolonged periods of time. This field exercise had only started today, even for all the other groups.
And while there could have been more traps left over from previous battles stretching on, he didn't see the Alliance skipping out on such an excellent clearing exercise for those corps that specialized in cleaning up battlefields and rebuilding. He supposed it would be the combat engineers, since they had the technical understanding necessary and specialized in the use of relatively expendable drones.
So he justified their haste with those thoughts.
Emiya's suit's internal medical apparatus, which had been re-purposed to simulate injuries through a software update, did not actually slow him down all too much. It wasn't like he had actually been injured, it merely clamped down on him to give resistance to his movements. It felt slightly strange, as if someone was hanging off of him and keeping his hip from moving freely, but he powered through.
As long as he adjusted to compensate for it, he could keep up just fine. At this level, it would just be draining his stamina.
At one point, there didn't seem to be any way forward, so they had to backtrack and jumped over the roofs of some dinghy houses to continue onward. After one building almost collapsed under them, they finally hopped back down, even if they had been making good time that way, and got back down to the street level.
If the city center had been dilapidated, the suburbs were little more than rubble and piles of refuse around the trees and undergrowth that had come to reclaim the abandoned lands. Encroaching from the outside in as the plants did, and due to the less sturdy construction materials used, the widely spaced and smaller houses had been already mostly eradicated.
Again, to Emiya it was nothing new.
Though the combination of the scale of the city, the climate, and the length of time the city had been left to rot was novel, he was still familiar enough with places such as these to find the old habits within himself in good form. In his time he had seen the ravages of disease, war, famine, fires, natural disasters, and much, much more.
But to Shepard and Cassani, who Emiya gathered had always lived in the bustling and ever-awake cities, this was a landscape from their wildest fever dreams.
Expensive houses and wide plots of land where the gardens might have once stretched out; places they could probably only dream of having lived in, completely destroyed and abandoned. Large manses, smaller homes, garages, and the unrecognizable remains of other buildings littered the landscape around and beneath the stubborn flora. They even saw a gazebo that had been lifted completely off the ground by a tree that had sprung up beneath it.
Nowhere in sight could you see the bare ground, as wherever there was even a hint of free space, a plant had grown up to take advantage of the sunlight.
The waist-high undergrowth swayed in the wind, like a green ocean as they walked through. After a while, a light canopy of treetops began to form above, as the taller growths began to appear more densely with the branches and green leaves stretching out to cloak them in the thin formless shadows of leaves dancing in the wind.
Shepard began to falter and slow down without even noticing herself, staring at everything they passed by with wide eyes and a slacked jaw, so Emiya took over as point man, recognizing the point where his experience began to eclipse hers.
He let the two gawk and wonder for a while as he consulted his mental map again.
At this point, he had little more than a top-down picture and a topographical map that showed the elevation relative to sea level, since the trees above hid everything else from a satellite view. Not much to go on, but that was jungle-warfare for you. The fog of war stretched everywhere; a neutral veil of uncertainty for everyone. Even people who lived in a jungle knew that the terrain was ever-changing and ever-treacherous and that few maps were worth anything past a month or two.
You simply had to know the rules and take every step as a first into unknown territory. Already twice Shepard and Cassani had almost stumbled as the ground—hidden from view beneath swaying green waves of undergrowth—was actually not as flat and level as the foliage might have made it seem.
Once they got underneath the ancient trees where the canopy blotted out almost all of the sun, they wouldn't have to worry so much about the undergrowth with each step. With no sunlight, the smallest of plants could not compete, underfoot to the mighty giants that stood tall in the distance. Of course, if they went further in, they would run into vines and other things that would require a machete and hours of time to pass through.
But they wouldn't go in that deep.
"It's been a while..." Emiya sighed almost nostalgically, wondering whether those primeval giants still stood in those far-off jungles he had trekked through in another life. He could clearly still remember, how perfectly straight they seemed; those dark looming pillars of ages past and beyond, natural cathedrals that stretched as far above as the eyes could see.
"Did you say something?" Shepard asked, walking up to his side.
Emiya blinked, realizing he had spoken out loud just now and shook his head.
"Sorry, just musing."
"...Musing?" Shepard tilted her head at him curiously, as if she had never heard the word.
"Thinking back. Or something like that," Emiya said with a shrug, thinking that it would be enough to end the conversation.
But Shepard only seemed to grow more curious, noting that he did not seem nearly as lost as they were and that he even seemed familiar with this place.
"About?" she asked, leaning in to stare at him as they walked.
Emiya felt slightly taken aback, not expecting her to continue questioning him, but he didn't let it show on his face as he continued staring straight ahead.
"Well, I'm grateful for this hardsuit right now. It wouldn't be anywhere near as nice here without it," he said, half-deflecting.
She didn't seem to understand what he meant, frowning at him.
"You might not realize it with just your face bare and feeling the wind, but it's hot and humid out here. Normally, we would be sweating buckets by now," he said with an amused smirk, pointing up at the glaring sun. She frowned again, turning thoughtful as she looked up.
She wasn't sweating, but it was hard to tell given how much her body had been changing during training.
Before, being sweaty had been something she had immediately noticed about herself, but some time during the past few months, she... simply stopped noticing. Or caring perhaps. She had to actually focus on the sensations to recall they existed now. Only her face felt particularly warm, but not enough to bother her. The suit really did feel comfortable on her: neither too hot nor too cold, regulating itself to a comfortable level to allow her to keep moving without any discomfort.
"Huh. Yeah, I guess you're right. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like walking around without the suit," she said, grinning a little.
Emiya made an amused huff but did not say anything more. He too had noted how little they sweat, which threw his internal checklist for rest and hydration times into conflict with his internal clock. He didn't even feel thirsty yet, despite all that running and climbing earlier. Quite different from what he had been used to from life. It almost felt like he was in some measure a Servant, who needed neither rest nor sustenance.
Not that he was complaining.
They continued, arriving at a strange flatland as they began to circle the city towards the RV point. The ground must have been paved for miles in thick asphalt, as only the toughest of weeds had begun to grow through the cracks. A thick, swaying sea of green undergrowth grew everywhere around it, though. Collapsed buildings dotted the landscape, like some ancient beasts' skeletons as young trees grew here and there as the prelude for what was to come.
It looked like some old industrial area, with storage buildings or hardware facilities all around them.
In ten more years, Emiya wouldn't be surprised to see this area having turned into the beginnings of a jungle, like the terrain they had passed through earlier. It wouldn't resist the return of nature any better than the suburb had, it was only a little bit behind on schedule. Still, with the remnants of solid asphalt crumbling underfoot with each step, their pace grew considerably.
It stretched on for at least half a kilometer, Emiya judged as they moved from cover to cover. To avoid being detected from afar by the naked eye, it was essential to consider the basics of camouflage; the silhouette and shape they cast against the background; any colors standing out from the background; unnatural reflections of light from metal or plastic; stark shadows standing out; sudden motion and the sounds they made, could all reveal them even to someone quite afar.
Thus he took care to choose routes that hugged collapsed buildings and large bushes, walked through shadows and shade, went below the highest peaks of small hills and crests as far as the flat terrain permitted. All in all, it was a rather pleasant walk outside on a beautiful day, even if it snaked up and down.
But as pleasant as their walk was, it had to end eventually.
Whizzzdzzts—
"Huh, what was—" Shepard perked up at the sound past and behind them.
—boom
Emiya's eyes widened, his hand reaching out for Shepard and grabbing her wrist as he fell down. She made a grunt of complaint, as all the air in her lungs was pushed out by the fall, wresting her hand free a moment later to reach for her pistol.
"What the...!" Cassani called out from further back, falling over with a thud and oof.
A second later, the second shot came over their heads, whizzing past. The sound of the gun followed a second later.
—boom
"Missed," Emiya noted, checking his own kinetic barriers, and then the status of the two adjacent barriers noted in the upper corner of his HUD, for Shepard's and Cassani's status, as they had all linked up their omnitools earlier.
Shepard was fine, but Cassani was in the red.
"Wha—What's going on?" she asked, noticing only now Cassani's blinking kinetic barrier.
"A sniper," Emiya concluded.
"Huh?"
"The delay between the shot hitting Cassani's barrier and the disproportionately loud gun report suggests a long-range sniper," he clarified distractedly. For a moment, he wondered how it was shooting in the first place. Their guns had to be tuned down in order to not risk their shields failing, but that would mean that the minuscule bullet they fired would not be able to hit anything at a distance due to loss of energy and drooping arc.
Not unless the gun's computer was automatically ranging and performing calculations for velocity correction, still keeping it just fast enough. He had distinctly heard Cassani's kinetic barrier crackle before he had heard the shot, which meant a supersonic projectile.
A weapon with that kind of power would still punch through their armor and kill them at closer ranges.
"Cassani, you okay?" Shepard asked, crawling towards the fallen and still form lying on the ground.
"Uh, kinda can't move here. Says I've got a 'shattered spine, minor internal bleeding' here. That's bad, right?" Cassani spoke up, quietly, as if someone was sitting on his lungs.
"Yes. Congratulations, you're crippled for life," Emiya answered easily, still keeping low. "Well, for the duration of this exercise anyhow. I'm surprised you aren't dead."
"Oh... Well. Shit."
Cassani sounded fine, Emiya noted with amusement as he turned his attention back to the distance.
The projectile must have been shot with enough energy to carry it all the way here, but not so much that it would punch through their kinetic barriers.
So the sniper rifle shot at a higher velocity than the other weapons so far, but because of the distance it was used at during this simulation, it would still slow down enough not to be a problem against the hardsuits and kinetic barriers? That must mean some sort of automatic range calculation took place; probably as part of the software they used for the exercise.
Could be those mainframes they mentioned doing the heavy lifting and keeping us all so very safe...
Which should mean a lag in firing when switching from long to short distance. He could use that.
Glancing at the radar, he found nothing except their three signatures. Out of range, obviously, as he had already judged from the sound of the firing gun. He didn't know how supersonic the round was, but it still had to be some ways off for him to notice the difference.
"Shepard, get Cassani. Stay low and drag him over there with you," Emiya said, pointing at the remains of what had been once a fairly nice two-floor house, painted yellow with a red tile roof, once upon a time. Even as new those walls wouldn't have provided any protection against a mass accelerator, but it offered enough concealment that hitting them would be difficult. "Call me over the comms once you're done."
Shepard nodded and began to crawl, staying low enough that she could not be seen as she made her way to the downed Franco.
This left him with some time to think.
Perhaps if the sniper had long-range sensors or set up area control measures, the concealment the walls would offer would be useless, but given that they hadn't been shot through just the grass yet, that seemed unlikely. He's got roughly the same level of sensor suite as we do, then.
Now, what to do...
They were down one man and being engaged by an enemy with a superior position and weapon. Ambushed. They should disengage and retreat according to conventional wisdom. But Emiya didn't much fancy that, since while only one out of three in their unit was down, in practice their combat ability was down to below even a third, since one of them had to drag Cassani around now, completely breaking their formation and combined sensor setups.
Mobility, ability to detect enemies and concentrate fire, to disengage and spread out to cover more ground and perform flanking maneuvers... Their ability to do any of those things had been severely crippled. Their fire team was effectively dead in the water.
They needed something to even the odds. Something like a nice sniper rifle.
First of all, he would need to get to the sniper.
Well, that wasn't a problem. With his experience when it came to long-range combat and the two shots he had heard, he had plenty of information to make a few educated guesses as to their assailants' location. He had already been eyeing the terrain around them as they walked, noting good locations for ambushes, traps, and firing locations for various kinds of weapons anyhow.
Additionally, he could cut it down to just three good places where the shots could have come from since the point of origin for both shots hadn't changed, suggesting the more entrenched options. Assuming the sniper was alone, of course. With blue team operations, there was usually an additional spotter who made it a two-man team.
He's alone, Emiya thought, however, even if he couldn't quite place his finger on why he thought so just yet.
With technology like automatic range finders and sensor suites, most of the spotter's duties could be handled by an omnitool program, but that didn't mean anything by itself. But, a two-man team would have set up to press their advantage in an ambush, whereas a lone sniper should have already moved on to a secondary firing position to avoid being detected and to get a better angle while they were still scrambling about with their faces in the dirt.
But I can't hear anything.
His earlier floating conclusion clicked, a rationale emerging from all the experiences and training he had accrued.
A lone sniper.
He had shot the rearmost of their team to buy himself another second with the rifle while they scrambled with confusion. Generally—if you hadn't drilled specifically for this kind of scenario—if someone in front of you was shot, you would react immediately—if only with shock at first—whereas when someone behind you was shot, there would be that additional moment of confusion from trying to figure out what was going on.
It would give the sniper enough time to aim for the next target, extending the window of opportunity of the ambush just enough to add one, slightly worse, shot on top of the first good one.
It was textbook. Too textbook.
Cassani had been shot in the gut, blowing out his spine but missing all the organs that would kill him instantly. Why not aim for the ribcage and lungs, or the sniper's triangle to silence the first target if the plan was to not startle them with the first shot? A slow, painful death like the gut was for loud bait, to force comrades to expose themselves in open terrain. Not this grassy meadow where visibility was zero below waist height. There was none of the personal flair that came with experience and skill, the small touches and tactics that reflected the sniper's mindset and thinking.
And even though Emiya had immediately dodged for cover with Shepard, reacting to the ambush as quickly as humanly possible, the second shot had been too hasty and hadn't predicted the second-in-line Shepard's movements at all.
The shooter was new; inexperienced. Probably not much older than they were. Another of the recruit hunters, then. So he would hesitate now. Seconds had passed since the first two shots and no flank or pressing assault was coming, confirming that the sniper was alone.
Of course... It might just all be him reading too much into it. The simulation wasn't guaranteed to simulate a one-shot kill, the sniper might have just been instructed to shoot far below the less-protected face, hitting the torso was much easier than the more mobile upper body... But the kinetic barriers handled all the 'damage' just fine, and he had all the time in the world for that first shot.
He felt confident in his assessment.
But Emiya couldn't just react with all the information he had gleaned from two shots and seven seconds of inaction; that would be too suspicious to anyone who could read the flow of combat. Already his ability to instantly react to an ambush, when such things hadn't been drilled into them yet, would be clearly suspicious. Who knew how much information these omnitools really could gather for the commanding officers overlooking this exercise, besides? So even though he already knew where the sniper was, he couldn't simply act out as if he had read the script beforehand. He needed to play a part to avoid raising further suspicion.
But the omnitools' data gathering did give him an easy out.
Emiya exhaled slowly and felt his plan click into place; fifteen steps, with variations and checks to see if his initial assumptions held true or as things could change. His old instincts began to resurface, the steel re-aligning itself in his bones as he turned back to the skills he had cultivated as a deluded murderer of men.
Four seconds had passed since he had ordered Shepard to go for Cassani, and Emiya turned on his omnitool. He navigated the menu, finding the connection to Franco's hardsuit.
"Cassani, give me access to your interface," Emiya ordered switching to comms, having paused as he was stopped by a password query.
"Huh? Yeah, okay." The answer came back, half-dazed and panting, scraping sounds against the hardsuit coming through muffled.
He continued, going through the other's hardsuit functions until he found what he wanted. A vid-feed from the helmet popped up, showing what Cassani was looking at in real time, struggling to help Shepard drag him. Emiya smirked, checking the options.
Rewind.
"Gotcha," Emiya said with a smirk.
He pulled up the map on his omnitool in another tab, placing a small dot that represented Cassani on it and then aligning the paused vid. On the frozen screen the kinetic barrier was flashing as it stopped the bullet, visible as a blue bubble rippling out, like the surface of water disturbed by a falling stone where the center almost formed a reverse crosshair, drawing a straight line out into where the sniper was hiding.
Right where Emiya had already reasoned out he was.
Based on this could see where the shot had come from, both on the horizontal plane as well as in the vertical. He closed the omnitool and looked around, mapping out a route forward and to the south. He needed to advance diagonally, to force the sniper to move his rifle from its current position and zero its calibration, forcing that lag to work constantly against him.
"Emiya, got Cassani and we're by the yellow rubble."
"Good. I've got a plan," he replied. "On my mark, I need you to start running toward the big ruin on your left. The sniper is to your right, along the other collapsed houses. Get a position there where you can overlook the sniper's position and that big house still standing further ahead." He paused. "You copy all that?"
It would be pincering in the sniper while also checking for any additional hostiles, who might still be in reserve.
"Right. Mark, run up and secure the flanks at the big ruins. Got it."
"I'm moving out. Hold position."
"Copy."