POST #1
“Incoming!” howled a Force Corps Auxilia Trooper, as a cluster of concussion missiles ripped a section of a street block.
The missiles exploded as they impaled the street, uplifting concrete and durasteel, spraying it in a downpour of projectile debris. The chunks of Bastion splattered into armored personnel vehicles, pinned down by the advances of more powerful Sith
All-Terrain Heavy Enforcer [AT-HE]. The unit had been pinned down by a unit of Armored Sith Trooper companies. Hordes of Sith Troopers supported by All-Terrain walkers had held up their advance into the central causeway that ran up to the Imperial Palace. They were all hunched behind cover, whatever cover was possible. Bombed out residential towers, burning carcasses of repulsortanks or, laid down prone in artillery ruptured craters.
The Auxilia Division pinned down by this onslaught was trying to engineer their own escape. The main chunk of the Force Corps, all of their Knights Battlegroups had been pulled to the right flank of the Sovereign Imperator himself. The Imperial Force Knights where there as well, as they were commanded. Led by the High Knight Marshal herself. Help, if any sort, wasn’t coming. The commander of the 99[SUP]th[/SUP] Auxilia Troopers, a near-human named Dexo Krav, was sat behind a smoldering tank with his surviving division staff.
“We’re fracked,” he said.
“This cover wont last another one of those missiles vomits sir!” chimed an officer.
“You don’t think I fethin’ know that?!” barked back Dexo.
“We could set up heavy repeaters in the buildings, funnel them into a kill zone,” suggested another officer.
“We’d need to run out into the open to set that up. We’ll get blasted into oblivion before then,” warned one.
“It doesn’t matter!” Dexo yelled, trying to shout over a deafening explosion.
“We can’t retreat, we can’t lose ground. There is no retreat point from here on out!”
“We gotta move! We move, we live. We stay, we halt, we die!” Dexo punctuated his lecture with a slashing gesture across his throat with his thumb.
Dexo rose up slightly, bracing himself against the hull of the tank. He motioned for his men to follow. They all rose cautiously, mindful of cover and the spewing shrapnel that rained a clattering melody as it peppered the tank’s side.
“We form up in small teams, two or three and we move through the towers. Keep to cover and we surround that S-IMP Walker and divide and conquer. Understood?” Dexo said.
The officers fell silent for a moment, but nodded and finally replied,
“Yes sir.”
“Alright then,” Dexo said.
“Force and the Imperator be with ya’boys.”
They separated. Formed their teams. And launched their desperate charge. When the teams fanned out from their cover to run into the bombed out towers they were immediately beset by cover fire. Some torn by Sith Trooper snipers, others by armored vehicle rapid fire, and some by the AT-HE’s guns. Dexo’s team were close to the crumbling entrance of a grand residential tower when a missile erupted above and showered them with fire and debris. Bloodied and crawling Dexo was hell bent on reaching his target. Some of the teams were moving past him. Some stopped to pull him but, he slapped them away.
“Get to your target damn it!” he cussed at them.
“Just get there and move,” he whispered.
Another missile was blazing its way towards him. He eyed and smiled. But, the missile froze. Suspended in some paralysis that made it jitter in place, its rocket still spewing fire and smoke efflux. Dexo watched the missile vibrate in the air, held in place with shock. His mouth gapped open and his eyes widened. Standing beside him, was the High Knight Marshal herself. She was before him, both hands out, controlling the missile with the Force. Her white armor was scorched with blotches of blaster fire burn rings, her black camp torn into tattered streamers, and her insignia’s barely visible from the erosion they had suffered. But, nevertheless she stood like a goliath. The Shield of the New Imperial Order. Dexo heard a cry and turned his head slowly, fighting the pain his body howled at him to view an entire division of Imperial Knight storming behind them with reinforcements.
A sudden horror came over Dexo that provided an adrenaline to his body helping him to jolt up to his knees. In laborious and stumbling struts he tried to reach his commander.
“Marshal!” he called out, he continued ignoring any etiquette that otherwise was demanded when addressing the overall commander of all the Imperial Force Knights.
“What the fething hells are you doing here?! You should be with Knightsgroup Center!”
“We’re just a flanking decoy ma’am! The Center needs you!”
“We can be lost! The Center can’t!”
“We know our duty!"
"We’re the expendable ones, not you!”
Zovesa still holding off the missile said nothing for a moment. Her fists were shaking as they pulled on the invisible reins that held the missile in place. Slowly however, the missile began to spin around. More fire came down as she did, but other Imperial Knights moved to guide, deflect and redirect them away. The missile was then fully turned to point back at the AT-HE that was baring down on them.
[MUSIC CUE!]
“Not, to me…” Zovesa growled back over the comms in the helmet.
“What?” Dexo replied in reflex.
“You’re not expendable to me!” Zovesa said, before releasing her fingers and then releasing missile which flew back into the AT-HE erupting one of its chicken leg limbs into a fireball.
Zovesa spun around and grabbed Dexo and with Force Speed leapt aside into the cover of the tower’s entrance Dexo had been crawling to. There she lowered him down took off her helmet. Her brilliant red eyes glared deeply into his black visor. She rested her hand on his shoulder.
“This tower is our home now Colonel,” Zovesa said.
“It is our world, like Nirauan.”
“It is in your hands now, protect it.”
She put back her helmet and stood up. Igniting her sliver saber, she sprinted forward and then became a blur as Force Speed propelled her legs in cavernous leaping strides into the fight. Reaching the open street, she ran up a wreckage of a landspeeder and jumped into a unit of Sith Troopers. The Force which fuelled her superhuman run surged into her fist as she landed and unleashed a Force Blast comparable to the craters created by the missiles. It flung Sith Troopers around and took concrete of the street with it. A dust cloud plumed and Zovesa used it as cover to toss her saber out and send it in a slashing crescent to clear any follow up from surviving Sith Troopers. Having drawn their attention, the other Imperial Knights and reinforcing Auxilia Troopers charged forward in a full on assault.
DK-03
