Location: Coruscant streets, near Beyer hospital
Wearing: Shadowsuit: (
http://starwarsrp.net/topic/129460-maple-hartes-shadowsuit)
Absorbelt: (
http://starwarsrp.net/topic/102333-absorbelt/)
Armed with: Mark One Pistol (
http://starwarsrp.net/topic/20759-heklerkok-special-edition-blaster-mark-i/)
VT Sliid Gun (Tranq rounds)
Coruscanti Typewriter (
http://starwarsrp.net/topic/40644-tenloss-type-8-smg/)
Uri's Cane: (
http://starwarsrp.net/topic/124421-uris-cane/)
Objective: Pick off the enemy, back [member="Ember Farseer"] if possible.
Maple had gone and volunteered the instant she new what was happening to peers from her prior occupation. And unlike a lot of operations, she did this one free of charge. Because
kark Non-Confederacy Sith. Confederacy Sith were not saints true, but a surprising number of them she had found were a damn sight better than these
insidious serpents that had spent years smiling, waiting for their victim to turn their back at just the right moment before driving the knife in. On a purely professional level, she could not help but appreciate the malicious sneakiness it had taken, the patience. But on a moral level she was disgusted, for it was the product of wicked minds who dreamt evil and bled venom from their veins. Everyone who engaged in this cruel deception deserved a saber through their skull.
Or bullets. Lots of bullets. And blasters. Maple had plenty of those. And she had this recreation of her old shadowsuit. And she was going to take advantage of that.
And so she had. She had been away from Jedi other than Matsu. But she could not ignore their screams. Not when she was packing an arsenal to help them with.
She had seperated from other CIS troops, intent on heading off any effort to frustrate evacuation attempts, as well as find any surviving Jedi and direct stragglers to evac. She moved quietly, methodically through burning streets, relying on her reflec coated suit to help her evade sensors and generally be hard to spot.
The shadowsuit's focus was meant to counter among the most common threats utilized by Jedi hunters...sonics and slug throwers. In a sense, that was part of the logic behind The Marksmen and their choice of cane sabers: The extra long, often cortosis woven shafts could deflect bullets in a pinch, whereas a pure lightsaber left you vulnerable to kinetic ammo. And there had to be a literal metric kark-ton of Jedi Hunters here. She wasn't worried about the troopers. The troopers could go to hell, she had killed enemy troopers like it was going out of style back as a Jedi Shadow. She had faced a hundred different kinds of infantry in a thousand other battles before coming out of self-imposed retirement. She knew the modern soldier. And while that did not mean she could always triumph, it did mean she no longer feared facing them.
Maple, observing with thermal vision as a group of commandos led by a fully armored and hooded Knight of Ren closed in the direction of Beyer hospital. Skip. Everyone and everything was made of cotton candy!
Chocolate flavored cotton candy. The good stuff. Skip. She was alone in the farmhouse, Zombie Anakin Skywalker seconds from kicking down the door with a shotgun. Skip. Back to reality, where she had discovered she had been a butterfly in a previous life. Her stomach had been just a giant rubber ball three seconds ago, but it didn't faze her much as the Knight of Ren stiffened, sensing her erratic, insane presence, but her madness made it difficult for him to ascertain her threat until she popped from cover, her Coruscanti Typewriter loaded with a stick magazine of forty-five caliber slugs that would soon be enveloped in energy. She was in the remains of a bombed out bank, about three stories above, having taken position the moment she sensed the danger and the approaching darkness of the Knight.
She fired in short, two second bursts, the energy enveloped slugs pelting three through three of their number and ducked as volleys of blaster and slug thrower fire peppered the window followed by the whine of sonic weapons. This wasn't regular infantry. This was death-squad quality. Force Hunters.
But Maple, once known as Uri Udinia, had been a Marksmen. And regardless of the success or even the validity of their objectives, one thing about the Marksmen could never be argued:
They were not afraid of death squads, alone or together.
Her Force sense whispered warning through her madness. The darkness of the knight had entered the building, along with several others. She scrambled up as a grenade was tossed through the window. She barely managed to slip into a stairway before it went off, though the compression wave was still close enough that she was slammed hard into the wall, knocking the air out of her, though she staggered back up, drawing her Mark One and snapping off three shots into the gaps between the duraplast chest plate of a black and red armored commando who had leveled a shotgun at her face as he advanced up. He was flung back by the impact, and she forced herself to rise and grab her tenloss and advance down the stairs, holstering her pistol, her saber cane sheathed on her back. She let off a sweeping, five second burst into the chests of two commandos who had tried to surprise her from the blasted open walls of a ruined tellers office on the second floor. One dropped, but the other only grunted, as most of the slugs had hit his comrade but one still winged him. He retreated firing a heavy blaster rifle, whose thick red bolts forced Maple to dive behind an overturned desk of an office cubicle ducking under the bolts as she sprinted, emptying her SMG into his direction. She ducked behind a cracked and fallen support pillar as heavy red bolts from the Commando slammed into it.
She took another of the four magazine sticks she had brought from a special ammo pouch on her left hip, ejected the spent mag put the fresh one in, cocked it--
--and was forced into a dive as she heard the thrum of a lightsaber heading her way. It sliced through the pillar from a downward angle, thrown by the knight as four other commandos joined him from the first floor, the red lightsaber returning to him. As Maple retreated into one of the closed in offices, where there was more cover, she stuck to the shadows, aided by the suit.
A heavy pistol bullet ripped through a wall and hit her right in the side, knocking her down as she felt a rib fracture. She swooned, bit her lip as she sprayed return fire through the wall nailing the Commando that had hit her. She coughed, survival instinct kicking in as she was forced to move from the aggressive tide of weapons fire that peppered the office as she flew out through one office window into what looked like a blasted apart tech support office.
Maple heard them shifting outside, the thrum of the knights lightsaber getting closer.
She snapped from cover and opened fire just as the Knight force-pushed her hard out an open window she hadn't spotted behind.
Maple, instead of panicking and flailing, dropped the SMG, tucking her legs into a rolling position as one hand shot out, catching the broken windowsil, the other hand drawing the pistol as her legs came down like a pendulum as she drew a bead on the knight firing. The knight, caught off guard by her acrobatics, still managed to impressively catch two bolts on reflex, but the shots had come too rapid, and the Knight still too off balance to catch the third, hitting his face plate and causing him to scream as he stumbled away, Maple force jumping back into the office barely getting under the return fire, grabbing the SMG as she landed, putting one bolt from her pistol through the faceplate of a commando as he sprayed the room she was in with a flame thrower. The wrecked room now on fire, Maple felt the silk from her shadow suit beganning to heat and knew she had to move. She force jumped through a hole back up to the third floor, and kept running as blaster fire ripped through the already damaged floor, causing collapses that she barely managed to clear, even aided by the Force.
Maple decided to try one of [member="Katrine Van-Derveld"]'s tricks. See if that Mandragora training had actually sunk in. She dived into a smoking ruin that had once been the rest area on the third floor, pushed the distraction, the pain out, let herself tentatively connect to her madness, felt the million lies in her skull understand the chaos behind the spell better than she ever could.
She dashed to an open space in the floor. She spotted them with her thermal vision through the smoke.
"MOTHER NATURE! A FIERCE COLD GUST VIOLENTLY BLOWS FORTH!" she screamed with all her might, holding her hand out towards them, concentrating with a tenuous embrace of her madness, the bolts already flying through the hole.
The blast of wind was so powerful it flung one of the heavily armored commandos into the knight, who had managed to get his bearings and had been about to leap up through another hole after her. The commando with the heavy rifle was flung backward also, but not before he managed to squeeze off a heavy bolt at the rim of the blasted through hole in the ceiling from which Maple had used the spell. The floor collapsed under her and she gave a yell as she fell through the ceiling, though her acrobatic talant let her land on her feet, ducking behind the newly made pile of flaming rubble that had once been the ceiling.
Maple forced herself to control her breathing. No panicked shots. She dropped her SMG in the dust, drew her pistol and opened herself to the Force, though with all the excitement she could only get a vague impression of where they were, and a general idea of distance. Training would have to do the rest.
As the heavy fire began to puncture even the thick flaming wreckage, she snapped from cover. Target one, equipped with a slugthrower assault rifle, firing in three shot burts from behind another support pillar.
Maple held her breath as the world slowed. A pull of the trigger and hideous red ate through the top left of the Commando's skull. A stray 5.56 millimeter round grazed her side from his gun as he fell.
Target two, heavy blaster man, having just dropped to one knee and aimed at her face. Trigger pull. The blaster tore into his throat and he dropped dead. Target three, sonic carbine user, geonosian make. Probably a war trophy from a confederate soldier having dived full prone and fired from twenty meters away at her torso just as she put a bolt through his eye. She took the hit, the sonic diffusers in her suit reducing the effect to a hard slap to her torso and a moment of painful high pitch and momentary nausea as she was flung back, though she worked with the impact instead of against it, using the way she hit the wall behind her to help her orient to target four, the man she had hurled into the knight, who had just managed to clear off the infuriated Kylo-fanboy. One shot from her pistol blasted the face plate into a smoking hole.
And then she was alone with the Knight of Ren. She rose, holstering her pistol, and ripping off the reserve SMG ammo from her belt and tossed it aside, drawing her cane. Viridian shoto blades popped out. One from the bottom end of the shaft, the other from the emitter hidden in the tapered end of her cane handle. The knight, still wearing his damaged, armored mask, snorted in fury, angling his lightsaber, at the bruised, bloody ex-shadow, a fine stream of blood from a cut on her forehead.
"That cane," the knight snarled. "I know that type of cane. Marksmen, right? I thought you had all disbanded."
"I take it you've been an beneficiary of the generosity of our rifles?"
The knight chuckled in spite of the way she had burned his face.
"Not 'till now. You Marksmen bastards murdered my wife. On Chandrila."
"Wrong." The ex-shadow said flatly. She remembered that mission, she stepped forward, point the bottom of her cane and its green blade at him.
"
I murdered your wife, filth of Ren. As I will murder you. Two taps, left frontal lobe. Just like your wife."
The Knight seemed taken aback, stunned. He genuinely had not expected that answer, nor the cold, vicious way the truth had been told to him. That was Uri poking through under the snow. Uri, in many ways, had become a monster during her time among The Marksmen. A useful monster that did not kill that which was undeserving, but a monster still.
He screamed, dashing forward with his red blade in a vicious, overhead chop that Maple drunkenly evaded, anticipating his wheeling overhead strike as she parried the vicious chops that followed, retreating from enraged but dangerously focused attacks that forced her to mostly twist and evade his swipes and thrusts meant to impale through her face or dismember her. She retreated still, back into the rubble from which she had come from hiding. She lacked the skill to duel him on his level and they both knew it. The blows and parries she blocked with her cane were merely buying time. She back flipped out of his relentless press of ever advancing heavy blows, the blade coming dangerously close to ripping her in half as she was slammed brutally backward blocking an extremely heavy blow, back toward the rubble. She struggled to get up, but the hot pain of electricity, the absorbelt reducing the heavy voltage to that of a slightly more powerful taser, making her scream, and she gritted her teeth hard as her muscles started to lock. Using all her focus, she flung her cane at him like a tossed pickaxe, and the lightning he was discharging from his free hand to electrocute her ceased as he was forced to catch it to keep the shoto in the handle from biting through his visor.
Maple forced herself to dive into the pile, fighting through the pain as she grabbed the SMG, emptying the rest of the clip his direction. He screamed as most of the bullets hit his legs, the energy enveloped heavy slugs breaking his knee caps as he dropped, bleeding heavily, his lightsaber flying away into the corpse of a civilian buried under debris.
Maple drew her pistol, staggering towards him, forcing herself to aim properly through fresh pain.
"Marksman
filth..." he choked out as she ripped off his mask, revealing a battle scarred man with sharply cut iron gray her. Maple shot him through the forehead twice.
"
Kylo wannabe." she said back coldly, though she slumped back against the wall and did not move for fifteen minutes, forcing the pain to go in the back of her mind. She sensed distress from a hospital close by, retrieved her weapons and ammo, and advanced. It was nearly ten minutes before she reached the hospital grounds, feeling a swath of dark presences. She advanced unhesitatingly after finding a way in making her way through the shadows and passages of the hospital, drawing her tranq pistol when she spotted a mass of crazed civilians about to bear down on a Jedi. She opened fire, seeking only to disable the civilians and gave the Jedi some breathing room to recover.
And maybe find a way to evacuate whoever was left safely from this messed up hospital.
