Contact Alpha

Battle Against The Beast

Was my prayer answered?

Were my cries heard?

I do not know.

What's happening in front of me is nothing but miracles.

B'ars are gigantic and dangerous beasts. A massive creature whose skin and fur thick enough to shrug off arrows and sword strikes. They have the strength of a dozen adult men and can easily lift a horse drawn carriage. Their deadly weapons are their four massive arms, each as big as a tree trunk, with claws as sharp as knives. Along with a powerful jaw that can crush the hardest of skull. Each of its strike can easily smash a log in half. Finally, they have the ferocity and agility that is deemed impossible for creatures of such immense size. 

There are even rumors about some species of b'ars deep inside the elven great forest that can cast spells and use magic. They are undoubtedly one of the most formidable animals in this world, just behind the likes of drakes and wyverns.

According to what I read in that book in my uncle house back then, to take on even a premature b'ar, a team of at least tier 3 adventurers and above is required. But this b'ar is a different story. It is much larger than a regular adult b'ar. It looks to be on the scale of an elder, which is even deadlier than a fully grown adult b'ar.

I remember that traveller used to tell stories of an elder b'ar that resided in the northern mountainous canyon taking out a party of three adventurer teams, all of which are tier 4, with a tier 5 leading them. After the battle, just 6 out of the original 13 strong party returned, while only managed to cut off one of its arms and poke out one of its eyes. The tier 5 warrior was the first one to get half of his body bitten off.

And yet here it is. An elder b'ar, roaring in pain as two of its four arms are easily blasted off as if they were made of paper. Its blood stain the ground in front of it.

I feel a strange vibration in the air. So I turn my head to the left. Something flew past me from the bushes. A strange blurry shape resembling something like a person.

For a split moment the shape stops, and I can see it clearly. That is indeed a person.

No, not just a person, but a warrior, covered from head to toe with darken black armor. His face is featureless. There is nothing in the place where the eyes are supposed to be, the same can be said for the nose and mouth. The entire face consists of just plain smooth blackness. He is carrying a long piece of weird metal, with multiple bright blue flashes shines on one end. There are small streams of white smoke coming out from the glowing part, smells like hot forge metal being dipped in water. And his most striking feature is that this warrior is very large, way larger than any adult man I have ever seen before.

Yet he is able to move at such mobility, approaching the beast with unbelievable speed and agility. Each step of his legs stomping the ground is clearly felt by my still collapsed legs.

Then some thing came out of his shoulder and bounce off the ground near the still growling beast. Landing near my sister's body...

...?...

Wait...

Where is my sister's body?

There's only a puddle of blood where her body used to be.

What is really happening?

What is going on?

Then suddenly, darkness embraces my vision. My ears follow suit as I can no longer hear anything anymore. Something has reached out from behind me then covered my eyes and ears. At the same time, what feels like a hardened arm of a person finds its way around my waist and hug it tightly.

The next thing I know...

I was lifted off of the ground. All the while hearing many loud blasting sound through even my tightly covered ears.

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Talon Alpha. Local hour 0602. Location unknown.

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The shot finds its target. Taking out both of its arms thus eliminating its ability to strike.

Well, half of it to be exact. Since this giant bear has up to four arms.

The shot went through its target, penetrate several tree trunks and disappear in to the woods. Its now detached arms lie motionless on the ground and the bear roars furiously in pain.

That is exactly what you will expect after taking a direct impact from one of these wonderful pieces of gadgets, The ER4 Railjack rifle. This gun along with many of my squad's equipments are all extremely high tech and highly classified. Many of them are still in the process of development, field testing or prototype phase. Given only to some of the top tier strike teams, task forces and elite units. That of course, includes Dellta Six.

There are many tiers in our military systems. Ranging from tier 4, which are your regularly trained soldier boys, to tier 1, where ultra elite special force branches like Quasar, Spectra or Delta reside. We are Delta Six, belonging to "tier zero", which is a hidden and even higher tier than tier 1.

As the name suggest we are indeed a part of Delta, but at the same time, not. We do not exist in any form of documents, in any form of papers, data or information. Our existence is shrouded from the public and any speculations are denied by the governments. We exist only in rumors, gossips and debates in the comment chains of Raddit of Quore. We are only acknowledged by the highest military commands and sometimes, reports directly to the leaders of UEC, or United Earth Council.

While extremely good at pretty much all form of military operations, every special force branches has their own distinct specialty. And they are very good at what they do. Delta are just like how they were formed more than two centuries ago. A branch specialized in internal and planetary covert warfare, they are still the elite force you have known from back then. Still managing to somehow keep their highly valued profile after so long. Though they are slightly less secretive and covert compares to back then, after more than 200 years of existence and several reforms. According to some historical information I have learned from the data banks back at HQ.

Members of Delta Six can either be recruited directly from the top pools of Delta or other forces and branches, picked from the very best of each. We are quite similar to Delta, from what they do to their level of elite and professionalism. The difference is that other than being able to execute planetary operations and fight in an 'internal' environment, what Delta mainly do. We are also trained and equipped to deal with or fight in extraterrestrial and alien environment. As such Delta Six members or Sixers are extremely proficient when it comes to specialized off planet combat, interstellar special operations, dangerous new worlds explorations or dealing with unprecedented circumstances and scenarios. We now mainly deal with interstellar terrorism, separatist rebels and other internal politic factions on non-Earth worlds as well as spearheading exploration on specially marked and hazardous planets. We are also trained for possible contact with alien life forms, both sentient and not. Though this is the first time we have ever encounter intelligent alien life forms.

There is in fact another "tier zero" other than us within the USG, and even more when you count tier 0 from individual nations. But that is a story for another day. Right now, I need to focus in taking down this big guy. This is made way easier now with these new toys we have.

These high power weaponry are given to us after a Sixers team encounter some large alien predators on other planets. Those that we explored in the past. They encountered some sort of giant sand-digging worm like creatures and almost got eaten, their weapons are designed to be anti-personnel and not anti-giant-monster-things. They made it out just barely thanks to their combat engineer teammate who overloaded his fusion batteries and toss them into the monster's gigantic mouth. That was just one, there were many more incidents where we encounter dangerous alien plants and animals. So from then on, we are equipped with high power weapons, in case we run into more physically superior aliens fauna or flora, like this bear over here.

The Railjack rifle is designed to penetrate the entirety of the target and destroy its organ. The sheer velocity and energy behind the projectile with the pressure it create is large enough to deal multiple small kinetic explosions in the softer inner flesh once the target thick scales are penetrated. Hence why the bears arms just exploded. The down side is its slow charging rate, which is about 30 seconds, and its deadly front blast zone. Also the victim its holding is still barely alive, clinging to her few last life signal. I can not afford to shoot full power, in order to not let the shock wave emanating from the firing blast takes away her last breath. So I switch back to 40% charge rate at the last second. But even then the gun still did some significant damage. These things are just really powerful, aren't they?

The bear, now done roaring switches its gaze at me after hearing my shout from earlier. For a split second I can see raging anger from within its red eye.

"Talon 2 here, T1 safe and secured," Baker's voice is heard In the comm, confirming that he has that girl I dashed pass who were on her knees in his protection.

"Talon 5, T2 safe and secured. Attempting first aid," Then comes Doc's voice. He has gotten hold of the poor victim and is probably treating her right now.

Now that both civilians are out of the way, combat can now commence. The bear attempts to stand up and is about to charge.

It is looking directly at me while I'm loading another slug into the rail... And then it roars rigorously again while using its remaining two arms to covers its eyes.

Yeah, bears do not know what flash bangs are. And that was not even a flash bang, that was a 9 bang. Which is a flash bang but nine folded. I activated it the moment the bear moved. Apparently one is not enough. One is in fact enough, we are not using the ancient stun grenades anymore, these are modern ones. So why the nine fold? Well ask the bunch sitting in the USAF council. They regulate the usage of these things.

Anyway my GMOV is still on so I immediately dash away, keeping the distance against the target while I recharge my rifle again. The 9-bangs did wonders as the bear is now falling on its back, half blind and deaf.

There are many ways to clear a situation like this. We were exposed with thousands of scenarios where we would fight large and tough opponents in our training simulations. Both the egg heads and the Commands came up with these imaginative scenarios, then put us through training with them. As such I have a lot of options to choose on how to kill this thing. But I disregard all of that as I know someone in my squad was being very eager to test his new gear.

" Talon 3," I utter a single word of command into the comm. And immediately receive a short reply with a slight hint of excitement.

" Got it. Clear angle,"

Me and the rest of the squad, including Baker who is holding onto T1 and Doc who is treating the poor victim T2 retreat away from Mont's front view, where he is pointing his barrel at. I almost didn't notice but Mont in his suit is about half the size of the giant bear, that is a really big bear.

Still in a confused and stunned state the creature has no idea what's about to happen to it. As the former Juggernaut point his weapon at it, the mid section of his gun start to spin faster and faster. Dust, sand and leaves start to get sucked towards the weapon. A humming sound similar to a ship engine can be heard getting increasingly louder.

Then, an ear shredding thump sound blast out and what follows up a few milliseconds later is the sound of flesh getting smashed. Like the sound you hear coming from automatic meat processing machines in butcher factories but way more gory and heavily bass boosted.

The poor creature turns into a thick fog of red mist...and multiple blobs of jelly spreading all around.

What Mont carries is the first prototype of an experimental weapon platform, what's known as Graviton weaponry. Gravity manipulation has been discovered quite some times ago and it is use mainly in non FTL space travel. But up until recently, new advances in technology has allowed for gravity manipulation to be applied to a multitude of other different fields, like medical or combat. So in the classic way of the human, we took it and weaponized it.

Mont's gun is designed to shoot projectiles carrying a Graviton core into the target. The weapon compresses surrounding gravity into an incredibly compact ball surrounding a core in the projectile and then discharge the round using electromagnetic coils. Once a target's armor is penetrated the Grav core collapses and the gravity ball implode.

And the result is quite gruesome. The sheer kinetic energy released from the implosion just detonated the entire beast from the inside. Without many physical restrictions and limits, Graviton weapons deals significantly more damage than regular chemical based explosive. What's left of once a ferocious monster is now just a blob of red jelly like organs, furs and bones. Its blood splattered all over the place, dying the ground and the leaves in a crimson red. I didn't notice before but it seems that these aliens also bleed red blood. Unlike other aliens species we have encountered.

Then, sounds of mechanical parts breaking down are heard. Mont's gun barrel begins to break apart after shooting once.

"Looks like the pressure was too high for it," Mont exclaims " Well these are prototype anyway, prototypes break all the time. Deman you got the stats?"

"Afirm. All weapon stats recorded, next version should be better."

"Just thanks your luck that the thing didn't implode on you." Doc adds in. He is the medic after all so of course he is worried about his teammates' safety. He has always disliked the usage of new experimental weapons and systems due to their rather questionable safety. But really, what can we do? We got direct orders from the tops to use them. Honestly, I admit that even I feel a bit excited to try all of these new gears. I mean pretty much all of the special forces are test beds for the R&D folks, if anything we would most likely be the ones to survive if things do go south, instead of testing these dangerous toys on a poor USAF marine. And then there's also the technological advantage of having equipments an entire level above what everyone else uses.

I then move my eye to the top left of my visor. Looks like our perimeter is clear, Deman has been keeping the donut up there to provide us with more situation information.

And so with that, our squad first ever alien rescue mission has been concluded. And now that all threats are taken cared of, I switch my attention to the two unfortunate extraterrestrial souls that got themselves into this mess. Especially the one who is gravely mangled by that bear.

She also bleed red.

Just like us.

These two looks no different to normal civilians who survived a terrorist attack.

This makes me subconsciously hope for her survival, even though I know for sure she will make it. With Doc mending her up and all.

"Talon 5, Talon 2, sitrep," I ask my men about the current situation away from the battleground. When we first split up, Baker went for the girl on her knees while Doc would obviously go for the injured one. Deman kept the surveillance with the donut, Miller went with Mont and I tried to separate the monster with its victim by shooting the arms holding her. So that Doc could pick her up and retreat away to treat her. Like many good combat medics he couldn't stand witness to dying civilians.

"Talon 2 here, T1 safe and sound. A bit calmer now but haven't spoken a word. And she has been staring at you the whole time," Baker reports through comm. So it seems the little one is fine. That's good to hear, but now the injured one.

"Talon 5, she has extremely weak life signal. She lost too much blood and the shock from the attack broke many bones as well as many organs," I can hear heavy breathing from him. He is indeed trying his best to save lives, like he always do, " Scheiße, inner organ is a mess. Come on, don't you dare die on me."

We then regroup at where Doc is. After snatching her falling limped body in mid air, he dashed back as far as he could behind the frontline and put the girl's body on an portable emergency med bed underneath a shaded area. Multiple medical kits, first aids kits and stem kits are scatter around where he stand as he works restlessly to stop her bleeding.

"Evaa? EVAA! Aun zis maein Evaa? Zu donviz heeir?"

We suddenly hear the voice of a girl screaming out in an unknown language. We turn our head around to where the voice came from.

The girl Baker was holding jump off of his arm and ran toward Doc where the other girl is.

It seems the girl lying over there is an important person to her.

She runs as if her life depends on it.

All the while screaming out loud.

"Zu donviz vu maein zis Evaa!"

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"A combat medic's job is no different to a doctor's. They fight the same battles. To save lives and fight back against Death no matter who the victim is. The difference is that combat medics themselves also play the part of Death as well."

Talon 1 - Squad leader - Master Sergeant Terian Ial Joner