Beyond Evolution

beyond_npcs
beyond_evo

Everything went as it was meant to, as it had been seen. There had been a hundred ways each moment could have gone wrong and shunted everything just slightly off course, off enough to mean that the whole thing would fail but that had not been the case. All those hundreds, of little mistakes, those thousands of tiny errors hadn't happened, everything had fallen where it was meant to. Even the dead. Everything that happened, happened so that something else could or so that something else wouldn't. All these significant moments spread across a raging battlefield, the smaller force of impossibly brave mutants against the seemingly unending Sentinel threat that went on and on: From the Gen I relics to the Gen IIs, far fewer in number and now piloted no by mutants but by what was left of mutants, meat fused with the machines themselves, shades of people that had once been, to the Gen IIIs and IVs that could dominate a battle so easily. they were held back, put down, and it was all pushing the mutants towards victory.

The bomb was set in the core of the Hive, it was armed. The timer was started.

The device had been retrieved from the heavily guarded labs. The team were carrying it out.

The Sentinels were so distracted by the incredible battle going on outside that they had left minimal forces inside the Hive so the teams that had been sent in had been able to cut their way to their objectives. Not without resistance, not without loss, but with enough breathing space to do what had to be done, what could never have been done without the frontal assault. The losses were racking up, the terrible price they were all paying for this, this one chance to put right so much that had gone wrong with the world around them. Their time was short, their forces dwindling.

"THE BOMB IS ARMED. EVERYONE, GET OUT. EXTRACTION POINT, NOW."

There were various iterations of this after the initial voice of Layla Miller had crackled and screamed over the comm units, nearly drowned out by the cacophony of the fighting; team leaders relayed it to their troops, it was repeated as friends and comrades picked one another out of the dirt, grabbed one another by the shoulder or the hand; Everyone get out, everyone to the extraction point. They had done it, now time was counting down to a nuclear explosion that could destroy them all in the blink of an eye if they waited around. It wouldn't be easy, but what about this, any step of this from the first, had been easy? None of it. They didn't know what easy was these days, they didn't need things to be easy, they thrived in the fire of combat, they could do this. They had to do this.

Escape or die. Extraction or Eradication. Go.