Durgama Takeover

This battle report is set to be happening concurrently with another 150 point game featuring Petra and her team of Tunguska troops. Read Part 1 first to get added context to this one.

https://durgamatakeover.warconsole.com/battles/razek2648-vs-moonunit14-1658380997

CSU's do not normally get an Lt option, but my opponent agreed to let him be the Lt for the sake of the narrative!

Larry had departed the Green Zone before Petra's team did. The Bow was a bit further away, and with the alertness of the Combined Army, Bravo team was forced to move a lot slower than Alpha team. Nomad Command had been made aware of an EI corrupted artificial intelligence in the Bow. Despite ALEPH obviously wanting it disposed of, for fear of infiltration and corruption of nodes, the Nomads agreed that it was too much of a liability to humanity as a whole to try and preserve. While the Nomads were always looking for ways to undermine ALEPH and its control, capturing a corrupted AI within Arachne nodes posed an equal threat, if not a greater one to the Nomad Nation as a whole. It needed to be destroyed.

The team had to be small. With the Hasselhoff running simultaneous operations throughout Raveneye in the Hatsune Miku's absence, the tactical team was spread thin. It wasn't that they didn't have the numbers to send full strike forces out to either section, but more because High Command needed a constant presence in the Port Battery to maintain control, which led to the large majority of the Hasselhoff's sizeable tactical unit being committed to defensive tasks.

How Larry ended up as team lead, especially when there were trained leaders among the Hasselhoff's ranks beyond Petra, was anybody's guess. Not even Larry fully understood why he of all people was given such a responsibility. He hardly felt like a leader, at least in the tactical sense. And while the crew, minus Petra, all cheered Larry on for receiving such an appointment, everyone knew it was a strange call made by the Hasselhoff's captain. Gin, the second-most senior Reverend aboard in the Hasselhoff's Observance detachment, seemed the far better choice to lead. Though she didn't seem too broken up about following Larry's lead.

Tagging along with Larry and Gin was Joy Troublesome. When it came to hacking servers and destroying rogue AIs, the uberhacker was the obvious choice. And if she would fail, Drake of the Evaders Tactical Group packed enough explosives for a more primitive solution. The Hasselhoff also appointed one of its more recent operators to Larry's team. A freshly trained Sombra who had much to prove to the wider crew and her wider regiment. Sheva Alovera remained separate from the team as they approached the Bow section. Her expertise was in EVA maneuvers, and she could infiltrate the Bow ahead of the team if she moved in alone along the exterior of the Raveneye's hull.

"This is Sheva," the Sombra reported as the team neared its destination, "We might have a complication."

The team went silent when they received the report. Larry slurped his coffee and calmly responded on his commlink, "Go ahead."

Sheva laid prone atop a covered power transformer, her optical camouflage keeping her hidden from sight as she stared at a patrol of Ariadnan Frontoviks. "We got TAK," Sheva said plainly.

Drake straightened his back and looked at Larry. Larry blinked, "What the hell are they doing here?"

Sheva went silent on the commlink, prompting Larry to inquire again. "Wait," she said.

Larry crossed his arms and tapped his index finger on his other arm while he waited for Sheva to come back on the net. It was a grueling forty seconds. But she did come back. "Sorry, I was eavesdropping on their conversation... Seems this patrol is trying to secure the AI. Said something or other about an AI helping Ariadna catch up in the tech scene."

Gin narrowed her eyes at that and came up on commlink, "They probably don't know that the AI is infected. If they get it, they could expose Dawn to a catastrophic collapse in their network. They don't have the firewalls on Dawn like we do."

Larry furrowed his mustache and thought on it whilst slurping his coffee. "So we stop them then."

The Evader nodded, "They'll see us as enemies after what happened to their kill team in the Green Zone. On a sensitive op like this, they're gonna shoot first and ask questions later."

Joy Troublesome spoke up, "Well they haven't been doing us any favors in this mess. And if they're stealing artificial intelligence, I doubt they've got this mission on the books. Something tells me Ariadnan command isn't going to come looking for a single covert patrol of Frontoviks in Combined Army territory. In the end, we'll be doing Dawn a favor."

Drake spoke next, "I'd rather not be giving handouts to Ariadna, but that AI could spread to other places in the Sphere if we let 'em off with it." He cocked his Spitfire.

Larry nodded and spoke back to Sheva, "Alright. Stay where you are, Sheva. We'll link up with you shortly."

*Click! Click!*

Gin blinked and looked around. "You here that?"

*Click! Click!* "Oooh good shot!" *Click! Click!*

Larry nodded, "Yeah. I do."

Joy walked toward the source of the noise, just up ahead, and stood behind a metallic crate. Only the crate wasn't metallic. It just painted with metallic paints. Upon closer inspection, the crate was just cardboard! She looked at the rest of the team with a quizzical expression. The rest of the team shrugged back.

*Click! Click! Click!* "Oh man this is the story of a lifetime!"

Joy grabbed the box and flipped it aside, revealing a WarCor with the symbol of the Nomad nation on the back of his jacket. The word PRESS labelled just above the emblem. The WarCor stopped what he was doing when the box flipped up. He rolled on his back and shielded his face with his hands while immediately panicking, "OH MY GOD! DON'T SEPSITORIZE ME! I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY!"

When he didn't immediately get his cube infected with EI code, the WarCor whimpered and slowly lowered his hands from his face. He saw a team of Nomad stand over him. "Oh! Uhh... Hey, guys." the WarCor said as he got to his feet.

Drake pointed his Spitfire at the WarCor, "What the fuck are you doing here?! How much did you hear?"

The WarCor shot his hands up in the air, "Don't shoot! I had no clue you guys were here! I was looking at the Ariadnans over there!" he pointed off to his side.

Larry followed his finger and saw the team of Ariadnan troops that Sheva had pointed out. They weren't alerted to their presence just yet. But if they stuck around, they've most certainly be seen. Drake stepped forward and grabbed the WarCor by the collar of his shirt, "You idiot! This is station is off limits! Not only that, but it's a fuckin' warzone at the moment!"

The WarCor nodded, "I know! I know! But I couldn't help it! The people of Bakunin wanted to know what all the hubbub with the Corregidor was all about! I figured I'd check out the source of the chaos and hit up Raveneye to see what's going on!"

Gin blinked when he mentioned he was a Bakunin reporter. She had spent such a long time with the Hasselhoff that she nearly forgot this man's identity. "Wait a minute..." she said.

The team looked at Gin. She pointed accusingly at the WarCor, "You're that bastard who wrote the report talking about how us Moira's are dressed like total sluts! And that we're just begging to hook up with people!"

The WarCor nodded, apparently satisfied with himself, "That's me! They call me-"

Gin interrupted, "The Current Kaiser! I know! Do you have any idea how many guys the Moira's had to kick out of the Observance chapels after that report went out?!"

The Kaisar shrugged, "Sounds to me like potential recruitment opportunities!"

"No! A lot of them may have been studs but we're very picky about who gets to be our Sin-Eaters! And forcing our Custodiers to screen through nearly forty times the average amount of applications was a bureaucratic nightmare!"

Larry cleared his throat, "Could we maybe settle this when we're not standing a few hundred meters away from a hostile patrol?"

The Kaisar blinked and looked between Larry and Gin. Then he did a double take on Larry, "Holy shit, I know you!"

Larry stopped, "What? You do?"

The CSU nodded, "Yeah! You were on Issue 99 of Sphere Hair Magazine!"

The rest of the team tilted their heads and looked at Larry for answers. Larry cleared his throat back, "Well... It wasn't the focus or anything-"

"No no! You had a whole interview with the magazine writers! Page 49!" Kaisar said.

Larry scratched the back of his head awkwardly. Gin immediately looked at her commlog to look this up and corroborate the Kaiser's claims. While she searched, Drake spoke up, "Isn't that the one with Achilles on the cover?"

Now everyone looked at Drake. Joy spoke, "Why do you know that?"

Drake shrugged, "Hey, receding hairlines are a bitch, alright?"

"Holy shit!" Gin said excitedly as she stared at her commlog, "You're telling me that my one true love is FAMOUS?!"

Larry nodded slowly, "Uh, yeah... Everyone knows Achilles is famous."

Joy slammed her palm into her face. The smack was loud enough to attract some unwanted attention.

"Hey, guys? Did you do something?" Sheva asked over the commlink before continuing, "Something just got the TAK patrol's attention. They're heading your way."

Joy blinked and looked at her hand. The palm was red. "Ah shit..."

Drake let go of the WarCor. "We'll have to deal with you later."

The Current Kaiser nodded emphatically, "Sure, sure! Lemme just get in a position here so I can watch this!"

Joy shook her head, "No, no, no! You aren't walking away from here with anything."

As Joy said that, she waved open her holographic hacking interface and completely wiped the Kaiser's camera database. She then proceeded to lock the camera to it couldn't take any more photos. The WarCor frowned. Larry cleared his throat and waved the WarCor away, "We're going to need to take you back with us. Just find somewhere safe to hide for now while we take care of this."

The Kaiser sighed and grabbed his cardboard box. "Fiiine!"

Larry moved underneath the catwalk ahead and set himself up underneath the stairs. He'd need to take a role at the rear to command and control his team! He remembered how Petra did all of her command and control through the station's cameras, so he looked over to Joy who was situation just a few meters from him, "Can you patch my commlog into the station's CCTV?"

Joy blinked at him, "CCTV? Uhh... When are you from? The Early 2000's?" she paused, realizing she was speaking with an ex-mall cop, "Forget I asked. But yes, I can patch you in."

Larry looked at his commlog, seeing the camera feeds all appearing on screen. Joy had even added in an IFF subroutine to the cameras to allow him to see who was who. He saw Drake using his suit's magnetic palms and foot soles to climb a building and get into a strong position to utilize his LMG. Gin had moved up the stairs to the catwalk to meet the Frontovik patrol head-on. But knowing she would initially outgunned, she ducked below the barricade to wait for the right moment to attack.

The team's silent Transductor Zond moved into a building, waiting for the moment it would be of use to the team aside from boosting the team's comms net. On the roof of that building, the WarCor had found a comfortable spot with great angles. Now that the strike team was focused on the Ariadnan patrol, he slipped his hand into his jacket's inside pocket and pulled out an old analogue camera. The kind one would get from a vending machine. There was nothing digital about this thing! And thus, no way Joy could wipe it!

Sheva spoke on the commlink again, "They're between us and the server stacks with the AI in it. If we're gonna get to the server, we're going to have to go right through them. I hear Frontoviks are no joke, so lets not underestimate 'em, yeah?"

Larry cleared his throat, "I'm in charge here, new girl!" he said, "Listen up, team! Frontoviks are tough nuts to crack! No heroics! Respect them for their skill in combat and don't do anything reckless!"

Sheva blinked, "But that's what I sai-"

"Yes, sir, sir!" Gin interrupted Sheva with an affirmative to Larry's command!

The Frontovik team spread out by the book to handle a frontage against their unknown visitors. With the team fanned out and ready for fighting, the first Frontovik cautiously moved up the stairs onto the catwalk to get eyes on whatever caused that strange smacking noise. As crested the small set of stairs, the Frontovik was immediately greeted with gunfire from two positions. A machine gunner on a nearby roof opened fire with tight, short bursts to find his range. The tracer rounds gave away the Evader's position. He thankfully had cover to stop the rounds, but the adaptive camouflage on his combats did well to ensure the Evader's shots remained cautious and spread apart. More concerning to the Frontovik, however, was the appearance of a Nomad in very close range to him. Brandishing an advanced breaker combi, the Frontovik knew that one good hit from that would see him hospitalized, or worse.

He walked his rifle onto the Sombra and opened fire, hoping the cover would hold against the armor piercing rounds of the Spitfire coming from the rooftop. It did. The Sombra's rounds also pinged off of the steel barricade. But the firefight continued, and more rounds spat at the Frontovik. This time, he wasn't so lucky. His rifle rounds made purchase on the Sombra, but her armor appeared to hold against the rounds. But a single shot from the rooftop gunner punched into the Frontovik's chest, and he fell back onto the catwalk floor, heaving for air.

"He's down, take another target." Sheva said calmly.

The rest of the Frontovik team began exchanging potshots with the well hidden and entrenched Nomads, but neither side could find purchase. Amidst the chaos of the opening firefight, an Ariadnan Wardriver appeared on right before Sheva. She aimed her breaker combi down at him and fired a blast from its underslung shotgun. The Wardriver, having been alerted to the Sombra's presence, wasn't taken by surprise, and he had already had his boarding shotgun ready for action. The two fired off at each other. The buckshot spat in every direction, the armor of both troops holding against the onslaught of pellets.

The Wardriver jacked his hacking device into one of the room's central consoles, another shotgun blast miraculously pinging off of his armor. Getting the data he needed, the Wardriver fell back. Sheva's HUD flickered and glitched a bit, tipping her off that she was about to received a hack from the Wardriver as he dove into a building to break line of sight. Sheva tried resetting her systems to prevent the hack from getting through, but it did anyways. She felt fine surprisingly, but a quick notification from Joy told her that she had a digital highlight on her that her camouflage was good for squat.

Joy looked through the camera feed and saw all three of the server stacks that the rogue AI could have been in. It wasn't worth their time or resources to hit all three, so Joy had to filter out the unaffected ones. She rushed ahead and jacked into another console, easily breaking through the Raveneye firewalls and identifying the corrupted server stack.

Knowing that the Wardriver was likely brought on this mission specifically to extract the AI, Mary understood that he of all of the Ariadnans had to go. "Larry, I can nuke that Wardriver, but I'm gonna need the transductor's repeater to get to him!"

Larry nodded and swiped to another screen on his commlog. He tapped away at it and inputted his orders for the simple remote to rush over behind the crate that Sheva was situated on. Mary, seeing the new digital signature of the Wardriver, grinned and immediately began to remotely break through the Wardriver's simplistic firewalls and upload a Trinity program. The Wardriver was notified of the breach in his firewall and tried sending a Carbonite program back through the breach, but Joy wasn't an uberhacker for no reason. Ariadnan hackers were leagues below her level. The Trinity program uploaded, and the Wardriver's body seized up. He started to foam out the mouth as he collapsed on the floor, convulsing from the deadly neuro-hack.

Larry studied the camera feeds and saw a way to slowly whittle down the well positioned Frontovik firing line. Watching cameras for anything exploitable was a security guard's most important job, of course! He saw one Frontvik who had climbed his way into the relative safety of a building's balcony. If Gin was able to peak just barely, she could fire on him without incurring the wrath of the rest of the Frontovik squad.

"Gin! Shift left just slightly and you'll get eyes on one of 'em!" Larry said.

"You got it, sir!" Gin said, doing as she was told.

Gin's ODD fragmented and distorted her image, making it difficult for the Frontovik to make out what he was looking at. But he knew whatever it was, it was certainly trouble. He recklessly fired a burst of fully automatic rounds at the distortion, but managed to achieve nothing. One thing was for sure, though, that the distortion was absolutely hostile! A handful of rounds flew out past his head and just barely missed him!

More shots spat from the distortion, and the Frontovik abandoned any sense of ammo discipline to hopefully hit whoever was in the distorted space. But Gin's shots were the more accurate ones. The shock rounds tore into him, and the deadly toxin-tipped rounds caused cascading failures in the Frontovik's nervous system. He collapsed dead on the spot.

Seeing the Frontovik go down, one of his comrades realized that they were starting to get picked off one by one. He quickly calculated the angle from which the shots come from, and deduced that the shooter was closing in on them quickly. Gin was crawling forward to surprise the lead Frontovik on the catwalk. When she reached a good firing position, Gin stood up and began spraying shock rounds at the man. But the Frontovik was ready. When the distortion appeared, he squeezed his trigger and spat three rounds into Gin's armored breast plate. The T2 tipped ammunition ripped through the armor easily and sliced through Gin's L-Host body easily. She fell back on the ground. "Agh... Shit that... Fucking hurts...!"

Larry cursed, "Gin!"

"It's... okay, Larry! The Observance will... Resurrect me." Gin said before the life in her body faded away.

Larry made a note to recover Gin's cube before leaving the Bow. The last thing he would have wanted for Gin was for a Combined Army patrol to come across her body and harvest the cube for sepsitorizing.

With their team getting slowly picked apart, the Frontoviks took a few seconds to reorganize the team and figure what their options were. With some quick hand signals, the Frontovik that had taken out Gin was told to take over control of the fireteam. He nodded and poked over his cover again to try and take care of the Evader on the roof. Drake returned fire, supported by Sheva.

Sheva's rounds went wide, not hitting anything. But Drake didn't need the fire support. His short burst of LMG rounds hit their mark, putting the leading Frontovik down on the ground. Seeing their comrade go down so soon after taking control, the other Frontoviks pulled back slightly to start breaking contact. Sheva fired at a female Frontovik as she pulled back, the breaker round passing through her body armor easily and severing her spine. The paralyzed woman collapse to the floor.

Sheva spoke over the commlink, "One more down! It's just this one left!"

The Frontovik shouted angrily in Russian and held his position. Sheva interpreted it as 'If I'm going down I'm taking all you bastards with me!'

He began to fire wildly, pinning down the Nomads. Larry ordered the transductor up to try and blind the shooter and clear a path for Joy to get to the server and wipe it. But the Frontovik snapped his rifle onto the remote and shot it down relentlessly. Larry bit his lip as he thought, but his thinking was cut short when he received an alert on one of the cameras. A Combined Army patrol was alerted to the gunfire in their zone and was closing in. They just didn't have the time. "Ahh crap! The CA is coming, we gotta clear out of here! Joy, think you can make a mad dash and scrub that AI?"

"I can try! Gonna be hella dangerous though!" Joy said.

"If you're not feeling good about it, say so now. I wont send you out there if you think you can't make it." Larry said thoughtfully.

"Nonsense! I have like... Ten L-Hosts lined up for me back on Tunguska! Not really a big deal if I get shot up here!" the uberhacker replied.

Made sense, uberhackers were hot commodities in Tunguska, and whenever one emerged, the Tunguskan Jurisdictional Command would shell out exorbitant amounts of credits to keep their ace infowarriors in the game. "Alright, give it a shot then." Larry said.

Mary took a breath and climbed up on top of the container she was situated behind. Mary tried to dive off of the container once she got on top of it, but the Frontovik's blood rage had him zeroed in on her the instant she crested the container. Not even Joy's ODD could stop the wild gunfire coming at her. Just like Gin, the T2 rounds shredded her body to pieces.

Drake spoke over the comms, "Well shit! Boss, we're going to need to get their cubes before the CA arrive! Even though we couldn't scrub the AI, Ariadna isn't getting it either. I'd say that's something worth celebrating, even if the CA get their hands on it in the end."

Larry nodded, "Yeah, I think you're right."

The wild gunfire from the Frontovik came to an immediate halt. He had run out of ammo. The man cursed in Russian and tried pulling ammo from his dead comrades, but all of their suppressing fire had bled them dangerously dry as well. Now that the gunfire had ended, Larry emerged onto the catwalk with his arms raised. The Frontovik went to draw his pistol but he found his hand intercepted by the Sombra.

Larry moved over to Gin's corpse and drew a knife while looking at the Frontovik, "We're getting out of here before the aliens show up. You should do the same!"

The Frontovik spat on the floor and spoke in English, "Just like that?! You kill my fuckin' team and now you're turning tail? Coward!"

Sheva gripped the Frontovik's wrist tighter, "We killed your team because you were about to make a serious mistake. The AI you came here for is corrupted. You were about to expose your entire planet's security network to the CA. You're lucky we didn't just let you walk off with it."

The Frontovik stared angrily at the Sombra, but Sheva's blacked out helmet made her completely unreadable. "How do I know you're telling the truth? Maybe you dirty nomads just want the AI for yourselves!"

Drake climbed down from the tower and hoisted Joy's body over his shoulder. He looked at the Frontovik, "We came here to kill it, genius. Or blow the whole server room to kingdom come if we couldn't do that. Your little moment in the red haze just bought the CA enough to find to figure out what was happening here."

The Frontovik heard alien alarms and guttural Morat voices echoing down a corridor. They were getting closer. He yanked his hand from Sheva's grip. "Where do I go, then? Ariadnan command will deny any part in this mission. I can't come back empty handed."

Sheva looked at Larry, who was just finishing up a very messy extraction of Gin's cube. He sighed, thinking about what to do with the Frontovik. "So you can't escape the CA on your own, and you can't go back to your unit..."

Drake stepped up behind Larry, "New blood?" he asked.

Larry nodded, "Come with us then. The Nation has a way with welcoming estranged fellows. I would know."

The Frontovik looked between the remaining nomads with skepticism, but all of the hostility seemed to have vanished. He was out of options, all except for Larry's. "Very well..."

Larry pocketed Gin's cube and gestured back the way they came. "Let's go then. We don't want to be spending any more time here. Oh... What's your name by the way?"

The Frontovik fell in with the Nomad team. "Misha."

Larry shook his hand before the team escaped the room seconds before the Morats arrived. Petra was going to love this.

As they left, Drake thumbed back toward the room they were fighting in. "What about the WarCor back there?"

Larry shrugged, "What WarCor?"

Drake smirked.

Had a bit of a delay on getting this one out! I ended being far more exhausted yesterday after work than I was anticipating. But it is done now, and the Hasselhoff's double duty has ended! While Petra's team was successful, Larry's team ended up in a draw with the Frontovik patrol.

But things weren't a total loss! Larry's team of Nomads prevented a corrupted AI from reaching Ariadna's unimpressive data network and causing absolute turmoil on the planet Dawn! Maybe there's a medal to be had somewhere for that. Unfortunately for the heroes, this mission will likely never reach anyone's ears. Maybe that's for the best, though.

Anyways, it seems the Nomad Nation has gotten a new addition! Misha the Frontovik found himself in the care of Larry's team after being the sole survivor of their firefight with the nomads. Not wanting to leave him to the merciless Combined Army or leave him abandoned by Ariadna command, Larry welcomed Misha into the Nomad Nation. He will be a returning character, though likely not as a Frontovik. Regardless, Larry is sure Petra will be okay with Misha being taken in to the Hasselhoff's crew!

This battle report is set to be happening concurrently with another 150 point game featuring Petra and her team of Tunguska troops. If you haven't yet read Part 1, follow this link to see what Petra's team was doing during this firefight!

https://durgamatakeover.warconsole.com/battles/razek2648-vs-moonunit14-1658380997