User:K4/Chronicle 1: The Hill

 Part 1 of the Chronicle saga, a collection of short stories regarding K4's characters. 

Colton Jackson's eyes still dazzled with blindness after that last grenade went off. He groped about, searching for his weapon. Faster. Where is it!? Another explosion, farther, but it's decibels still rang in Colton's ear. Will was somewhere off to his four o'clock, his big MRG-274 churning out bullets in the Covenant's direction. Where the fuck is it!? He crab-crawled, still groping, still blind. He had to hurry. Seraphs flew above, still engaged in their fast-paced fistfights with Longswords. The constant drone of missiles and cannons and plasma tangled with the whiteout of his vision to throw him off as he still scavenged for his gun. ''Godfuckingdammit! Where! Is! It!?'' In a rush, his world turned black, then colored. Grass, scorch marks, gopher holes, dead Sangheili, Kig-yar and Humans, debris, collapsed buildings. The Hill. He quickly assessed his position relative to that landmark. Due north,northeast, a squad of Sangheili closed in on his team. They resisted, Will, Jai, Kelly and Anton, all of them, fighting back, making those split-chinned fucks pay for every inch they clawed into. Blood, both crimson and violet, mingled and clashed, dying the battleground before them a hideous black. Fuck this, fuck them, fuck it all! He withdrew his Magnum and fired 3 rounds towards the Sangheili. Their personal shields flared, and one of them turned towards Colton. He pumped more rounds into it, and it returned fire, although it's aim was impaired by the vibrant shield fluctuations that swam across it's body. Bolts of white-hot plasma pocked the ground about him, but his aim steadied, and the last round in his magazine broke through, putting a 12.7mm Magnum bullet through his opponent's frontal lobe. It fell with a wet splat into the blood-soaked ground before it. Colton's hand automaticly went for a fresh clip, but it found nothing. He searched his Load-Bearing Vest, but no M6 magazines were present. ''First, the BR runs out. Then I lose my secondary. Now, THIS!?'' He threw the heavy gun away and continued to crawl towards The Hill. Kelly, whose MA5B sprang empty, turned and ducked at the same time, behind a holed-out dumpster. She spotted Colton and keyed her mike. "Captain, where the hell are you going?" Colton forced himself to break eye contact and continue for dear--well, his, not so much--life. "Sir!" She called again. He ignored it and scrambled. Almost there. An explosion caught his attention, and he panned back, to see Jai's upper body gone. His bloody abdomen fell dumbly to the deck. A sobering wave caught Colton's chest and squeezed his heart. ''What the hell am I thinking? Running away from my squad?'' He then realized that he had allowed his fight-or-flight instinct, his animal desire, to overcome his tactical judgement. He raged in himself and finally chose to face the enemy, not to run to a pick-up that may or may not have been shot out of the blue by now. He picked himself up, and ran towards them, those bloodied faces, burnt bodies and resilient spirits. "Just noticing how many of them there were, Gunney. What have you three been doing?" Kelly snorted as she racked her rifle's charging handle and handed it to Colton. "Just fighting for The Hill, sir." Colton accepted the weapon as she drew her M6C sidearm and fired from cover. Colton rushed to Will and patted his shoulder. The SAW gunner didn't even stop firing and grunted acknowledgment to Colton's prompt. "We're going up," He shouted over the big machine gun's din. "Rear guard, cover!" "Yes sir!" Will replied enthusiasticly. He stopped firing, long enough to pop out his near-empty drum magazine and to slide in a new one right next to him. Colton bellowed on the TEAMCOM, "Team, move to The Hill, double time!" Kelly and Anton charged up the dirty ground to the big dirt lump, pumping their heavy-laden boots. Colton was next, following his team, who was covering his approach at the Apex of The Hill. Will, began to rise, when a rouge plamsa grenade latched to his MRG. He reacted quickly, tossing the weapon from him and dashing up the dirt mound. The weapon pulsed and detonate in a brilliant flash of gray, blue and brown. Debris from the ruined gun pelted the Hill team, and they covered their eyes from damage. It was long enough for the Sangheili team harassing them to pump bolts of Plasma into Will's backside. Vaporised flesh and muscle forced the man to the ground, screaming in agony. Kelly was at his side, that moment, grabbing the reinfoced grip on the collar of his LBV and tugging him to the top, with Colton, Anton and Will himself--firing his sidearm, despite the near-fatal wounds in his back pulsing with angry pain--covering her. At the top, they took a second's refuge behind the sandbag wall before moving again. Colton's PLATCOM crackled to life, his extraction Pelican's pilot giving him news an operator never wanted to hear. "Echo Team, our LZ has been compromised due to heavy resistance close to your location. Proceed to Lima-Zulu-Bravo for extraction, over." Oh, no! No fucking way!