>>5969227Speaking of the alien adversaries. The covenant counter-attack force was still in the middle of figuring out what they were going to do next. The elites were apparently all the same rank, and appeared to be arguing with each other, at least according to what could be picked up from the tone of their speech and what few parallels you could draw between human body language and theirs. The jackals were skiving off in their own groups, and the few grunts that hadn’t been assigned to picket duty were instead goofing off. Giving the first fire team ample time to rig up anti-personnel mines in the corridors just beyond where the pickets could see.
As such, when the Covenant finally stepped off, -with jackals in the front and back, grunts in the middle, and the elites mingling among them- nobody spotted the small disc-shaped devices until the formation was almost halfway past them. First blood went to the marines in a shower of grunt as the fragmentation mines went off almost instantly.
Over the course of the next nine minutes, the Covenant assault force was under near constant attack. When the aliens tried to advance too quickly, they’d run ankle-first into mines. When they went too slowly, a pair of marines would jump out of a door they’d passed and empty a magazine into them before running away. And throughout it all, Diana did her best impression of a poltergeist.
You have to hand it to the AI. For a cyber-warfare AI, she <span class="mu-i">really</span> messed with the Covenant. She played the sounds of marines running through the speakers in nearby corridors, to give the impression that the assault force was always being outflanked. She cycled the lights between off, on, and strobing. And she’d randomly set off the activation noise for the doors, causing the Covenant troops to jump and aim their guns at the offending entrance. Sometimes she’d even open said door, revealing either; nothing, a brace of anti-personnel mines, or a remote-firing light machine gun ready to dump a 50-round belt into whatever it was facing.
But no matter how slowly they went, the Covenant force pressed on. The jackals at the front and rear of the formation locked their shields together in a phalanx, providing a decent amount of protection against gunfire. But they were replaced as the lead units, as unlucky grunts were sent ahead to clear any mines in the way with their own bodies. And the grunts really had no choice but to obey, given how one of the stout aliens was simply shot when it tried to return to the formation before a length of corridor had been cleared.
>Cont 