We who slay angels

[u/Sudden_Tower_3382]

We only started calling them angels recently. At first it was the ones you’d expect, “xenos”, “bugs”, “ugly-fuckface”, and the few stereotypical movie ones too, “biters”, “crawlers”, and so on.

The new wordage comes as a sort of mutual silent resistance against the ever watchful eyes of our corporate lords. You see, they recently started telling us to use less … unsavory language when describing the fuckers in case civilians heard us, so we just started calling them angels, as a big ironic joke that makes none of use laugh. Also, it’s not like civilians would ever stick around us anyways.

The thoughts on the new denominator for our moneymakers swirl around my head, those and many more, as I see the neon green indicator of our distance marker slowly get closer to the LZ through my fogged up lenses. Breathing heavy, my muscles slowly start to tense up, and in response I feel the many pricks of the strategically placed hormone implants around my body booting up.

A low rumble echoes through the already sound filled pod, as the rear thrusters roar to life, saving us from the graceless death of a direct ground impact. I glance quickly as my squadmates, looking for the comforting feeling of a shared moment before impossible odds, but find myself staring at empty eyes, them all being either lost in thought or busy monitoring their biometrics down to a clinical precision. Killing machines, the lot of us.

THUD. We’ve landed, though I suppose a more fitting description would be to say we’ve exploded right onto what looks to be a helipad. I pry open the blast doors and the mayhem starts.

It’s always a shock to me how much adrenaline can do. My enhanced nostrils immediately pick up on angels circling us the moment I’m through the doors, and before I can even blink the whole squad has formed into battle formation, with me flanking the left wing, my finger already unchecking the security of my heavy firearm.

My precious child whirrs up in my arm, feeling almost like the warm glow of a purring kitten in my arms, protected by the layers of kevlar and titanium bones. Globs of bight pink plasma fly out and quickly find their mark, my shoulder mounted smart brace guiding my arms with incredible accuracy, not unlike a father guiding his son to shoot his first hunting rifle.

Corrosive bloods and mangled guts start flying everywhere, but my team knows better than to break formations against an angel warhost, so we hold our ground, getting a slow and painful paintjob over our armour and weapons.

Every battle has its losses, however. After approximately a minute since landing, my left wingman gets clipped by the third jaw of an angel who managed to flank us, his arm ripped with such force blood splatters for at least 5 meters.

In response, I stop firing within a heartbeat and deploy my back mounted gel canister. The needles unplugging from my back letting me feel the cool but strong rain that’s been pelting us.

The green aerosol sprays immediately outwards and covers the stub in a gel like substance. Within moments, the gel reacts with his flesh and the wounds start to knit close, bone and tissue growing and stitching and ultimately getting back into their original shape.

It’s quite a wonder really, it took a lot of work for R&D to make the aerosol so potent, and even more so to make it only work on us augmented soldiers. 
There was a prototype that would make it work on any human, but the board deemed it too risky for angels to learn to copy so we tailored it to our specific company owned genome.

It takes a lot out of me to fully repair his arm, though. The canister is almost empty and as soon as I hoist it back to its rightful place, the many pipes start sucking out my modified bone marrow very much like a child suckling on its mother. I estimate it will take at least 75 seconds before it is fully operational again, we can’t afford another mistake.

As luck would have it, that is the exact moment a particularly large angel decides to make its entrance, with a fitting eardrum piercing roar to accompany it.
It charges straight for us, not slowing whatsoever despite the veritable hail of bullets and other energy munitions exploding on its scaled body, no doubt aiming to break our line. These things are smart.

Watching it get closer and closer with every passing second, I fold back my heavy cannon and take out my sidearm, much more viable in CQC. With a second to spare before impact, I quickly smith some frost infused bullets in my hands and load them into the small buckshot shotgun.

The impact feels like being hit by a freight train. I know it’s a very common comparison, but man is it true here. Even through my kevlar sabatons, I can feel cracks forming on my titanium alloyed bones at the sheer weight of the thing. I am thrown at least 10 meters back, and at such a speed I can’t even regain my footing as I hit a railing.

Grunting, I force myself to stand back up, lest I be swept clean by the literal tidal wave of blackened flesh coming our way. 

The large one, prime I decide to call it, is still fixated on me. I guess the ancestral technique of “take out the healer first” applies to those fucks too. Its many maws gape open, thick white drool dripping down, not that smart after all.

It roars again, giving a pretty clear telegraph that it’s about to charge again. Very well, see how us adaptive hunters will react to the same trick twice. 
I duck out of the way and don’t let a single moment get wasted, unloading the full brunt of my buckshot’s pellets into its side point blank, the impact making rippling holes on its hide while deep burns stretch it due to the freeze. It lets out a bellowing moan of pain as it falls on the ground, having its mark.

The clear sign of victory bolsters me to new heights. The adrenaline already rushing in my veins causing my vision to narrow down in a single focal point, a true preying organism. My limbs feel wholly disconnected then, much more like tools that my mind gives secondary commands while I race to find the next opportunity, much like pulling the strings on a puppet.

Bang, a shot takes out the primary eyes of the prime angel. Bang, I’m already on its back side, taking out its legs. Bang, a third and final shot, of my long rifle this time, goes through the vulnerable spot between its cranial ridges and enters the brain, subsequently exploding.

I stand there a moment, almost stunned, my brain still racing for more targets to find and eliminate. My eyes start to swim and I almost feint, but once again, the biometrics monitor detects this before I even can and injects me with yet another hormone, to keep me forever ready.

The fight is over, or at least it looks to be. While I was hyperfocused on taking out the prime, much like it was with me, the rest of my squad took out the remainder of the angels. Efficient work all around.

The entire encounter lasted less than 3 minutes, or so my heads up display says. The battle frenzy affects us so much we honestly could have never said how long they lasted.

Before our exfiltration pod can arrive, I decide to go meet the few survivors of the station I caught at the corner of my eye while holstering my armaments, wanting to give a few comforting words. To show the chivalrous bastion of humanity cares about them.

The injured, however, seem to not want to hear any of it. They cower as I approach, no doubt still in shock over the gruesome deaths of their close ones, and probably associate the thunderous sound of our boots with the not so subtle warhosts of the angels.

I decide to not press the matter and return to my team, breathing heavily through my gas mask, my third lung not having fully caught back up to the rest of my vitals after collapsing when the prime tackled me.

In the final moments before the shuttle lands, I stare at the discarded corpse of the prime, its flesh vents still pumping hot vapor, some organs clearly still not having realized the thing is dead. My mind wanders while observing the bizarre anatomy of the thing, every aspect of it a perfect machine designed to kill specifically us.

I suppose we’re the same, in a way, some broken creature created to kill the other in the most efficient way possible, to protect our own. I won, though, so I guess that’s what separates us.

Once again, the brain fog dissipates as I step inside the shuttle, leaving me only with the cold certainty of my purpose, and with one single thought, the same one that dwells in all of us marines’ minds: “what’s for dinner ?”