Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 61: Warfall

*WARNING*
Graphic violence, gore, and disturbing content.

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Landfall rushed them.

Power armor pulverized the sand in twin plumes, right in the heart of the outpost. The impact rolled brutally up her body, and Kelly bared her teeth in her helmet as she collected her bearings, metal fist in the sand.

Battle was thick in the air around them, a dissonance of hardened honor clashing with that of fervent madness. Cries and shouts of chaos. In the open, their impact became the centre of all vicious intent. A bold move. Kells would not approve of Maxson's choice of landing zones. But Kells wasn't the Elder.

She heard the electric whir of Maxson's hydraulics as he rose behind her to take up battle, laser rifle already picking off targets in red bursts.

The world turned mute but for the echo of her breath for a moment. A red cloak flared. Sparks of red muzzle-flash surrounding her. Spatterings of red gore. Red cries. Red sand. Red sky. Red rage. Her vision. Red.

Red.

Kelly stood upright and brought her weapon to bear on the first raider unlucky enough to enter her sights. A red spear of laser set skin and armor alight, eating up the scream that spewed forth from tormented lips. Her first kill in so long. Too long. Her bared teeth turned to a grin.

"Do what you do best! Kill anything that moves!" she heard Maxson call out at her side, his voice rough to cut through the howls of dust and battle. "But stay in my sight!" His rifle warped off unrelenting fire as he cut down charging raiders in his view, aim snapping from target to target with the quick precision of a snake.

Kill. That was what she did best. Kelly spread out to give a rough five metres between them, then unleashed on her share of the meat. Her Tooth machete slid out from it's sheath to compliment the firepower of her laser rifle, adding a sharp chime of metal to the air. While those at range were turned to fire and ash, those in close-quarters were blocked, slashed and stabbed to crippled wrecks. It took little effort in her power armor to dual wield.

The raiders wielded an array of weapons, from simple machetes and spears to elaborate war maces, axes, and double-edged daggers. Some threw smaller knives and hatchets, all clinking benignly on steel armor. Whatever they wielded, they all just provided Kelly and Maxson a bountiful supply of dead bodies, and they were piling up into a circular layer of gore around them.

Together, they were untouchable.

The sacrificial rage was madness. Wasteful. But it gave clarity on just how many forces they had to spare with such tactics.

They could afford a war of attrition. The Brotherhood could not.

Killing her thoughts, Kelly focused on combat and swished her blade across the throat of a raider launching his machete at Maxson's blindside. His war painted face twitched, his breath choked on blood and bubbled up through the gash, and eyes were bulging at her before his limbs failed him and sent him to the soil. Another charging her was lasered down into a flaming skeleton, crisped to black. Then another. The next met her blade again, intimately. And the next, her upward arc slicing him from groin to neck. She connected her following strike into a downward crest, carving a raider through the torso.