Chapter 556: Chapter 556 Round up and Clean up
Avery gritted his teeth as he grabbed ahold of his dislocated right arm.
With forceful movements, he aligned it back into place and shoved it back into its socket. Eliciting a sharp pain for a moment.
He could feel his body already getting to work healing the injury, but that still did not mean it did not hurt.
Once he was certain that his condition would stabilize soon, he turned his gaze towards the abomination that had managed to cause him a great deal of trouble.
It had been the last of the mutated creatures to go down, and by far the strongest.
Unlike most of the others, its body had not been bloated with oversized muscles or misshapen appendages.
This monster had been far closer in appearance to the person it had once been, though whatever had been done to them had left them visibly grotesque and a mindless beast.
Nevertheless, it had been astonishingly powerful, and while he was not completely certain, Avery had a good idea as to why it had stood out from the other mutated people.
’The flow of energy around it had been strange. As if it possessed psionic abilities of its own. It did not seem to affect anything outside of its own body, so it could have been something else. But my gut is telling me that I’m on the right track.’ Avery though, thinking back to his fight with the monster.
When it arrived, it tore through four people before anyone could stop the thing.
One of the members of the power armored squad slowed it down enough for everyone else to get away, but they lost their life as well before Avery could arrive.
With him holding its attention in a fast-paced melee, the rest of the team surrounded the two of them and began the process of wearing the monster down with a ceaseless barrage of laser fire.
Eventually, it went down, but not before killing two more people and giving Avery some serious injuries.
Along with the dislocated shoulder, he had several bruised rips, deep lacerations over most of his body, and he was certain that he had torn something in his right ankle.
His fast regenerative abilities were already hard at work to repair all of the damage, but he looked like a mess and his ruined exosuit was soaked in his own blood.
Unfortunately, the specially designed exosuit had not been able to hold up to the intensity of the battle.
It was not even just the damage incurred from his opponents either. Avery’s own strength had proven too much for the suit to handle.
He had clearly gotten stronger since Grito had measured his physical capabilities and tailored the equipment to him.
’I’ll have to have a new one made once all of this is over. For now, though, I have to listen to some reports I really wish I didn’t have to.’
Avery pulled himself together and found the officer in charge of personnel.
They had already taken a headcount and figured out how many casualties the battle had cost them.
"From our team, we lost nine people. A couple minutes ago, communications were reestablished with Liesel’s and Burke’s squads. It seems that they fell victim to an ambush and trap set by the entire remaining security force on the station. There could be more as they apparently have a lot of wreckage to search through, but five casualties have already been reported."
"As for Ezra’s and Olivia’s squads, they encountered similar creatures to us, though only eight instead of the nineteen we fought. They reported several serious injuries, but no casualties."
After listening to the report, Avery closed his eyes and tried to calm his roiling thoughts and emotions.
This was not the first time that he had lost people, and it almost certainly would not be the last.
Being a mercenary was a dangerous profession, and no matter how well prepared they were, or the quality of the weapons and gear, people were still bound to die.
Avery wanted to blame himself for each of the deaths, but he knew that doing so would not help.
The Odium Syndicate production facility had simply been far more dangerous than expected.
The battle out in space had gone exceptionally well with only a couple surprises that were easily dealt with.
Perhaps that had made Avery too overconfident in their infiltration. He had not imagined that they would encounter the resistance that they had.
’Was there anyway we could have known about those monsters? No. We could have collected information on the place for years and never found out. None of the data retrieved from the station’s main commuters even hints at such a project occurring here. The Odium Syndicate would want to keep experimentation like this as closely guarded as possible.’ Avery thought, his firsts clenched so tightly that his hands were going white.
While there were plenty of people out there that would write off fourteen deaths as an acceptable loss for completing a mission of this scale, Avery was not one of them.
He could not just accept their deaths as necessary.
As the one in charge, he felt it was his duty to do everything he could to keep everyone alive.
However, sometimes it just was not possible. Even as he continued to grow stronger, his best still was not always enough.
’I was starting to believe I was basically invincible and unstoppable just because I have a bit of power. But there are still plenty of things out there that I can’t handle and can easily kill me if I’m not careful.’
Feeling his frustration growing, Avery punched the closest wall and left a heavy dent in it.
After that though, he contained his overflowing negative emotions and hid his feelings under an expressionless mask.
Now was not the time for him to lose himself to grief and anger.
The station still was not fully under their control yet, and he could not expect his troops to continue working if he could not get his act together.
There would be time to unpack everything later, but that time was not now.
Once the fallen and injured were taken care of, Avery took the lead in sweeping the base.
Most of the enemy combatants had already been dealt with, but there were still thousands of people onboard the station that needed to be captured and detained.
Not in the mood to deal with any annoying complications, Avery had given order that anyone that resisted was to be eliminated.
Certainly, this was a callous command, but he was not going to waste any time or resources on those that did not immediately surrender.
No one here was free of guilt.
They might not have known about the ghastly genetic experiments going on that had created mutated monsters, but they certainly were complicit in the creation of Paradise.
"Sir, we just received word from Olivia. It seems that she and Ezra have found where the monsters originated from." The individual in charge of communications told Avery while they were sweeping through the habitat section of the station.
With no other major threats having presented themselves in a while, he took a small squad with him to investigate the hidden lab while the rest of his team continued searching for and capturing the people that worked in the production facility.
It took around twenty minutes of traversing the station’s corridors, but Avery finally reached his destination.
Olivia was standing outside of the demolished doors that had once sealed the lab, waiting for Avery’s arrival.
"We’ve already made sure that there aren’t any more of those creatures inside. Ezra has the place secured, but it doesn’t look like anyone survived those monsters. It’s not pretty in there, but we figured that you’d want to see it yourself."
Avery nodded at Olivia before heading inside himself.
The first thing he noticed was the rancid smell of chemicals and death assaulting his senses.
It did not take him long to find where the scents were coming from.
There were dozens of bodies scattered around the area, all of them torn to shreds.
Some of them appeared to be the people that had once worked here, but others were wearing fancy clothing and had expensive accessories on them.
One of the bodies caught Avery’s eye, and he quickly recognized the shredded corpse as having been the station manager, Bartholomew Carlson.
Avery honestly did not mourn the man’s loss, but he had wanted to get information out of him before handing the guy over to Cerise.
Though, after the deaths among his own people, Avery likely would have arranged for Bartholomew to have a painful "accident" before he could be delivered to Alliance Police custody.
’Well, it doesn’t look like his end was a peaceful one. I’ll just have to consider that enough.’ Avery thought as he took one last glance at the look of terror frozen on the man’s face.
