(Untitled)

[capemods]

WHO: PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE
WHERE: Nominally Los Angeles, but with teleporters and the refugee camps involved, who even knows?
WHEN: From June 5th on!
SUMMARY: People... who evacuate people... are the luckiest people... in the world.

Comments

[ctu_savior]

Good thinking, thought Jack. Clearly the X-men had been better trained in tactical matters than he would have expected. Dust's move not only obscured the enemy's line of sight and distracted them from the civilians, but the panicked firing it caused also gave Jack easy targets. He picked out the muzzle flashes within the dust and opened up, firing single shots to minimize the risk of misses hitting civilians. Two hostiles hit the ground with Jack's bullets in their chests. Jack kept shooting, ignoring the wild return fire coming towards him. The priority right now was to neutralize the threats before they could cause any more noncombatant casualties. Jack's own safety was a secondary consideration.

The side door of the black van slid open and two more gunmen hopped out, faceless behind goggles and bandannas. Jack dropped one right away, but the other hurled a grenade that bounced to a stop right in front of the car Jack was using for cover. Jack sprinted away to the other side of the street as the car exploded behind him. He winced and gritted his teeth as he felt a razor sliver of red-hot shrapnel slice into his leg, which was followed a second later by the feeling of a sledgehammer smashing into his back as one of the shooters nailed him as he ran. The wind went right out of him, but his armor stopped the bullet from entering his body. Jack knelt behind a lamppost, gunned down the man who'd thrown the grenade, and then, ignoring the pain in his leg and back, started advancing on the blockade, moving closer to the enemy, shooting all the while. They had to keep up the pressure.

[sable_cloak]

When the firing started, The Shadow took aim with his borrowed weapon, looking for the armed men that remained after the inexplicable dust cloud seemed to cause them to react. Suddenly the radio that had been on the body crackled to life.

"Snipers! Snipers! Where the hell are you?!" A man fled across the road, narrowly avoiding a grenade blast, and then dropping. The Shadow sought out the source of that lead and gave the trigger a confident squeeze, taking him down. He returned his aim to the remaining foes, using muzzle flashes to help coordinate his attacks as he aimed at those who offered the greatest threat to the civilians.

"Snipers! Hold Fire! Hold Fire!" A sibilant laugh escaped The Shadow's lips as he took down another H.I.V.E. member, and heard them shouting over the radio at their dead comrades.

USING THIS ICON FOREVER

[fromyourbones]

Quickly diving back into the fray--or wafting, or whatever the correct term was--Sooraya continued to disable the men with guns, literally sanding the flesh from their extremities in order to keep them from hurting anyone else. Their screams of pain were both disturbing and effective, making them better targets for anyone who might want to pick them off. The thought was unsettling, as it always was when action like this became necessary, but there was another constant to the violence--the guilt and disgust dulled with repetition. It was... not fortunate, but useful.

[ctu_savior]

Between his fire, the Shadow's sniping, and Sooraya's power sanding, by the time Jack got to the blockade all the hostiles were down. He hopped into the pickup truck, its keys conveniently inside, started it up, and rolled it out of the way of the refugees. He then got out and took up the loudspeaker. "THE AREA IS SECURE!" He announced. A few civilians cheered, but most of them just got moving on their way out of LA. Jack continued yelling, belting out the locations of evac points where they would be safe and routes they could take to get there. "THE GOVERNMENT AND THE IMPORTS ARE HERE! WE WILL PROTECT YOU! I PROMISE."

"Fucking..." The former owner of the loudspeaker whose hand had been mutilated by Dust suddenly leapt up from his fetal position on the back of the truck and tackled Jack. Surprised, the agent went down as he felt the masked man's remaining hand go around his throat. "We've had a good thing here for years... you think you can just come in here and take it all away?" Spittle flew from the enraged criminal's mouth. "You think- urk!" Suddenly Jack's knife was sticking out of the side of his neck, and that was that.

Jack didn't even blink as he pushed the body off him, got back up, and picked up the loudspeaker again. "KEEP MOVING! YOU WILL BE SAFE!" And he meant it.

[sable_cloak]

((LJ notif failure, sorry for the delay))

The Shadow intended to aid Jack in that statement, as he provided sniper cover from the rooftop. He kept a close eye on as many potential ambush and sniping locations as he could from his position. As he moved about the rooftop to cover the mobile citizens, he collected the valuable radio that had been uttering curses at him moments earlier, and relieved the body of the H.I.V.E. soldier of any remaining gear. It mostly was just ammunition, but it was ammunition that would help protect the people it had originally been intended to kill.