Post by Alina Rybalka on Mar 26, 2020 0:07:21 GMT -5
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[break][attr="class","nikki101"]WE CAN ALL AGREE THAT VIOLENCE BREEDS VIOLENCE
[break][attr="class","nikki102"]BUT IN THE END, IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY
[attr="class","nikki109"]The Fifteenth Street Killers were an up and coming little gang in the Ground District. They were slapping their logo of 15K all over the place and being a fucking nuisance. The part that was most concerning, though, was the fact that they seemingly popped out of nowhere with good intelligence and tactics. They weren’t a threat yet due to their small numbers, but they could easily be in the future. A more proactive person would have just eliminated them early on, but Knight wasn’t a proactive person and preferred to wait until she was given an excuse to do something. That excuse came in the form of a notice board mission that paid a few hundred lien to clear out some thugs from what was supposed to be an abandoned apartment complex that was right near the boundary between the Ground and Wind Districts. [break][break]
Apparently, the thing that set it off is a few of the members got drunk and pissed off some neighbor at night who got pissed enough to walk out of his house and get shot for his troubles. It wasn’t the rash of armed robberies or the drug smuggling that did it, just a chance murder that happened to piss off the wrong relative or friend. It looked like that friend or relative had some money, because they wanted revenge. They didn’t much care if the rogues were arrested or wiped off Remnant, but they wanted them gone either way. The pay wasn’t a tremendous amount for something like this because whoever put it up moderately underestimated the strength of the gang, but it was certainly better than nothing and gave the faunus a location she wasn’t aware of to hit. While she could have certainly waited longer to get a higher payout, caution won out in the end along with the fact that it was very possible that she ended up getting some more information from the base if she smashed it fast enough. [break][break]
Semblance was still unfortunately off limits, but individually these were front line grunts and not much else. Some of them had auras unlocked, but they were nothing special when it came to fighting ability. What really set these guys apart from their peers was the level of equipment that they had. Normally low level street gangs were running around with no armor and machetes, frankly. These guys had some of the better quality Great War era weaponry, and particularly had firearms that were well above par for a fledgling street gang. They had pretty decent funding, and Knight had no idea where it came from. [break][break]
The apartment complex itself, in a word, was shitty. It was less of a complete complex and more of a ring of smaller apartments that were built before the blockade and then abandoned soon after due to the complete lack of newcomers in need of housing for almost a year. Whatever company owned them before went under and the place was deserted ever since, until very recently anyway. There were dozens of places like this throughout the Ground District, which had a dearth of police patrols and thus was avoided by anyone with money to rent a newer apartment complex. Gentrification was attempted and failed multiple times due to the high crime rate, and only someone supremely confident or supremely stupid would walk around at night in the area. Unfortunately, those two traits were not mutually exclusive and that led to pointless deaths like the idiot who decided to bang on a gang’s door to complain about the noise level. [break][break]
She didn’t quite know how many of these fuckers to expect but anticipated at least six. There was at least a dozen in the gang itself, but with how well organized they were there was no way in fuck they were all cooped up in one apartment complex. Thankfully for everyone involved, while their leader might be smart the grunts were fucking dumbasses and made unforced errors that let to public attention. The faunus saw the mission within the hour it was posted up, and because it was posted late in the day it was very unlikely for anyone else to also bother coming along that quickly for that little pay. That meant that she could go into her full mission gear without an issue, because the likelihood of getting recognized by anyone worth a damn was almost zero. [break][break]
Knight’s mission attire was starkly different from her casual or business attire, and it bore mentioning from the top down. A nontransparent and red tinted full-face mask combined with a respirator at the mouth with a combination cartridge and filter to take care of any aerosols, gases, or vapors in addition to a voice modulator to better hide identity. Knight’s hair was also tightly tied together in a bun to fit underneath the helmet so there was one less identifiable feature present. Below that was an unzipped black motorcycle style jacket with light gray reinforced forearms and elbows for that little bit of extra protection for regular impacts. Underneath that was a dark red hoodie that had the hood pulled up over the back of the red tinted mask that was visibly thicker than a usual one on account of the heat-resistant materials used but was otherwise unexceptional. [break][break]
Out of view below that but visible if one was looking closely due to the extra bulk was a metal cuirass that would allow Knight to simply not use aura for rudimentary attacks and rely on her armor and ability to redirect attacks to do the work and save aura in the process. Underneath that was a heat-resistant shirt that helped prevent chafing, and while the cuirass did not extend to the arms, underneath the hoodie and jacket sleeves the faunus did wear a Kevlar sleeve with thumb holes to provide a little bit more heat and cut protection. On top of those were men’s formal dress gloves made of cotton that served no purpose other than keeping the filth of the outside world off of her skin. [break][break]
Moving down, Kevlar reinforced motorcycle style pants with a nylon regular belt underneath a nylon duty belt that carried with it several pouches to hold primarily dust, gloves, and a magazine or two of ammo. On her left hip was the scabbard and blade for a Szabla wz. 34 sword and on her right was the holstered and loaded M1911 style semi-automatic handgun. Metal shin guards covered the fronts of her legs while leather straps held it in place, and an extra pair of weighted and reinforced dark brown boots with a different tread than usual completed the ensemble. The only thing that made this oven of a loadout bearable over long periods of time was the fact that the faunus could use her abundance of aura to prevent herself from being soaked in sweat in the first half hour of any assignment. Aside from the sword, gun, and boots she didn’t bother to bring any other weapons and left the more niche street weapons at home. Using different weapons and a different style with this getup delayed any attempts at identification and it wasn’t like she was incapable of using a wide variety of weapons anyway. The handgun was there entirely for misdirection and would almost never be used in anything except point blank range as a result once the battle had already been won. [break][break]
It was about seven o’clock, past sunset so the only lights in the area were the very few and ill-maintained streetlights that flickered on and off and the lights from the inside of the buildings themselves. Attacking at night was Knight’s standard to take advantage of faunus night vision and cripple the ability of human enemies to fight back effectively. Because she was saving her semblance for a big mission, she needed to compensate for the fact that she only had access to standard weapons and needed to take advantage of everything she could in order to close the gap and get into melee. If she was found out before she got close and they decided to run instead of fight, she was fucked. [break][break]
There was little to no chance she could go into every apartment undetected, though, and she didn’t know how many were in each apartment. She needed them to either come to her or to hunker in place because they sensed a threat, with the former being preferable so they got cocky and rushed all at once. That would be fine and dandy for as long as there wasn’t a lot more of them than she suspected, and Knight was willing to bet on that. Years of scouting had given the woman a light step and an ability to blend into the shadows so the approach was easy and soon she was pressed right up against the wall of one of the smaller apartments with its lights on and could look inside. Two males with their backs turned to her watching television with a single light in the room – wonderful. [break][break]
While she could from this position just shoot them in the back, that would be basically the definition of dishonorable so she would alert them to her presence and let them call for their buddies simultaneously to gather them all together nice and close. Unholstering her handgun, she took aim at the singular light coming from the ceiling fan in the room. The first shot broke the glass window and hit the ceiling about a foot to the left of the fan and freaked both of the guys out. The second one hit one of the wooden fans spinning around and dropped it to the ground. Both of the gang members were on the ground yelling at this point about an attack. The third shot hit the ceiling about six inches to the left of the light and missed one of the fans as it rotated around. One of the thugs had pulled out their own sidearm at this point and fired a shot that sailed to the left of Knight with little aim. The fourth shot hit another of the ceiling fans, and briefly caused both of the gang members to take cover behind their couch again. The fifth shot cracked the glass covering the lightbulb but didn’t actually hit the lightbulb. The muzzles of two handguns started to poke out from both edges of the couch as the screaming continued and Knight finally hit the fucking lightbulb to take out the lights on the sixth shot. This entire sequence took less than six seconds, but that felt like an awkward eternity for the mercenary who was never exactly known with her skill with a gun. [break][break]
Holy fuck, that was annoying. She only had one bullet left in that magazine, but honestly it wasn’t even worth reloading the damned thing at this point. Holstering the pistol, the faunus stepped back and then drew her Szabla using a hammer grip due to both the hilt being too short for a more traditional thumb-up sabre grip and the weight of the weapon itself. The gang members were hollering out her general location and that there was at least one person with a gun, and the metallic sound of the sword being unsheathed led to a couple of bullets being sent in her general direction as well. It was a fur-lined but metal scabbard that definitely made some noise when the sword was drawn, but it was not so obnoxiously noisy that people in other buildings could hear it. Only people within a reasonable distance with no sound dampening materials between them and her would hear it, which to Knight’s attention included only the two guys inside the small apartment. [break][break]
She got lucky with this one because the living room light was the only one on, and frankly the instinct of both of the men inside was to shelter in place rather than run to lighting. That worked out just fine for Knight, who after stepping to the side to not get shot to draw her sword would just jump up and hoist herself over the windowsill to touch down with an audible thud that provoked more bullets being fired in her direction. They were high quality and punched through the wooden walls of the building well enough but were fired by people who weren’t really trained. For someone with huntress level reflexes, frankly, it wasn’t exactly a challenge to simply sidestep very telegraphed attacks like this. She might have overprepared with all of this armor, frankly, and that was a bit of a shame.
[break]Apparently, the thing that set it off is a few of the members got drunk and pissed off some neighbor at night who got pissed enough to walk out of his house and get shot for his troubles. It wasn’t the rash of armed robberies or the drug smuggling that did it, just a chance murder that happened to piss off the wrong relative or friend. It looked like that friend or relative had some money, because they wanted revenge. They didn’t much care if the rogues were arrested or wiped off Remnant, but they wanted them gone either way. The pay wasn’t a tremendous amount for something like this because whoever put it up moderately underestimated the strength of the gang, but it was certainly better than nothing and gave the faunus a location she wasn’t aware of to hit. While she could have certainly waited longer to get a higher payout, caution won out in the end along with the fact that it was very possible that she ended up getting some more information from the base if she smashed it fast enough. [break][break]
Semblance was still unfortunately off limits, but individually these were front line grunts and not much else. Some of them had auras unlocked, but they were nothing special when it came to fighting ability. What really set these guys apart from their peers was the level of equipment that they had. Normally low level street gangs were running around with no armor and machetes, frankly. These guys had some of the better quality Great War era weaponry, and particularly had firearms that were well above par for a fledgling street gang. They had pretty decent funding, and Knight had no idea where it came from. [break][break]
The apartment complex itself, in a word, was shitty. It was less of a complete complex and more of a ring of smaller apartments that were built before the blockade and then abandoned soon after due to the complete lack of newcomers in need of housing for almost a year. Whatever company owned them before went under and the place was deserted ever since, until very recently anyway. There were dozens of places like this throughout the Ground District, which had a dearth of police patrols and thus was avoided by anyone with money to rent a newer apartment complex. Gentrification was attempted and failed multiple times due to the high crime rate, and only someone supremely confident or supremely stupid would walk around at night in the area. Unfortunately, those two traits were not mutually exclusive and that led to pointless deaths like the idiot who decided to bang on a gang’s door to complain about the noise level. [break][break]
She didn’t quite know how many of these fuckers to expect but anticipated at least six. There was at least a dozen in the gang itself, but with how well organized they were there was no way in fuck they were all cooped up in one apartment complex. Thankfully for everyone involved, while their leader might be smart the grunts were fucking dumbasses and made unforced errors that let to public attention. The faunus saw the mission within the hour it was posted up, and because it was posted late in the day it was very unlikely for anyone else to also bother coming along that quickly for that little pay. That meant that she could go into her full mission gear without an issue, because the likelihood of getting recognized by anyone worth a damn was almost zero. [break][break]
Knight’s mission attire was starkly different from her casual or business attire, and it bore mentioning from the top down. A nontransparent and red tinted full-face mask combined with a respirator at the mouth with a combination cartridge and filter to take care of any aerosols, gases, or vapors in addition to a voice modulator to better hide identity. Knight’s hair was also tightly tied together in a bun to fit underneath the helmet so there was one less identifiable feature present. Below that was an unzipped black motorcycle style jacket with light gray reinforced forearms and elbows for that little bit of extra protection for regular impacts. Underneath that was a dark red hoodie that had the hood pulled up over the back of the red tinted mask that was visibly thicker than a usual one on account of the heat-resistant materials used but was otherwise unexceptional. [break][break]
Out of view below that but visible if one was looking closely due to the extra bulk was a metal cuirass that would allow Knight to simply not use aura for rudimentary attacks and rely on her armor and ability to redirect attacks to do the work and save aura in the process. Underneath that was a heat-resistant shirt that helped prevent chafing, and while the cuirass did not extend to the arms, underneath the hoodie and jacket sleeves the faunus did wear a Kevlar sleeve with thumb holes to provide a little bit more heat and cut protection. On top of those were men’s formal dress gloves made of cotton that served no purpose other than keeping the filth of the outside world off of her skin. [break][break]
Moving down, Kevlar reinforced motorcycle style pants with a nylon regular belt underneath a nylon duty belt that carried with it several pouches to hold primarily dust, gloves, and a magazine or two of ammo. On her left hip was the scabbard and blade for a Szabla wz. 34 sword and on her right was the holstered and loaded M1911 style semi-automatic handgun. Metal shin guards covered the fronts of her legs while leather straps held it in place, and an extra pair of weighted and reinforced dark brown boots with a different tread than usual completed the ensemble. The only thing that made this oven of a loadout bearable over long periods of time was the fact that the faunus could use her abundance of aura to prevent herself from being soaked in sweat in the first half hour of any assignment. Aside from the sword, gun, and boots she didn’t bother to bring any other weapons and left the more niche street weapons at home. Using different weapons and a different style with this getup delayed any attempts at identification and it wasn’t like she was incapable of using a wide variety of weapons anyway. The handgun was there entirely for misdirection and would almost never be used in anything except point blank range as a result once the battle had already been won. [break][break]
It was about seven o’clock, past sunset so the only lights in the area were the very few and ill-maintained streetlights that flickered on and off and the lights from the inside of the buildings themselves. Attacking at night was Knight’s standard to take advantage of faunus night vision and cripple the ability of human enemies to fight back effectively. Because she was saving her semblance for a big mission, she needed to compensate for the fact that she only had access to standard weapons and needed to take advantage of everything she could in order to close the gap and get into melee. If she was found out before she got close and they decided to run instead of fight, she was fucked. [break][break]
There was little to no chance she could go into every apartment undetected, though, and she didn’t know how many were in each apartment. She needed them to either come to her or to hunker in place because they sensed a threat, with the former being preferable so they got cocky and rushed all at once. That would be fine and dandy for as long as there wasn’t a lot more of them than she suspected, and Knight was willing to bet on that. Years of scouting had given the woman a light step and an ability to blend into the shadows so the approach was easy and soon she was pressed right up against the wall of one of the smaller apartments with its lights on and could look inside. Two males with their backs turned to her watching television with a single light in the room – wonderful. [break][break]
While she could from this position just shoot them in the back, that would be basically the definition of dishonorable so she would alert them to her presence and let them call for their buddies simultaneously to gather them all together nice and close. Unholstering her handgun, she took aim at the singular light coming from the ceiling fan in the room. The first shot broke the glass window and hit the ceiling about a foot to the left of the fan and freaked both of the guys out. The second one hit one of the wooden fans spinning around and dropped it to the ground. Both of the gang members were on the ground yelling at this point about an attack. The third shot hit the ceiling about six inches to the left of the light and missed one of the fans as it rotated around. One of the thugs had pulled out their own sidearm at this point and fired a shot that sailed to the left of Knight with little aim. The fourth shot hit another of the ceiling fans, and briefly caused both of the gang members to take cover behind their couch again. The fifth shot cracked the glass covering the lightbulb but didn’t actually hit the lightbulb. The muzzles of two handguns started to poke out from both edges of the couch as the screaming continued and Knight finally hit the fucking lightbulb to take out the lights on the sixth shot. This entire sequence took less than six seconds, but that felt like an awkward eternity for the mercenary who was never exactly known with her skill with a gun. [break][break]
Holy fuck, that was annoying. She only had one bullet left in that magazine, but honestly it wasn’t even worth reloading the damned thing at this point. Holstering the pistol, the faunus stepped back and then drew her Szabla using a hammer grip due to both the hilt being too short for a more traditional thumb-up sabre grip and the weight of the weapon itself. The gang members were hollering out her general location and that there was at least one person with a gun, and the metallic sound of the sword being unsheathed led to a couple of bullets being sent in her general direction as well. It was a fur-lined but metal scabbard that definitely made some noise when the sword was drawn, but it was not so obnoxiously noisy that people in other buildings could hear it. Only people within a reasonable distance with no sound dampening materials between them and her would hear it, which to Knight’s attention included only the two guys inside the small apartment. [break][break]
She got lucky with this one because the living room light was the only one on, and frankly the instinct of both of the men inside was to shelter in place rather than run to lighting. That worked out just fine for Knight, who after stepping to the side to not get shot to draw her sword would just jump up and hoist herself over the windowsill to touch down with an audible thud that provoked more bullets being fired in her direction. They were high quality and punched through the wooden walls of the building well enough but were fired by people who weren’t really trained. For someone with huntress level reflexes, frankly, it wasn’t exactly a challenge to simply sidestep very telegraphed attacks like this. She might have overprepared with all of this armor, frankly, and that was a bit of a shame.
[attr="class","nikki103"]2102 words | [attr="class","nikki103"]ASCHE SYNDICATE | [attr="class","nikki103"]2102 TOTAL WORDS |
NOTES
B Semblance, D Weapons, C Dust Enhancement, C Durability, C Agility, D Stamina, D Exhaustion, D Martial ArtsPHARAOH LEAP CREATES
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