Prologue

Everything had been going fine, the Captain and Johnson were getting their “index” while all Colonel Schaeffer and his squad had to do was hold the perimeter. They hit almost as soon as they had secured the perimeter; the brutes’ plasma fire rained down on his men. At least a dozen went down in the first fifteen seconds of the firefight. Leaving him with nearly a third of the force he started out with when they entered this cursed Sentinel Wall. Col. Schaeffer ducked behind the wreckage of a massive sentinel and a flurry of bright red plasma beams whizzed by. Schaeffer fired back with his own rifle, not really intending to hit anything but rather in an effort to make the Brutes’ heads down while his men regrouped.

Originally disorganized, Schaeffer’s men quickly rallied and pushed the Brutes back. Snapping off a shot at a nearby brute Schaeffer saw a few of the monsters go down but not nearly enough to even the odds. Everywhere around him he saw his men fighting back against the unstoppable onslaught with the grim knowledge that whatever the Captain’s mission was, it was imperative that it be completed. Already he could see that they were going to be defeated, the Brutes were just too strong. For every Brute that went down they got closer and closer to the Marines position, regardless he kept firing glancing at the aliens masculine bodies, knowing full well what would happen if those Brutes reached the Marine line.

* * *

2^nd Lt. John Wilson ducked behind a piece of rubble just as the Grenade flew overhead peppering him with shrapnel and causing multiple scratches, but luckily none penetrated his flesh too deeply. The man that had chosen to duck down next to him wasn’t as lucky, in fact Wilson could tell that if it weren’t for the man next to him he would be just as mangled. With a sudden rush of adrenaline at the anger of his comrade’s fate he popped up firing his rifle continuously until the clip ran out. Heedless of the danger of being out in the open, Wilson proceeded to start throwing grenades at the oncoming horde, causing most to actually duck into cover, shocked at the sudden ferocity of the attack. For a moment he stood out in the open, straining his eyes against the smoke, wondering if they had actually driven the monsters back, then the brutes charged.

Any man who saw the Brutes would have thought it impossible for anything so large and cumbersome to be able to be so fast, regardless, a mass of nearly thirty Brutes charged into the Marine lines taking full advantage of the rapidly dissipating smoke cover. All around him he saw Marines thrown like rag dolls, he saw Pvt. Summers receive a punch to the chest and get thrown nearly ten feet before crashing into a large slab of wreckage with a sickening thud, out of the corner of his eye he saw a brute cleave Major Wallace in half with a primitive looking blade attached to his gun, he saw Pvt. Jones, with one of the enemy’s infernal grenades attacked to his shoulder leap into a Brute, engulfing them both in an explosion of blue-white flame. We’re all going to die, he thought suddenly, noting the carnage that surrounded him. Even as he thought this he was cut down by a flurry of plasma.