xp_logs | GBOW: Here Come The Drums

The second squad of X-Men wait for the armor charge by the Indian forces on land. Lorna, Julian, and Paige develop a strategy to disable as many tanks as possible and slow the charge.

The rocky plain was close to the border, a wide saddle of land between two low mountainous ranges. A single highway cut through the road, which remained spartanly populated until it reached the urban centre of Kusar and the two UN airfields. Without those fields, the loss of air power opened the way to seizing Pakistan’s rich oil and natural gas fields to the south. A swift attack, aimed first at the UN airbases and armor laagers would knock out half of their mobile capability in one stroke, isolating the infantry and reducing their air to helicopters and northern bases, far less than what they would need.

It was three heavy brigades they were facing, Indian Arjun heavy tanks, which would rush ahead, annihilating everything in front of them. Behind them, armored troop carriers, towed artillery and most importantly, the logistic train which would dig in a supply line to refuel and refit the tanks for the next objective. The only advantage they could see is that the Indians believed their rush would go unopposed, and that armor was designed to engage and kill armor. Infantry just couldn’t kill or disable a tank unless it got lucky, and the heavy machinegun in the turret was designed to make sure they didn’t that chance.

Unfortunately for them, that common wisdom didn’t apply to mutants.

When Lorna had requested that the professor allow her back into the team, she hadn't thought he'd kick start it with a, "Let's fight a war with India." But time and experience had thought her enough. An operation like this one was nothing out of the ordinary and wherever danger was, that was where Lorna intended to be.

After a quick survey of the area ahead of them, Lorna flew back to the ground to rejoin her teammates. They were still a reasonable distance away from the approaching heavy tanks which meant they had time enough to come up with a strategy.

"Three to a possible few hundred men and lots of heavy armor," she reported. "It's time to come up with a brilliant plan, guys."

"Pray for a miracle," Julian quipped, looking down at the seemingly endless train of armor and heavy weapons. "I can probably float a couple of them, maybe the first two in line, slow the others down, ya know? But that's a temporary solution at best and will leave me pretty drained."

Squinting against the sun, Paige let the scene before her turn into a blurry field of metal flares, using the dulling of her sight to concentrate on their situation and the archive of training situations she had built up over the years. Two telekinetics and a metamorph walk into a war zone...

"How about a... well, me?" she asked, then nodded at Lorna. "Metal of course, something sharp."

"Like a razor sharp pinball?" Julian smiled, "Wicked."

"It's perfect." Lorna nodded. "We'll take turns handing Paige back and forth between the tanks. We're bound to generate more speed and power that way." And it won't leave us both drained, she thought. "I'll need you to cover for me once we get closer." She wanted to get a sense of where the weapons were so she could work on disabling them.

"Let's see Nightcrawler and Wildchild put me through the ringer in the name of teamwork after this," Julian mumbled, stretching out so as to not pull anything. If they had to make a quick getaway, he wanted to be limber enough to do so. "Make sure it's something really dense so that I don't break you or anything when I'm throwing you, okay?" It probably wouldn't happen, but better to be safe than sorry.

"Of course, chickpea. Probably an alloy, something with enough metal for Lorna, as light as possible for you and dense enough that my arm doesn't snap off." Paige got a strange, considering look: she'd never actually broken off a limb before. How would that work? Perhaps today wasn't the best day for testing. Right, alloy.

Giving her ponytail a long tug, Paige ripped back her skin to reveal an especially spiky, charcoal metal beneath. She clacked her knife point fingertips at them gleefully, grin revealing a mouth like a shark. "I'll curl into a tuck for the best balance between aerodynamics, mobility and strength I think. A javelin would be too difficult to work corners."

Lorna, for one, was glad she skipped breakfast this morning. Paige, shedding her skin off was not something she had gotten used to even after all these while. "Ready?" she asked and then extended her hand; more for dramatic effect than anything else, and slowly lifted the metamorph up, testing Paige's weight before she turned her attention back to Julian. "Let's give this a quick try so we'll both get a feel for it. I'll hand her over to you. You throw her back to me and then we go for it." And with that she flew upwards, creating some distance between her and the younger telekinetic.

A momentary surge of adrenaline and fear hit Julian as the what if's started to play over and over in his head. What if he dropped her in the middle of the tank fleet, what if he couldn't handle this for as long as they needed to, but the most important what if in his mind remained what if we fail and these tanks get to where they're going? With that thought in mind he steeled himself against failure and centered himself. "Okay, ready when you are!" he shouted over the noise.

The tanks were approaching fast. They were closer now. No time to lose. Once Lorna got a feel for the alloy, she sent her teammate spinning forward and hoped to god Julian wasn't about to end up a splattered mess on the side of the road.

Julian created two barriers, a solid one around himself in case he missed and one with the consistency of hard rubber in front of himself in case he missed Husk. With both safety measures taken he reached out and caught his teammate with ease in a ball of green light. With her firmly in his telekinetic grip, Keller swung her in a high arc around himself, using centripetal force to speed her up and realizing he'd just used something he learned in high school physics class. "Here...we..." before he could say go he had released her toward the tanks with the velocity near that of a bullet.

Loathe to admit it, Paige had always wanted to be a flyer. Perhaps it was the idea of finally not being a hitter, perhaps the sense of freedom, but either way she had never complained overly hard since in her family it apparently meant a glowing butt or wings, both of which would probably get in the way in the lab. Whatever the reason, Paige felt that this, this sensation of shooting through the air, was nothing like flying.
It was better.

She hit the first tank with a clap that took her several seconds to realize was the shattering, crumbling, tearing, of metal on metal. A moment later a high squeal was released, the drag of slowing down, but she still had enough to continue, to shoot through the other side and hit a second tank on an angle, leaving a considerable dent in it's rolling tracks before ricocheting off.

And so began the game of human pinball as Lorna sent Paige moving in the right direction again. It took some matter of skill to keep her eye on the fast moving target but her ability to recognize Paige's type of metal was an added advantage. Their combined efforts were putting a stop to the enemy's approach but it was far from over.

It hadn't taken long for the guns to start coming around on the moving target. Fortunately, the slow moving weapons weren't able to track the small, fast-moving mutant who continued to pulverize their light armor and poorly assembled treading. Still, things were going too well, and Julian knew it would only be a matter of time before one of the giant, death-machines got a lucky shot off. Conscious of his movements with Husk, Julian put up a thin and permeable layer of telekinetic shielding up around his somersaulting teammate.

Then something exploded nearby.

The tanks had gotten the brilliant idea to target the two people who were standing on the ridge instead of the mutant who was serving as a pinball. "Shit!" Julian exclaimed, throwing up a shield between them and the tanks.

Instinct made her shield herself from the blow but recovering quickly enough, Lorna sent Paige hurtling toward one of the main battle tanks, targeting the turret and the guns. "We need to get closer!" There was a better chance of them putting an end to this if they started destroying the weapons and she couldn't do that well enough if they were attacking from a distance.

"Right, because that's the sane thing to do!" Julian shouted over the noise. Then, still concentrating on catching and throwing Paige, he began to slowly move forward- keeping the shielding in front of both Lorna and himself.

Human beings were not generally made for this kind of flight at this speed, or any speed technically, metal or not, and so while Paige could see the tank when she was, well, going through it, she couldn't generally see much more than that. It took her a moment to figure out that there was a direction change, not that she really had to do anything with the new development. The speed she was moving at slowed slightly and she took it for exactly what it was: readying a new attack.

Luckily, there were plenty of tanks on the way over there to go through in the meantime. That was never going to get old.

The tanks began their rapid firing as soon as the two were within target range but Julian's shield provided them with the means of breaking through the enemy's line of defense.

The heavy armored fighting vehicles had begun attacking from all sides but the lack of preparation for the surprise attack and what seemed to be incompetent leadership from the command vehicle up front was clearly working towards their favor.

Targeting the large-caliber main guns, Lorna dismantled them from their rotating turrets and sent out a signal for Julian to take out the secondary machine guns.

"On it!" he shouted, but was drowned out by the overpowering noise. Paige was getting easier to throw now that he knew he wouldn't break her and aiming was coming to be more and more natural. Of course, if he'd been able to see the lines of force like Nathan could, this would have been a much shorter fight. The steady ping of the rapid fire machine-guns that were equipped to the tops of each turret soon became less and less severe as Lorna and Julian pummeled the tank division with their razor sharp friend. "You'd think they would have had enough by now," the young man commented as he caught and threw Husk again.

"You're doing good, Hellion. Keep it up," Lorna said, impressed by the younger man's ability to handle the difficulties of their tasks. They had managed to stop the brigades' advance and the remaining heavy tanks had begun its retreat. It won't be for much longer now, she thought.

Not willing to be thwarted by the mutants however, and in what could have only been a desperate and reckless move by the Indian army, a surface-to-surface missile was released; the only warning sign of the incoming threat being that of an explosive charge as it was fired by a rocket motor.

But the missile quickly found itself engulfed in a green haze as it wobbled off course and back toward the remaining, intact tanks. A massive explosion shook the ground as the missile hit, causing him to nearly drop Paige. "I really hope they don't try that again," Julian mumbled to himself as he got back to work destroying the large, mobile armored division with Lorna and Paige.