A wailing hybrid shell ripped through the air, desperately homing into our bunker before inevitably its life ended, screaming right past the 2nd divisions bunker, violently ripping apart the sandy landscape and leaving a crater thats 50 feet wide, and 150 feet deep. We had setup thermo scramblers the night before, but this wont stop them, it just make their job harder. These aliens had done something that even our evil race could not put together, they had infused their suicide bombers mind and souls into a living hybrid of a shell and bomb. To them it was a great honor to become a hybrid, I think its just insane.

They have been shelling us for 3 days and nights non-stop, and every day we send out our Thermo Scrambler Team to redeploy. We’ve sustained heavy losses, our long range radios are shot, and we had to turn of our distress locater beacons, the 5th division found out the hard way that the hybrids have learned to home right into that beacon. This basically means were stuck here, and HQ probably believes us to be dead, therefore abandoning our position.

Amidst all this chaos, I manage to fall asleep, earth has been in constant darkness since the invading force has figured out our dependency on the sun, they have managed to block it out with their technology. I don’t know how much time has passed, I woke up all sweaty, my gear uncomfortably hot. Silence….. I felt nauseous, and disoriented. The stench of scorched flesh, and boiled blood, aggressively assaulting whats left of my senses.

With great effort, feeling three times heavier, I managed to stand and look over the bunkers trenches. It did not come as a great surprise to me. But most of our detachment had been annihilated, it seems the Hybrid Shells have adapted to our meek attempts to confuse their senses with thermo scramblers. Time to move…

In the confusion I lost my unit, In the far distance, I could see the spec-ops unit on the move, but I decided to trust my own senses this time, and take my own path. Luckily my tactical night scope still worked, this made navigation in the dark much easier. After about 2 hours I caught up with my unit in a ghost town on elevated grounds. The town looked like a Hobbits village, but completely abandoned, eerily silent. Our units scout James approached me, even in this darkness his insane constant grin clearly showed on my tactical scope.

“Are you ready for the bad news?”

“Heh… it gets worse? Doesn’t it.”

“Does it ever get better?” The insane grin is replaced with a serious frown in a flash.

I wont bore you with the details, long story short, were down to five men out of fifteen. HQ appears to have been leveled to the ground, and were on our own, and at least KM 6800 away from the closest outpost. James joined the rest of the unit, amusing them with sick and twisted jokes as usual. The closest thing to entertainment were gonna get for long long time.

“BREAK BREAK !!!!!”

Thats tony, our rear guard, calling for tac-com silence.

“SIX-O-CLOCK, TARGET, TARGET, TARGET, RANGE 300 METERS AND CLOSING”
“ADVISE ON ROE!!!” (ROE = Rules of Engagment, fancy way of saying how do we handle this?)
“BATTLE COMMS, EPSILON FORMATION, TAC-P GTFO” was my immediate response.
“Wolf you better wake the fuck up, and wipe the fucking dust of your scope!” (Wolf is our Sniper, probably the best this unit has ever seen, and the longest surviving…)
This day just keeps getting better and better.

A screeching plasma shell flies right past my head creating a new hole in the aliens chest 6 inches in diameter as it dropped just 20 meters from my position.

“BREAK BREAK!!”
“SEVEN-O-CLOCK, THREE DUNE CRAWLERS, PINED-TAC-MAP” Wolf called em in on our HUD’s tactical map.
“COPY, P-SCRAM out, TAC-MAP, OVER” called in Nova

Shit… I run back towards the rest of my team, as the force of the plasma scram bomb hit melting anything within a fifty meters radius, its force assisting me with a first class ticket across another 6 meters into the cold sand. With the air knocked out of my lungs, James runs up to me, helps me up and we run towards the mountain peak. I cant remember what happened then, I must’ve passed out.