Humanity Endures

Part 12 - Bravery and Bloodshed | Chapter 11

Leselah, atop her aerial bike, soared somehow unmolested through the air; the cataclysmic battle below her unfolded quickly into a hectic mess while the air-battle before her grew more and more desperate by the second, though she, aboard her civilian sports bike, went unnoticed by all. The putrid scent of burning metal and immolated flesh continued to pour in through her helmet, though Leselah had somehow grown accustomed to the vile odor; gliding between the two battles and searching for a way to contribute to either of them, Leselah suddenly received a textcomm from none other than Theten, who, tracking her via implants, noted her arrival by saying, "That's a nice fighter you've got there. It's very minimalist."

Leselah chuckled lightly to herself — there was nothing like a good dose of battlefield humor and sarcasm to make the war for the fate of the galaxy and the human race seem more relaxed.

Shooting a glance down towards the calamitous clash between enforcers below her, Leselah eventually decided that she, a lightly-armed pilot, could hardly succeed where so many enforcers had failed — instead, she decided that she would attempt to contribute to the war in the air, which, as flaming Loyalist fighter craft fell from the sky at an astonishing pace around her, appeared to be going more terribly than she had expected. As the immolated wreck of a Tehkrian drone fighter plummeted to the bloodied ground below, Leselah understood what she should have known from the start: her place was in the air, and, perhaps, fortunately, it was here where the Loyalist cause needed strengthening the most.

Kicking her aerial sports bike's thrusters into action, Leselah began hurtling towards the air-battle at incredible speed, the wind pressing against her ragged armored suit but doing nothing to dislodge her from her bike, as she sought out the one thing that might let her participate in this battle once more — a fighter. Thankfully, there seemed to be a lot of those around. As she neared the air battle, luckily for Leselah, the perplexing sight of a soldier mounted on a sports bike did not remain unnoticed for long — a Nahmatiixian military fighter, quickly dispatching the Loyalist ship it had been pursuing, turned to directly face her and began to charge, seemingly unwilling to even waste ammunition on such a pathetic sight, and instead preferring to ram her to death. Leselah, grinning wickedly, rotated her bike to face her quarry and charged in turn. Within moments, the two vehicles were about to collide; not wanting to be pulverized, Leselah leapt off her bike and kicked her PFS into action, slowing her movement drastically before a moment later she slammed into the front of the Nahmatiixian fighter with force so powerful it would have crushed the body of someone who wasn't genetically modified, though Leselah simply suffered a few fractures and cuts in her legs and arms.

Recovering, and glancing at the cockpit of the fighter before her, Leselah cursed: the fighter's cockpit was obscured by a blast-shield, adding yet another barrier to her mid-air commandeering attempt. Thinking quickly, Leselah, tethering herself to the vehicle, grabbed an emergency plasma dagger from its sheath just above her thigh; igniting it, she plunged the weapon into the blast-shield of the fighter craft, holding herself steady with her other arm as she did so. The fighter Leselah had attached herself to suddenly began to spin rapidly in an attempt to shake her off, yet, owing to the mad stubbornness of Leselah, this was to no avail. Moments later, the blast shield of the fighter was retracted by the pilot of the waylaid fighter in an attempt to catch Leselah off balance, but, quickly deactivating her plasma dagger, Leselah instead drew and fired one of her pistols at the Nahmatiixian pilot in one fluid motion, shredding the unarmored man, his fighter's glass cockpit, and much of the craft's interior.

Removing her tether and clambering into the cockpit of the spinning fighter, Leselah cackled gleefully; she had just jumped from a sports bike onto a fighter, and was now commandeering that same ship mid-air. Whatever in the name of the Empire she was doing, she was enjoying it.