Chapter 142: Chapter 138

It took five more days of observing and relocating, five days of sleeping in dirt holes, five days of shitting and pissing into a hole in the ground, before it seemed that finally the Nexus was finally making their big push. Elliot almost cheered when he saw Nexus aircrafts appear to disgorge soldiers. He hurriedly scrambled for his voice recorder and almost broke the device from thumbing the buttons too hard.

 

Finally, he was getting to witness the Nexus threat first-hand.

 

“Third report on Nexus military assets, beginning now.” The Enclave operative took some effort to calm his giddy excitement before continuing, while a stupid grin was plastered across his face as he all but pressed an eye against his telescope. 

 

The joy was almost aborted though when jets of wasteland dust suddenly kicked out from the Nexus lines, thick enough to obscure most of their forces under a heavy wall of dust. The cloud of dust began to roll forwards as if a strong gale was summoned, and Elliot could just make out the silhouettes of robots and armored soldiers following in its wake.

 

“The Nexus has…some sort of obfuscation device to create a curtain of debris. Likely to mask its forces’ true strength. Whatever remote device used is generating the dust cloud at a speed to at least match the combat speed of the Nexus’ soldiers and robots. It is safe to assume that the actual speed could be much higher, likely capable of quickly blinding unprepared positions and putting them into disarray.”

 

A glance behind him revealed the super mutants responding to the massive display, their brutish yells faintly heard even from his hidden overlook. The giants were forming up behind their barricade of scrap, and with a pivot of his telescope Elliot saw rocket launchers, heavy caliber guns and energy cannons being aimed towards the Nexus’ summoned cloud. A few of the Enclave’s super mutants were spotted as well, their neural enhancement caps and their more straightened posture singling them out from the horde.

 

The super mutant’s ingrained combat instincts kept them from firing blindly into the approaching wall of dust, which gave first strike - and first blood - to the Nexus. Elliot’s mouth dropped open when he saw things shimmering in front of the dust cloud. A line of vehicles materialized, picking up speed as their barrels unleashed a fusillade of lightning-wreathed projectiles. 

 

They had stealth tanks! The Nexus had stealth hover tanks!

 

Despite his shock, the Enclave agent found his voice to describe the new vehicles as they ravaged the opposing horde. “T-The…the Nexus’ assault hovercraft are fast, agile vehicles considerably smaller than known dimensions of Great War light tanks. Armed with a pair of plasma cannons fixed to their hull, their ability to maneuver in any direction renders little need for a turret…”

 

The super mutant defenses exploded in spectacular fashion as the plasma bolts slammed into them. The hover tanks, or more accurately hover tankettes, Elliot thought, began to weave about effortlessly while keeping their twin plasma cannons trained on the super mutants. In their wake. The only drawback of the display of superior maneuverability was the dust cloud being kicked up in their wake was far less cohesive than the near opaque wall of powdered wasteland they’d been creating before.

 

As he spouted off his observations and speculation, a spark within the fading curtain of dust drew Elliot’s attention. Snapping his head and his telescope into it, he saw the flashes and smoke trails of a barrage of missiles pierce through the dust, several seconds before he heard the staccato roars of their launches. The missiles soared above the super mutants’ front lines and blasted chunks out of their still amassing back ranks.

 

The Nexus’ dust curtain swirled and puffed as towering giants emerged, somewhere about Liberty Prime’s height, the bit of Elliot not too busy being dumbfounded realized. But where Liberty Prime was a hulking humanoid, these metal monsters were almost alien in their appearance. 

 

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Their reverse-jointed legs strode with the predatory gait of a rad-eagle, while it’s neck-less, bulbous head jutted out from its boxy body, glass panels glinting off the top half of it to form a semidome. The shoulders sported massive boxes, their lids opened to reveal a terrifying array of missiles, while short arms underneath them ended in plasma cannons that began firing into the super mutant horde.

 

He never got to verbalize any of this, too shocked to do anything but stare dumbly through the telescope.

 

How such massive things walked, how they were conceived at all, boggled Elliot as he watched another torrent of missiles unleashed into the devastated super mutant army. Watching the slaughter unfold, the Enclave agent then recalled one particular rumor about the Nexus, of how the Nexus didn’t really go to war. War would presume a level of equality from the opposition that Elliot now realized didn’t exist on this radioactive continent.

 

So the Nexus didn’t wage war, it made examples. What the massive super mutant army that Elliot once thought mighty and intimidating would be made into nothing more than a simple message to the rest of the world: ‘Don’t mess with us, or else.’

 

Between the hover tanks and the giant robot walkers, the super mutants were doomed, but then the rest of the Nexus army broke out from the cloud of dust to join the fray. Elliot’s telescope picked out definitely human soldiers in power armor far less bulky and running far faster than anything the Enclave could manufacture. Hulking bipedal robots soared through the air on jump packs to close the distance, their oversized claws flexing sadistically. And then from the skies, attack aircraft dove in for strafing runs with plasma bolts and laser beams.

 

From his little hidey hole, Elliot Lindsay watched as the Nexus broke up the super mutant army into groups, and attacked them in a variety of ways. Something about the way the soldiers moved struck him as odd. There was a sense of casualness in the way they carried out the extermination, moving through the battlefield with the ease of people not taking combat too seriously.

 

As if they were conducting a training exercise, he realized in horror.

 

This was far worse than what the brass had expected. The super mutants weren’t even being a tedious roadblock to the Nexus. The army of the Nexus Severalty had clearly shown that they had the firepower to simply obliterate the entirety of the horde. That this mockery of a battle would take longer than thirty minutes at all would be simply down to the Nexus playing with their newfound training aids.

 

Remembering his duty, Elliot hastily got up from his camouflaged position to head to his bike. His gear could be damned right now, he needed to get the intel back to Fort Cornell. Or to pack his bag for a quick defection. As he hurried down the hill with the muted sounds of explosions cresting behind him, the latter option was beginning to sound more and more appealing. 

 

Maybe he’d ride towards the Nexus lines instead. Would they understand a white flag? God, he hoped they did…

 

Then he stumbled to a halt as he reached his motorcycle, and the two hulking robots standing beside it. Already frozen from surprise, special agent Elliot Lindsay almost fainted when something tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to see a Sentinel robot materialize right in front of him, its many red optics locked onto him. Its many tentacles grabbed him not too gently, and he was carried off towards the Nexus’ lines.

 

It looked like he didn’t need a white flag after all.

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