“STRIKE INBOUND.”

Eric felt like throwing up, a spectacularly bad idea while wearing powered armor (or any full face breather, frankly), but managed to hold that off. He clipped his chute pack to the back of his armor and jumped, letting the pack do a minimal slowing of his descent as he dropped behind the NYPD cop who was still sprawled on the ground.

He pushed her further down, covering her with his own armored body, much to the woman’s ire.

“Incoming!” he called, loud enough to be heard for quite some range, and was gratified when she instantly stopped fighting.

The hundred-pound guided bomb units, or GBUs, tracked the lasers down all the way and slammed into the Drasin soldier drones with a rumble that could be felt right through the ground. As close as they were, Eric was more concerned with the effects of overpressure on the cop beneath him than he was of shrapnel, but there were quite a few obstructions between them and the worst of the blast to bleed off the power of the explosion.

As the sense of destruction began to settle, Eric looked up and around and made a decision.

“Time to go, lady,” he said, hooking one arm around her waist as he gave his chute its orders and was pulled up and away from the ground in a hurry. He kept the angle low, not wanting to draw fire, and skimmed the ground until they reached an alley to drop into. He let her go as he landed, nodding to a man in SWAT uniform who was covering them with his submachine gun.

“That’s not going to cut it in this fight, son,” he told the younger man. “Get yourself something with a punch, or get yourself out of the battlefield.”

“Who the fuck are you?” the man demanded.

“Weston,” Eric said, leaning out slightly so he could survey the situation.

“Eric Weston?” the woman asked from where she was crouched, leaning against the wall.

Eric snorted. “Heard of me, I suppose?”

“Yeah. You’re the crazy bastard who flew that ship into my city,” she scowled.

“Guilty,” he admitted, “though I wasn’t exactly in full positive control of the Odyssey when she dug in.”

“No shit,” the woman scoffed, shaking her head. “Name’s Lyssa. Thanks for the save.”

“No problem,” Eric said, looking over what he could see of the park. “Just hold on a sec.”

He swapped over to a private comm. “Nice hit, Strykers. Targets eliminated.”

He lifted his Priminae GWIZ to his shoulder and stroked the trigger once. The crack of the weapon discharging shook the air with enough force to rattle teeth. The diamond round lashed out and slammed into the single Drasin that was still twitching, blowing its superheated blood across the park to cool.

“What the hell is that?” Lyssa screamed at him, though he suspected it was more because she couldn’t hear herself properly than anything else.