[quote]Link to previous parts: part 1: the Hive who killed me https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/193169306/0/0 part 2: From Russia with Void https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/193169596 part 3: Never say hunter again https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/193170140/0/0 part 4: License to Chill https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/193170719/0/0[/quote] [b]Gunslinger [/b] Domino turned towards Felix, her eyes shining with cunningness and curiosity: - Soooo…. Tell me more about M-I6. Felix looked at her with a sadden expression, raised his glass to his lips slowly and drunk a bit of it. The silence seemed to last incredibly long before he seemed to have finally settled on what he would say, and started to talk: - It’s a long story Domino. A long and sad story. I’m not sure exactly how long we were together, nor how many missions we ran together… easily above 300s, but my notion of time is rather distorted nowadays. I like to tell myself we were the best… Ikora was never short of a compliment for us. Even Zavala complimented us once… Good old times… A sad smile grew on the titan face, while he seemed to dwell deeper into the past and lose himself into it. - What happened? - Draksis. - What? - Not what, who. He was the Kell of the house of Winter, on Venus. The one before Paniks. Used to live and hide in his Ketch, in the Ember Caves. - Oh I remember that story. That’s the one they made a song about, right? Where the guardians take him down and steal his ketch. - Well… it didn’t go exactly the way the song has it… The titan took a deep breath, then another sip, before resuming. - Draksis and his House had proven a major issue on Venus. We could barely set foot on it before being under attack by them. The search for relics or information relating to the Golden Age was therefore slowed down to an unacceptable pace. The Vanguards were aware of it. The best scouts available had been trying to gather information of the Winter’s organization and secret hideouts. After a few months, it turned out that Draksis himself didn’t use a dedicated hide-out, but rather kept to his Ketch, which he moved around regularly. After a year, several potential suitable places had been identified. The plan was to send fireteam for recon missions, scout the areas, and, when the Ketch would finally be located in one of them, be able to strike rapidly in a then familiar environment. It seemed a very sound plan. It required a bit of time but well.. We are Guardians. Time doesn’t matter for us. Ikora charged us to scout the Ember Caves, in the Ishtar region. Huge caves, close to Vex territory, yet still under Fallen dominion. Her assessment was that one of the caves’ entrances only needed to be widened a bit for a Ketch to be able to hide there, given how big the heart of the caves actually were. She was right. Those caves were huge. Her information was rather limited, but was accurate enough for us to find a remote entrance guarded by a small group of Fallen. We dispatched them easily and went in. We encountered little resistance at first, but the deeper we went, the more enemies we started seeing. In a small cave with three levels, we got ambushed. Shanks started coming at us, with fire support from Vandals, while some dregs rained grenades on us. I had barely time to cast a Ward before the firsts exploded. They had numbers on their side… and Fallen don’t care about Dregs. We were temporarily sheltered, but surrounded and incessantly having to push back Dregs trying to storm my bubble. That’s when Alec saw them. Three Vandals, close to the entrance of a tunnel at the other side of the cave. We first didn’t get what he had thought was so special about them, until we saw it too: a Captain talking with them, then rushing towards us, ordering some Dregs to follow him. Then another Captain appeared with 10 vandals, stopped by them too, before going with his squad to a promontory they indicated him. Captains were taking their orders from those Vandals… If we took them down, the command chain would be broken and the short disorganization that would inevitably follow could be our chance to turn the odds to more favorable ones. Alec got ready to leave the bubble. Bomb blinked out of the bubble and high in the air, and casted a Novabomb to create a distraction for him. In the confusion that ensued, Alec was able to close in on them enough to activate his goldengun, and take them down before their subordinates could react. The shock of losing their commanders had the exact effect we had hoped for, and we seized the opportunity to even the odds, me taking care of the close-quarter threats and opening us a path back towards the entrance of the cave while Bomb was providing cover for Alec to come back to us. We made it back to the entrance of the cave and started taking out the remaining Fallen from behind the safe cover of a massive rock. Within ten minutes, the gunfight was over. No Fallen were left to prevent us from going deeper into the Caves. We took a few minutes to recover ourselves and prep our gear. It was clear now that our recon mission would be much tougher than initially planned, given that the Fallen where much more numerous than Ikora’s report had indicated. Any hopes of a stealthy recon were gone. We took the tunnel by which entrance those Vandal commanders had stood, and after a while, came out in one of the biggest cave I have ever seen. It could easily have contained several Ketches if necessary, but was only harboring one. Without knowing it, we had stumbled upon the hiding place of Draksis, Kell of Winter. [quote]link to part 6: a sparrow never flyes https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/194769007[/quote]