The Lone Warlock

The Lone Warlock (NOTE: Its still unfinished but its at about three and a half pages so I'd like some opinions on it now so I don't have to extensively revise the rest if the beginning is bad) Talis jumped from the ship, using his ability to wield the Traveler’s power to slow his descent to Venus. Looking up quickly, he made sure that his fighter’s autopilot had kept the ship out of reach of the Cabal’s anti air cannons. A scan of the ground closing on him from below revealed almost nothing, since the thick canopy of the jungle hid the ground from sight. At last his feet touched the floor of the jungle. Another scan of the terrain around him revealed no new threats, so he set off towards the coordinates of the temple that he’d been given. Rumored to contain some armor from the Golden Age, Talis figured that even if the armor wasn’t there that there would be enough Golden Age technology to make the trip worth it. Besides, letting the Cabal gain such artifacts could be disastrous, as the armor was rumored to make the wearer nearly invulnerable. ‘Aegis’, Talis recalled, was what the man had called the suit. It wasn’t long before Talis heard something stumbling through the brush near him. A distinctive breathing pattern that he recognized as Cabal put him on high alert, and pulling out his combat blade, Talis crept towards the noise, being careful to utilize the natural cover of the jungle to obscure his form and the sounds of the many animals nearby to keep him from being heard. The Cabal scout came into view rather suddenly, stepping out of the shadow of a massive tree. He thanked the Traveler that he hadn’t been spotted, and using his left hand flung a bolt of energy straight into the scout’s head, passing through the armor and destroying its brain. It didn’t even utter a noise as it fell. Again utilizing his power, Talis lifted the body into the canopy, relying on the thick branches of the forest to keep the scout’s body hidden from view. He couldn’t risk being detected when he had no back up to come to his rescue. Moving from the scout’s body towards the Temple again, Talis noted a sudden quietness in the jungle around him. The birds and other wildlife that had created an ever present cacophony in the background had stopped for some reason. That set alarm bells off, so he found a place that offered him a good line of sight, and waited. It didn’t take long for the sound of tanks rumbling through the forest to reach him. Was that the Cabal, or something else, Talis wondered. There wasn’t supposed to be anything else in the area, and he certainly hadn’t heard about any major Cabal force, just some looters wandering around. The tank column did not take long to appear. Counting each tank as it passed, there were about 30, along with HUNDREDS of Cabal soldiers, and they were moving towards the Main outpost on Venus. With that kind of army assaulting it, the walls would fall within minutes. There wouldn’t be enough time for Guardians in orbit to arrive, let alone any reinforcements that could stop such an army. Deciding on the spot that he needed to find a way to slow the army while the outpost was reinforced, Talis radioed the outpost, very quietly, that a Cabal army was approaching, and ordering them to send out a level 4 distress signal. Now he just needed to buy them a few hours to let help arrive and for them to fortify their position. Pulling out his Anti Material Sniper Rifle, he figured that wiping out a few of the lead tanks and picking off any officers he could find would be a good place to start. Moving excruciatingly slowly, Talis began to move away from the Cabal army so he could get a decent vantage point before he made his presence known. A ridge two kilometers ahead and half a kilometer to the right offered promise, so he went for that. It had decent foliage for cover and several trees he could move around in to avoid fire once they figured out his general location. He arrived there about two minutes ahead of the tank column by using his power to accelerate him beyond normal human speeds once he was sure that the Cabal wouldn’t notice him. Using the precious little time he had, Talis set up half of his magazines for his AMSR, figuring that he could burn through at least that much before they worked out where he was. By the time he had calibrated his scope and made sure he could easily reload his rifle using his set out mags, the tank column had made its way into his designated kill box. Sighting their heavy treads, Talis began disabling the many tanks. It took two or three shots to disable each tank, as the treads were well protected, but he had plenty of ammo to waste. Twenty rounds and four magazines in, he had disabled six of the tanks, causing the entire column to stop, and had killed nearly half a dozen Cabal. Then they began bombarding him. Grabbing the remaining exposed magazine he had, Talis moved into a tree fifty meters to the right of him, and set up his AMSR again, only to have a branch beside him shatter into shrapnel. The Cabal snipers had noticed his movement. Throwing up a barrier to buy him a few seconds, he quickly resighted his rifle and found the offending sniper. Taking that one out, another popped off a shot that would have killed him if the barrier hadn’t been up. As it was though, the barrier would only be able to withstand one more round before collapsing, so he had to be fast and make his shots count. Talis blew out the brains of the second sniper, and then a third as it aimed its rifle towards him. A fourth got a shot off, but luckily it missed him and his barrier. That one went down too. He knew that there had to be at least twenty or thirty more snipers within the army. He could never hope to pick them all off before they could kill him. Talis went ahead and used the last round in the magazine to wipe out another Cabal officer. Then he descended to the jungle floor, and used the cover there to escape. Talis had already begun plotting his next move against the Cabal. He had done some damage, but none they couldn’t recover from quickly enough. In a few minutes the tank column would be rolling again, and the outpost would still be unprepared. A quick radio check confirmed that the outpost was still about three hours away from a prepared defense, and the Cabal couldn’t be allowed to reach the outpost before then. Moving ahead of the still unmoving column, Talis spotted something that could be useful. There were a few rather large boulders sitting in a deep, wide river that paralleled the area that the Army would be moving through. The jungle was dense on the other side of the river, far too dense for the tanks to move through. Even infantry would have trouble in that mess. He started to move the boulders with his power. Each had to weigh several tons, and it took him a few minutes to move each boulder. When the fourth had fallen into place, the tank column once again came into view, causing Talis to mutter more than few oaths. The road was only three quarters of the way blocked. Not wide enough for a tank to squeeze through, but enough that some Cabal infantry working together could clear the road far too quickly for Talis’ liking. Looking at the boulders he had been moving, and back at the approaching tanks, Talis realized that the tanks probably didn’t weigh much more than the boulders. Quickly deciding to be an idiot, knowing that if the driver were smart, he would die, he began lifting the tank. There was a window of about nine seconds where the tank would be able to fire on him, and with no extra power to raise any kind of shield, Talis would die from even a shot landing close to him. Luck was on his side though, and the driver didn’t think to do anything but panic while the tank was lifted and turned so that it rested on its side perpendicular to the road and right in the center of it, so that moving around it was impossible for the rest of the column. Preparing for the foot soldiers behind the tanks to swarm forward, Talis positioned himself behind and on top of the rocks so he had suitable cover. Pulling out his AMSR, he waited. True to form, they brought out shield bearers first. Luckily, he had thought of this, and using his AMSR, quickly opened a wide hole in that front line. Switching to his powerful Assault Rifle, four more went down. Talis then really went to work. He flung a few powerful fireballs into the horde, killing a dozen Cabal. Following that up with beams of pure power, another half dozen went down. Right before retreating to a more defensible position, Talis gathered his traveler power into a dense ball and tossed it into the midst of the army. Several died from the sheer force of the explosion, while many more were injured from the shockwaves and getting flung into the boulders and upended tank, as well as a few who drowned into the river, and others who were broken by the dense trees to their right. The explosion also had the rather nice side effect of tipping the tank onto its head, crushing a few Cabal officers in the process.