Chapter 9 - The great escape 1

It was became clear Hunter did not have much time left and he had to leave the valley as soon as possible; he was woken up by Glados during the night, warning him about a large horde of various kinds of monsters, including redbeaks, werewolve lookalikes, innumerable numbers of large insects and even flying creatures passing near the cave, headed North towards the mountains. They were enough distance away from the cave, that Hunter was not in danger of them discovering this location, but it was getting obvious it was time to pack his stuff up and leave. Those groups of monsters were only small fries at the tip of the monster wave, and much stronger monsters were soon going to be at his doorstep.

The next day, after the coast was clear, Hunter immediately rushed towards the cache he found to be absolutely critical. At the location of the marked area, he dug up a metal box that contained five cyro containers storing canisters filled with nanomachines. He immediately injected himself with one of the canisters, on the spot and felt as if he now had five extra lives. He wanted to collect all of the remaining caches in the valley that contained valuable supplies like this, but first, he needed to try and find the industrial printers located on the map. His current printer was very capable at printing precise small parts but it was slow and the limitation in size was beginning to be a huge problem, where he could not print armor plates that could properly armor his suit and a new suit with limbs powered by carbon nanotube muscles was out of the question as well. He could print all the parts to make an industrial printer, but the sheer complexity and size of the cores of one of those industrial printers meant it would take much less time and resources just to salvage one. He was not sure what he was going to face in the mountains, but by just looking at the large number of monsters heading towards the north, if he was to survive, some major upgrades were neccessary.

When he arrived at the marked location on the map, he saw that it was a huge underground military facility, closed off to the outside world with massive bombproof doors. With power supplied to the facility's emergency power system using the suit and Glado's security clearance, they were able to slowly open the doors and enter the facility. The facility was evacuated a long time ago, likely with the Federation no longer able to keep military control over the area. There was nothing in the large vehicle bays, barracks and armory, everything of value stripped and removed. Hunter was not willing to give up, and after searching the entire facility, he was finally able to locate a printer core that was removed to get repaired and was left behind by the evacuating personnel. The industry printer's core was enormous, almost the size of his printer, and all he needed to do to have a functioning industrial printer was to build a frame and a controller after fixing the core.

Hunter was delighted, but when he was about to retrive it, triggered an alarm left by the personnel. He managed to shut it off by shutting the power to the facility off, but a small group of monsters was alerted nearby and left the horde they were travelling with, and started to madly rush towards the facility. There was no way he could return to base carrying the printer while in combat, so he decided to come back for it later on his way out of the valley. Fearing he would attract the rest of the horde and end up getting trapped in the facility, he quickly got into his suit and moved as fast as he could to put as much distance between the facility and the horde as possible. The asswipes who decided to follow him was a group of Redbeaks, and Hunter swore under his breath when he saw two alphas were leading the pack. He was better armed than last time but he had no idea how his armor was going to fare against the skills the dumb birds used.

When the monsters were finally in viewing distance, Hunter made a mobile barricade by planting his shield down onto the ground, but got behind the shield this time; and to better brace for impact, took a knee and planted himself firmly against the shield to get as low to the ground as possible. When the Redbeaks came into the clearing past the treelines, Glados began firing while Hunter held his fire waiting to use the anti material rifle on the alphas. The Redbeak alphas were surprisingly crafty and hid behind their underlings to get close under gun fire, and when they got in range to use the spell, Hunter saw the familiar bright flash as one of them thundered towards him. The impact was deafening and Hunter felt the whole suit buckle as the beast slid across his shield that was angled and flew above him. Hunter got up and immediately fired his 20mm into the beast, aiming for the brief period of vulnurability. The slugs exploded out of the side of the beast and it died with a bloody gurgle filled cry.

The other alpha with its mate dead, stopped in its tracks and circled around, looking for an opening while the rest of the Redbeaks finally caught up and entered into melee distance. Hunter, annoyed he could not finish off the remaining alpha using the same tactic, retracted his 20mm and activated his chainsaw, while picking his shield up with his left hand. When one of them got past the gunfire, Hunter stopped its charge with his shield, stabbed through, and sliced the bird in half by lifting his arm up. Another redbeak, slammed hard into the shield and bit onto it, but Hunter in turn, slammed his shield face down into the ground along with the bird to hold it down while he stabbed and sliced another one in half. He lifted his shield up again and finished the bird off by placing his chainsaw against the back of the beast until he felt the chainsaw scraping against the metal of the shield. During the hectic melee, Glados was finally able to kill the remaining redbeaks, and feeling the danger of being singled out, the alpha finally used its skill on Hunter.

With Glado's warning Hunter was able to get his shield up, but got flung tens of meters away by the sheer momentum hitting his shield and slid across the ground, with the box on his back digging him to a stop. It felt like a train had just crashed into him, but when he quickly got back up from the ground, Hunter realized, besides the bent shield, he was completely unhurt in the the suit, and the armor worked far better than he would have expected. The alpha roared in frustration at its attack being ineffective and because it was too close to use its skill and build enough momentum, attacked Hunter with its tail. Hunter was able to brace properly against the attack this time, and after stopping the attack with his shield, retaliated by charging towards the alpha and stabbing its tail with his weapon and slicing it off. The alpha screamed in pain, and Hunter quickly body slammed it to the ground, and with a foot on its neck, sliced its head off with his chainsaw, ending the battle.

With blood dripping down from the chainsaw and the guns quietly smoking, Hunter quickly checked the area for more enemies, but thankfully, the horde was long gone, not bothering to change its mad rush towards the north and come after him. He quickly looted the corpses for the monster cores and, after a short trip back to the facility, he was able to retrieve the printer core and quickly returned to base.

Although Hunter obtained the core for the industrial printer, he was quickly running out of time so he gave up on repairing the industrial printer and building a new suit. He instead decided to just upgrade the weapons on the suit and make it a walking tank. He switched out the anti material rifle, to a belt fed three barreled 20mm chaingun. The chaingun fixed many of the flaws that the anti material rifle had, and with the much higher fire rate, he was now able to hit targets that moved at great speeds with the sheer volume of fire it was able to put out. Since he no longer had to manually reload the main weapon with the ten round magazines, it freed up his left arm and allowed him to carry the shield or use a secondary on his left arm without his main weapon running out of ammo and having to switch to melee. Since the ammunition was of caseless telescoped design; (the cartridge does not have a brass case and the bullet is completely encased in a solid propellent greatly reducing the overall size and weight of the cartridge. The HK G11 and the planned 40mm CTA gun the Warrior IFVs are some irl examples) it was very compact, and allowed for a massive ammo drum, containing 1000 rounds to be mounted on the back of the suit. Hunter also rearmed the weapon turret with a compact light machine gun to increase its reliabilty and finally repaired everything that was broken from the previous battles.

While he was working on upgrading the suit, Glados reported the concentration of monsters in the valley increasing more and more, and as soon as he was done with the suit, Hunter immediately started working on his next project with Glados standing guard with the freshly upgunned suit. He was going to build a vehicle he could use to move all of his tools, materials, food and the monster hides over the mountain range; he considered many different ideas, but after finding details about hover technology in the database, Hunter decided to build a hover cart that could be pulled or pushed around by the suit. And since a hover vehicle floated off the ground, it could pass through any obstacles if the trail was wide enough. Although Hunter had no idea how the technology worked, he was able to assemble the hover plates with Glados's precise instructions, and after working day and night for two days, Hunter was finally done. During the two days, a couple of stragglers from the main horde were lured to the cave with all the racket he was making but Glados managed to stop the waves by herself with the upgraded guns, and by the time Hunter was done building and loading the hovercart up, the entrance was filled with corpses with their mana cores neatly harvested.

The finished hovercart was a fully enclosed metal box the size of a small cargo van with four of the hemispherical plates mounted on each corner. The entire the cart was made out of the same alloys, that was used to make his armor on the suit to ensure the cargo was going to be safe; with the side benefit of being able to be used as a sturdy cover during combat. There was ample space in the cart to function as shelter at night and along with some creature comforts, he added another weapons station on top of the cart for static defence. With the various obervation equipment and the woodland green camo scheme the box was painted in, it was going to be much harder for the monsters to surprise him at night with a sneak attack.

Since the cart was a much more secure place to store it, Hunter moved the small printer from the suit to the cart and with space freed up from removing the printer, he was able to mount another drum on the back of the suit, raising the total 20mm ammunition loadout on the suit to 2000. With the printer removed from the suit, Hunter needed to come up with a new way to power his suit, and came up with a system of dual armored powerpacks filled with the monster cores. Since the powerpacks were armored, he did not have to worry about the cores getting damaged and with two redundant powerpacks, he could still keep moving even if one of them got damaged in battle. With more than enough monster cores to get him over the mountain, he had more than enough power left over, and set the small printer to coutinously print ammunition using the scrap metal from the generators.

Hunter finallized his prep up by stowing the combat shield, extra ammo drums, magazines and the extra powerpacks on the exterior of the cart, and he was finally ready to leave this godforsaken valley. After a long filling meal that could very well be his last, Hunter went through final checks on all of his gear, and finally got into the suit. He switched the cart on and the four hemispherical plates on the bottom of the four corners wirred into life, effortlessly lifting up the entire cart that weighed at least two tonnes with its cargo and all his gear. With a beating heart, both excited from finally leaving this valley after the two long months he was stranded on this alien planet, and scared from the unknown dangers he was going to face in the mountains, he finally set off without sparing a look at the cave.