Only when it's clear.

Back on Meridia’s solid ground again, I emerged from my Hellpod and quickly scanned my surroundings for immediate threats before calling in my Guard Dog pack and a Solo Silo while I had the breathing room to do so. The jump in mission difficulty rating had me nervous about the whole thing so I made sure to have all the gear I would need to keep myself safe and complete the mission by myself.

With the increase in mission difficulty rating came an increase in size of the area of operations and I found myself in a larger patch of near-wilderness as I moved through the landscape. In terms of points of interest in between patrols of scavengers, hunters and warriors, encountering bugholes guarded by hive guards that were dispatched with the swiftness with grenades thanks to the Guard Dog and the Machine Gun Turret, the major one I spotted was another spore spewer though thanks to the area of operations being larger, I didn’t have to get close enough to it to start getting spore particulates in my filters before I took it out with the Solo Silo. The laser designator was so much better and so much more useful than the normal stratagem ball in directing the missile from the Solo Silo to destroy the spore spewer that I was convinced that I needed to do something with it. I have some ideas on what to do and I’m thinking I will need to speak with Service Technician Andersson about it but in the meantime, I had some Democracy to spread.

The mission itself was dressed and completely wrapped up in a thick blanket of Super Earth patriotism but really the actual pragmatic purpose of the mission was to draw on the bugs’ numbers, to reduce and redirect the amount of bugs that normal SEAF forces planetside have to encounter or fight in the main push to contain the outbreak. To that end, I’m all for it. The more bugs I take care of as a part of this mission, the more resources that I can get allocated to me and the more equipment I can get access to, modify to my own needs and reproduce if need be.

As I made my way over to the first mission-designated site, I avoided patrols where I could, making sure that my Guard Dog remained “muzzled” while I stayed low and moved. It was going well though I did get a glimpse of why this mission was rated at a higher difficulty. Beyond the hive guards having armour that my MP-98 could not deal with unless I hit the squishies, there were also Terminid Chargers roaming about the mission. Having never encountered one in person yet, I immediately started looking for weak points and based on my observations from a distance, other than simply catching one unawares with an Orbital Precision Strike from the 380mm ATLAS cannon or using the Solo Silo from beyond 40m away, my only hope is to get at the soft and unarmored… for the lack of a better word, butt, with as much firepower as I could get on target. I’d probably have to think of something.

Getting to the first site to raise the flag and draw the attention of the bugs away from nearby SEAF engagements, I made sure to call in a supply drop, a Machine Gun Turret and a Solo Silo just in case prior to calling in the flag. It was a no-brainer decision and I was promptly rewarded for the decision when I got lucky with the bug breach, clearing out a large amount of the chaff. What did give me trouble though was the Terminid Charger that had tunneled out of the breach just as the flag was raised and I needed to clear the area. While I did kill two chargers earlier with the OPS and the Solo Silo on two separate occasions earlier as a fact-finding test, the OPS was being loaded when this charger showed up and the Solo Silo had too much of a blast radius to be safe to use. There was nothing for it, I had to face it with grenades and whatever else I had on hand.

It was certainly dicey though, having to cook a grenade while being charged at by a bug that was roughly the size of African Bull Elephant but I’d managed to thread the needle to have the G-6 Frag grenade detonate right as it rumbled over it and the grenade ripped into its ass while I dodged with a dive to the side. Despite the wound looking pretty gnarly, the abdomen didn’t look nearly damaged enough and I knew that I either had to toss another grenade up there or engage it with a gun. Getting the grenade throw right the first time was already dicey enough though so I didn’t fancy my chances of cooking another grenade. Dodging a charge though was relatively straightforward enough so I put on a brave face underneath the helmet and brought out the SG-88 to give it both barrels as many times as I’d need to destroy it, figuring that my best chance was repeated burst damage from two shotshells full of dense lead being blasted into the charger's soft, wounded bits.

Dangerous, stupid, but effective. When the charger fell to blood loss after I’d ruptured its abdomen from a double-dose of lead 3 times, it occurred to me that this is how Helldivers get their reputation. From making do with what they’ve got and dealing with it.

Note to self, keep OPS handy on standby. I thought to myself, feeling winded from diving to my sides 3 times in a row to avoid the Charger, picking myself up off the ground before saluting the flag for the camera and completing the objective on the first site. Time to do it all over again till I get back onboard. Fan-fucking-tastic.