Spread your wings. (Fan Fiction Contest)

The flak from the Cabal’s weapon pummeled the fractured barricade sheltering the Warlock and Titan. Their armored foe advanced through the rust sandstorm, its growls adding to the cacophony. The guardians’ retaliatory gunfire was little more than the grains of Martian sand in the gale. “She’ll be here,” said the Warlock. Beyond their rapidly weakening refuge lay a forsaken, buried city devoid of life. Without these warriors, only cloth and twisted metal in the wind would remain—echoes of the Golden Age, relinquishing secrets to the sands. “You’ve spent too much time studying the Traveler, and not enough other people,” said the Titan. “She’s not coming.” Not waiting for a rebuttal, the Titan slipped from cover, rocket launcher at his shoulder. Scorching explosions met alien armor. The Warlock seized the opportunity, leapt onto the giant’s back, one hand finding a hold, the other firing incandescent blue fusion rounds into the beast’s neck; until a monstrous hand found cloak, heaving him into a support beam of the abandoned transit station. The Cabal raged, sprinting for the Titan and trapping the human in its hands. A ferocious growl as the Titan’s bones began to crack. The end was coming. But death’s expected silence never arrived. Instead, the distant but familiar whirr of something coming, then louder, before he was thrown away. A Sparrow hurtled into the behemoth, engulfing it in a steel inferno. A slender silhouette floated above the chaos and flames; the flash of two hand cannons, firing in unison into the top of the Cabal’s head. With a horrific moan, the Cabal released itself to the sands, crumbling into a tangled mess of alien and wreckage. “Remember the part where I said to tread quietly?” The Hunter holstered her revolvers. The Warlock turned to his companion. “Told you she’d show.”