<span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>3rd Squad</strong></span><br/><br/>Between the grenades, the apc, and the literal hail of smartgun, pulse rifle, and shotgun blasts that the squad fired onto their targets three of the unknown hostiles had already fallen to them. The first blown away by shrapnel from several grenades, the second with his chest caved in from a point blank shotgun blast, and the third from several rounds to his center mass, arms, and legs. The remaining two enemies knew better than to simply attempt to hold their ground now that their position had been overrun and they were easily outnumbered.<br/><br/>Moving with the precision of well trained soldiers they began to fall back, using each other to provide suppressive fire until they were close enough to the exit to turn and run. As they did, one of them fell to a smartgun round to the back of the head. As the other one disappeared down the hall. With the nearly destroyed corpses of their enemies littering the ground around them 3rd squad now had the task of attempting to find out what the hell had just happened.<br/><br/>Each of the four bodies still held onto it's weapon, a total of three strange looking pulse rifles and one shotgun. One of the bodies, who's suit sported slightly more ornate rank insignia than the others,  had a small data slate strapped to it's suit. The slate had been damaged by the shotgun blast that had claimed the man's life but it might still yield some information.<br/><br/><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>1st Squad</strong></span><br/><br/>Even as the creature continued to attack the squad with it's staff it was able to smoothly catch the disc which it had used wound Senjo as if the device posed no danger at all. As it seemed to prepare to launch the device again the sound of Rome shouting his curse could be heard, followed closely by the report of his M56. Within seconds the weapon's voice was joined by the voices of the weapons belonging to the other squad members. The loud chatter of pulserifles, the deep cough of a grenade launcher and even the angry hiss of a flamethrower. All of them firing on the position of the hostile. The dust and debris from the grenade rounds going off as well as the gouts of flame shrouded the enemy's location even as the squad continued to fire.<br/><br/>But these sights sounds were not the ones that would tell the squad what they needed to know. In fact it was the lack of another sound that would prove most important to their current situation. The constant and urgent chimes of the squad's motion detectors had fallen silent mere seconds after they had converged their firepower on the creature's location. What ever had been amongst them was obviously no longer moving......<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>As the last of the gunfire died off an eerie silence filled the clearing. Moments later the dust settled and 1st squad was greeted with two very unsettling sights. The first being that whatever they had been firing upon seemed to have simply disappeared. Aside from a few splatters of bright green blood...there was no sign of the creature there wasn't a body, nor were any of the creature's weapons  laying around. In fact there wasn't even spent ammunition casings or tracks. It was as if the thing had never even been there. The second bit of bad news that the squad encountered was the fact that Senjo, their synthetic, had in fact been damaged much worse than it had at first seemed... A good portion of her stomach, just above the hip, had been torn into a 'bloody' mess. And she lay there inert as her systems had obviously initiated some sort of emergency shutdown.<br/><br/><br/><br/>As the squad took these things in, the device in the center of the clearing began to beep first slowly, but with each passing noise the next seeming to come sooner than the last. This mechanical beeping was soon joined by what could only be described as laughter  (http://datacore.sciflicks.com/predator/sounds/predator_laughter.wav).....<br/><br/>