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He grabbed a dented metal bowl, ladled some in, and found a seat by a cracked window. For a few minutes, he simply ate. No radio, no command channels, no battle plans. Just food and silence.
The next morning broke grey and sullen, the kind of light that crawled sluggishly over the ruins of Boston like it wasn't sure it belonged there. Sico stood at the front of Greenetech Genetics, arms crossed, surveying the fortified perimeter with a quiet intensity. The shattered facade of the building behind him had been patched with scavenged steel plates and concrete barriers, but still bore the wounds of yesterday's battle—blaster scorches on the walls, collapsed masonry, and the faint lingering smell of plasma burns and gunpowder.
Four Sentinel tanks stood motionless, positioned at the cardinal corners like statues of war gods. Two faced the front—one to the left of the barricaded main entrance, the other to the right, each with their twin cannons locked forward and sensors sweeping the road ahead with eerie precision. The other two Sentinels were stationed on the rear side of the building, guarding escape routes and potential flanking approaches. Their heavy treads sat idle, but everyone knew they could spring into motion within seconds.
The soldiers patrolling the outer line looked tired but alert. Many had only gotten a few hours of sleep, if that. Some were fresh-faced from Sanctuary, others hardened veterans who had fought across the Commonwealth, their eyes scanning the horizon for trouble.
Sico narrowed his gaze at the quiet street beyond. There was a strange pressure in the air, like the kind that came just before a thunderstorm—an invisible static that made the hair on his arms stand up. He didn't like it. And in the Wasteland, instincts like that usually meant one thing: trouble was coming.
Then it happened.
With a sharp, high-pitched crack and a flash of cold blue light, a beam of energy tore through the still morning air just twenty meters in front of him. The Institute's teleportation field—the telltale swirl of particles and pulsing white light—flared into existence on the cracked asphalt.
And then another.
And another.
Dozens.
In the space of seconds, the street was flooded with Synths—Gen 2 and Gen 3 alike. Metal skeletons with glowing eyes and pulse rifles, reinforced troopers with ceramic armor plating and shock batons, even a few spider-like drones crawling out of the teleport fields.
"CONTACT!" someone screamed, but Sico was already moving.
He sprinted forward, shouting over the rising roar of Institute weapons. "ALL UNITS—TO THE FRONT! HOLD THE LINE!"
Gunfire erupted in a deafening hailstorm as the Minutemen at the barricades opened up with laser rifles and heavy turrets. The Sentinels spun to life with a low whirrrrrr, their cannons locking on and unleashing coordinated bursts into the ranks of the advancing Synths. Explosions rocked the pavement, throwing chunks of asphalt and shrapnel into the air.
Sico turned to one of the soldiers near the entrance—a young comms runner named Jordan. "You—get inside! Warn Sarah and Robert! Tell them we're under attack and synths are teleporting into the courtyard—inside too! Lock it down and protect the command center!"
Jordan's eyes were wide, but he didn't hesitate. He bolted back through the barricaded door, shouting for reinforcements as he went.
The courtyard became chaos. Institute forces pressed forward with cold precision, fanning out to both flanks and laying down suppressive fire with plasma bolts that hissed through the air like angry hornets. One Minuteman was thrown back by an explosion, his power armor dented and smoldering, but he staggered to his feet and kept firing.
Sico grabbed a plasma carbine from a nearby weapon rack and vaulted over a low barricade, landing beside a heavy weapons team hunkered behind a sandbag wall.
"Concentrate fire on the teleport zones! Don't let them build a foothold!"
One of the Sentinels let loose a salvo of mini-missiles that slammed into a trio of Synths mid-teleport, disintegrating them into scrap and vapor before they could even stabilize. Another Sentinel swiveled and cut down a wave of spider drones trying to scuttle beneath the barricades.
But still they came.
From inside, the distant boom of fighting echoed through the halls of Greenetech. Sico's worst fear was confirmed—the Institute wasn't just coming from the front. They were teleporting into side rooms, stairwells, even sublevels.
A transmission crackled in his earpiece—Sarah's voice, breathless and urgent: "Sico, they're inside! They're hitting the server room and the main stairwell—we're holding, but they're everywhere!"
"Hold as long as you can," he growled into the mic. "Route anyone you can spare to reinforce—if we lose the uplink, we're blind and deaf."
Another Synth exploded nearby as a grenade detonated at its feet. Sico ducked behind the barricade, caught his breath, and vaulted forward again, plasma bolts sizzling past him as he moved toward a position where the line was starting to collapse.
A squad of Minutemen had been pushed back behind a flipped truck, pinned down by three Gen 3s advancing with machine precision. Without thinking, Sico flanked wide, crouched behind an old mailbox, then popped up and unleashed a barrage of plasma fire. Two Synths went down in bursts of green energy—the third tried to turn, but was met with a bayonet through the throat from one of the Minutemen who surged forward with a battle cry.
The skirmish in the courtyard raged on. Explosions from the Sentinels shook the ground. Shouts, gunfire, and the digital screeches of Synths filled the air.
Back inside Greenetech, chaos reigned.
Sarah had barricaded herself in the comms room with a half-dozen defenders. Wires sparked overhead as a ceiling panel caved in under the impact of a synth being thrown through it by a soldier in power armor. "Cover the uplink!" she shouted, grabbing a laser pistol and opening fire as another Gen 2 crawled into the room, sparks sputtering from its half-melted arm.
Meanwhile, Robert led a brutal counteroffensive through the western hallway. The Institute had managed to teleport an entire unit into the side labs, but they hadn't expected the level of resistance waiting for them. Robert's squad moved like a scalpel, clearing room after room with relentless precision. Pulse grenades were tossed, breaches made with explosives, and every inch was paid for in blood and scrap metal.
In the lower levels, Mel and two techs desperately worked to move critical data and patch the last of the uplink backup lines, while gunfire echoed just outside the door. One of the techs was crying, another was chanting old Brotherhood war hymns under his breath. Mel just worked. Hands steady. Eyes sharp. No time for anything else.
Back outside, Sico knew they were reaching the tipping point. They were holding—for now—but if more teleport signals opened, or if the Institute managed to overrun a flank, it would collapse fast.
He ducked behind cover and keyed his comm again. "Sarah, status on backup systems?"
"Still up—barely. Mel's holding the downstairs. Robert's got half the building locked. But they're pushing hard. We've got maybe five minutes before they hit us again."
"Copy. Stay sharp."
He turned to the soldiers nearby, voice rising above the cacophony. "We hold this line! If they break through here, everyone inside is dead!"
A chorus of battle cries met his words. The Minutemen—those weary, dust-covered soldiers—rallied once more.
The morning thundered on.
Sico crouched low behind a crumbled wall, the plasma carbine in his hands glowing hot from constant fire. The ground around him was littered with twisted synth parts—smoking limbs, shattered visors, still-clutching fingers frozen mid-trigger. The Minutemen's forward barricade had held, but just barely. Smoke and dust thickened the air, turning every breath into a cough and every blink into a sting. Even so, the Minutemen kept fighting, their line unbroken.
The four Sentinel tanks began to unleash hell.
With a synchronized roar, all four tanks pivoted toward the active teleportation zones and opened fire. Their heavy cannons discharged one after another in a deafening cascade—BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM—shaking the very bones of Greenetech. High-explosive shells detonated in the middle of the swirling Institute teleport fields, flinging synth bodies skyward like ragdolls, blowing craters into the asphalt. Plasma-backed concussion rounds followed, designed not just to destroy, but to disrupt the fragile teleportation energy matrices. They did just that—several of the shimmering fields flickered violently and collapsed before fully forming.
"Target zone two!" Sico shouted, gesturing toward a cluster of Gen 3s flanking from the right. One of the Sentinels whirred, locking on with its twin cannons and unleashing a precise double shot that obliterated the enemy squad in a flash of fire and debris.
The synths were relentless. For every one they dropped, two more seemed to take its place, but the Minutemen had a rhythm now. Behind the front barricades, sniper teams picked off enemies from elevated positions inside the building's broken windows. Heavy weapons teams fired from sandbag nests, lobbing plasma grenades over the heads of the frontline troops. Even settlers—those who had picked up arms in the name of survival—stood in the secondary line, ready to fight if the first wave fell.
Sico glanced toward the main gate, where a synth demolition team had managed to breach a small opening in the barricade. A half-dozen Gen 2s rushed forward, only to be met with concentrated laser fire from a Minutemen fireteam led by Cait, who had arrived minutes earlier with backup from Minutemen Plaza.
"You're late," Sico muttered into his mic.
Cait's voice crackled back, full of that familiar grit. "Traffic was murder. Don't worry, I brought the fireworks."
And she had. One of her team carried a rocket launcher, which barked a bright orange streak into the street and turned another synth wave into flying wreckage.
Inside the building, the situation remained dire.
Robert moved like a ghost through the west wing, his squad retaking corridor after corridor. At one point, they cleared a room only to find the ceiling above them glowing with the distinctive shimmer of another teleport field. Without hesitation, Robert tossed a plasma charge directly above. The moment the teleport field materialized, the charge detonated, incinerating the synth squad before their systems even booted up.
"Third floor clear!" he shouted into his comm, voice ragged but determined. "Moving to stairwell Bravo."
"Copy that," came Sarah's reply. "We've pushed them out of the east labs—barely. Holding the uplink. Still intact."
Sparks continued to rain from the ceiling as Sarah and her defenders fired from the comms room doorway. She dragged a wounded soldier out of the line of fire, pressing her palm against his bleeding shoulder before slapping a stimpack into him.
"Don't you dare pass out on me," she growled. "You promised to fix the antenna relay, remember?"
The soldier grinned through the pain. "Guess I better stick around, then."
Down in the lower levels, Mel was all but soaked in sweat, her hands trembling but precise. His team had successfully rerouted two of the three uplink backups to secure frequency ranges, and the third was being hardwired into a new terminal using repurposed Institute equipment taken from the dead.
Gunfire raged just outside the thick steel doors.
"They're not getting through," Mel said to herself more than anyone else. "They're not getting through."
One of his techs looked up. "Why are you so calm?"
"I'm not," Mel replied. "I'm just too busy to freak out."
Back outside, the tide finally began to shift.
The Institute's coordinated push began to falter. Sico saw it first—not in their numbers, but in their movement. The synths stopped advancing in formation. Some began firing erratically. Others lingered too long in cover or rushed forward without support. One Gen 3 climbed a pile of debris only to be vaporized by a sniper shot through the head.
"They're losing cohesion," he said into the radio. "Keep pressing! They're breaking!"
A Sentinel tank fired another mini-missile salvo, striking a fresh wave of teleport signatures before they fully formed. The explosion knocked a nearby streetlamp into the middle of the street and sent a spray of synth parts raining down like mechanical hail.
Cait's team advanced, laying down suppressive fire and pushing up the right flank. Sico led the charge from the left, plasma carbine still singing with heat as he fired on the move. A group of Minutemen rallied behind him, cheering as they surged forward.
The teleport fields began to stutter. Some shimmered weakly and vanished. Others pulsed and failed altogether.
Inside, Robert burst into the final stairwell with his team and found a half-dozen synths converging on the server room. He fired two quick shots, then slammed the butt of his rifle into the faceplate of the lead Gen 3, sending it crashing into the wall. His squad followed, cutting the rest down in a flurry of gunfire.
"We've got the core locked!" he called. "Sarah, Mel—you're clear!"
There was a long pause.
Then Sarah came over the comms, voice strained but triumphant. "They're pulling back."
Sico stood up from behind a smoking barricade and saw it with his own eyes: the synths were retreating. Not falling back to regroup—teleporting away in droves. Each blink of light marked a retreating unit. They had been beaten.
The street outside Greenetech fell quiet for the first time in hours.
Ash and smoke drifted over the ruined landscape. Minutemen stood from their firing positions one by one, weapons still raised just in case. Sentinel tanks lowered their cannons, scanning the horizon for lingering threats.
Sico stepped forward into the middle of the street, boots crunching over scorched pavement and broken metal. He took a long breath of the acrid air, chest rising and falling with exhaustion.
Victory.
It didn't feel clean. It never did. The dead still lay scattered—friend and foe alike. But the Institute had been repelled. They had struck with everything they had, and the Minutemen had held.
Sarah emerged from the front of the building, her uniform torn and smudged with ash, but her eyes bright. Robert followed, dragging a wounded synth frame behind him for salvage. Mel came last, blinking in the daylight after hours underground.
They all converged near the center of the courtyard. No words were needed—not yet. Just nods, tired smiles, and the silence of shared survival.
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• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-