The Saberions rallied around Gamos, who led them into the Gloomy Canals – the ancestral grounds deep underneath the abandoned city of Barren where unknown riches await them. His goal was a simple one: find the forgotten weapons cache and bunker forged by his grandfather Saladin, prepared specifically for the day Clan Saber needed a shelter when the confederacy did not work out.

They descended many feet underground, threading on dangerous and volatile platforms that often gave way to the unseen depths of the planet’s innards, with Gamos straining to find the various hidden signs along the way. Their journey was a costly one – they lost more than half of their strength just to get there – but when they finally reached the massive vault door with the coat-of-arms of clan Saber indented upon its diffused surface, they knew the sacrifice had been worth it.

The vault held three chambers: a weapons cache, a living quarters and a mission room. The weapons cache held a variety of vintage dark age-era assault rifles, heavy munitions and explosives, as well as seemingly endless rounds of ammunition. And to the joy of the Saberions, all the weapons still worked, albeit with a little cleaning and oiling. The living quarters were large enough to hold all of them and stocked with enough supplies to last them at least a year, but with careful rationing and active collecting in the vast underground network, they knew this would serve as a powerful and permanent base for their activities for a long time to come.

The location of the vault was also advantageous. It was extremely hard to find, and in case of detection, the mission room could be detached from the vault and launched into an underground rail system that eventually leads to another underground network that sits directly underneath Rot Port.

Their mission then became two-fold: fortifying the escape route’s tracks and training to fight in the volatile underground network.

The Dirty Dozen

Every day scores of Saberions are sent into the tunnels to collect supplies, and in the beginning, due to their unfamiliarity of the underground networks, they often got lost or worse: fall prey to the environment or the vicious beasts that lurks in the shadows of the networks. Knowing that they could not sustain such losses, Gamos vetted his people and selected a dozen of the best of his men, and began intensely training them in surviving the Gloomy Canals. Drawing from the lessons that were passed down from his father, he taught the dozen how to read the environment, how to hunt in it, and most importantly, realizing that reckless speed in the underground is often beneficial to their survival in a rather counter-intuitive way.

The dirty dozen soaked up the lessons well, and the results were stellar – they managed to bring in a huge bozza on their first hunt, and for many hunts after that they had always managed to find their way back. No men was lost to the canals.

Soon, as they developed their own routines in the inhospitable underground, Gamos started training the rest of the Saberions in guerrilla warfare, as well as fortifying the defenses around the vault. They began building a series of listening posts around the vault, soon covering every corner of the canals that stretched all the way from Rot Port to the Boneyard.

With the listening post network, and the rapidly maturing familiarity with the canals, they were poised to strike at the Combine for their unlawful exile.

The ‘Krissen’ raid

The first Combines to perish were the collection teams sent out to Tar City. The Saberions would detect a collection team’s entry into the city via its hidden listening posts network, and scrambled to get into position for a well rehearsed ambush plan. It was their first mission and they were determined to get everything right.

The collection team was escorted by a squad of heavily armed sentinels in powered armor, which posed a problem for the ambush team armed with non-armor piercing rounds. Nevertheless, they settled down and waited for their prey to arrive.

When the troupe came into view, they opened fire, killing all four collectors immediately. The escorts were taken by surprise and could not pinpoint the source of fire, and began a hasty retreat, not even bothering to retrieve the fallen collectors. A second team of Saberions, cleverly hidden along the predicted retreat route of the Combines, picked off the survivors one by one.

It was over after a bare fifteen minutes of firefight, with twenty Combine corpses to zero Saberion casualties. As a display of power and intention, they decapitated the corpses and spiked the heads upon crude spears, marking the battlezone in a gruesome manner. The bodies were given a proper burial in the canals by casting them into the dark depths of the underground.

The victory was two-fold. Not only their morale soared at the successful ambush, but they also managed to salvage several energy cells from the powered armor that added to their crucial energy supplies needed to power the entire listening post network.

As more and more collector teams went missing, Hellena suspected that perhaps the infected did not die off in Tar City as expected, but somehow managed to find the same cure that she used to inoculate herself from the virus and survived. Also, she suspected of the links of their survival with the loss of the collector teams, and reports from scouts of the gruesome decapitated heads littered around Tar City.

Knowing that if the population were to realize the true identity of these raiders her position in power would be severely challenged, she took the precautionary step of declaring that the Krissens have struck again. Many in the Combine still had vivid memories of the Krissen crisis, and were easily convinced of the new threat. After all, the modus operandi of these new raiders weren’t any different from the Krissens’.

Battle for Tar City

Hellena planned an operation to flush out the rebels from Tar City, deploying two companies of the Combine Regular Militia to achieve that purpose. More than a hundred heavily armed soldiers marched out of Gauntlet on that day, and their footsteps were easily picked up by the Saberion’s listening posts.

Gamos faced a dilemma. Obviously, going head to head with an army of this size was suicide, even if they had an advantage in the terrain. They were short on manpower and could not afford to lose any more when no fresh blood were willing to join them of their own will. After a tense meeting with his trusted aides and with the counsel of the older and wiser ones, he decided to avoid the army and instead focus on harassing them.

Over the course of three days the Saberions struck hard and left before the Combine Regulars could react, and often in an unpredictable manner. The tactic worked. At the end of the third day the regulars had suffered five dead and fifteen wounded from a plethora of booby traps, with their morale at an all-time low. The company commander, in a furious display of desperation, ordered the eastern quadrant of the Tar City to be demolished, and the regulars set about blowing concrete and ruins into rubble to reduce the amount of cover the Saberions could employ to their advantage.

Unfortunately for the commander’s bad decision, the demolition only gave the Saberions more cover to hide within, and with the regulars distracted on the demolition mission, their ambushes became more effective and downright devastating.

The first battle of Tar City ended with the regulars pulling out completely after losing more than a quarter of their men without even seeing the enemy.

Vicerons enters the fray

The Combine’s response, at least, was predictable. More regulars were sent out, in tighter formations, with the same instructions. They almost always come back with the same results. The mission to flush the Saberions from Tar City is a complete failure.

For ten years the Combine and the Saberions played a cat-and-mouse game, with the Combine suffering heavy casualties in almost every encounter. The Combine regulars were simply no match for the crafty and cunning Saberions.

When Hellena retired, the Saberions had grown to a massive strength of more than a hundred active troops, and posed a serious threat to her successor, Ibrahim. A more aggressive arch-counselor, Ibrahim was determined to end the Saberion threat once and for all.

His suspicions that the Saberions have an advanced reconnaissance system in place was proven true when his own spies discovered the listening post network. Realizing that this might be the key to defeating the Saberions, he secretly began training of an elite army for that sole purpose. By reinforcing the armor on the current power suits, and accelerating research into the microexplosives field, he managed to pave the way for a revolution in the Combine’s military power – the creation of the Vicerons.

The first squad of Vicerons were selected from the best of the regulars, with exceptional ruthlessness, courage and tenacity in the heat of battle, vetted from the regulars in the continued patrols in Tar City. Five months later, the first prototype of the advanced powered armors were completed, complete with the vicious Hellfire Repeating Cannons.

When the first field test went successfully, Ibrahim knew he had the ultimate weapon.

Operation Rat Hunt commenced.

The Stalemate

To call the operation a massacre is a severe understatement. When the regulars were consistently defeated in Tar City over the years, the Saberions have grown bolder and had taken to roaming the streets arrogantly in a display of their tenacity and defiance of the Combine. But when the Vicerons came, everything changed.

None of their weapons worked against the reactive armor plates on these behemoths, and the Hellfire cannons simply ripped through any cover the Saberions would hide behind.

With their listening post networks intercepted and used against them, the Saberions were routed humiliatingly from Tar City, forced back into the Gloomy Canals where the environment favored the lightly armed warriors. There, the two forces fought into a stalemate, with the Vicerons barricading all exits from the Gloomy Canals and the Saberions defending from within.

But the operation was considered a success, for the Combine had retaken Tar City. Ibrahim spun a propaganda campaign to declare their victory, and as a result he was able to push through some of the most controversial policies ever made since the beginning of the Combine era – increased rationing, tightening of the credit system and reduction of Inter ‘dome communications.