"Man has had but one ambition, to soar through the sky, free like a lark and slice the clouds lingering overhead." – The Firebird, in an interview with Liberation Front television host, Garry Altosakovsky.
The country of Helvenia is a state on the frontier of the Eastern Imperium; its leaders have often been puppets to the chairman of the Imperium. After a series of martyrdoms and strife, a stable roster of resistance leaders formed the HLF (Helvenia Liberation Front) and began fighting in the streets of Grisham. Files of men draped in khaki, accompanied by columns of tanks would march onto the streets of Belle Et Navier and spray machine gun fire into future debris across the city. Imperium forces set up equal resistance, forcing bakers and bankers out of their bakeries and vaults, and fashioning them into makeshift barracks where they tried to hold the line. General Harolda was the main military mind behind resistance strategy, attempting to use the sewers to enact guerilla warfare against Imperium hounds, and it succeeded for a while, until Imperium air force swept the brick-work and carpet bombed the streets, forcing guerillas to stay underground. Harolda realized that it would take a miracle to gain even a single inch in this fight, unless he could acquire sufficient air control.
In a slum of West Helvenia, Biroga, a young boy named Tarko Madrivaso was obsessed with flight, gazing at the brisque and elegant maneuvering of Franco fighter jets exercising overhead, his sun kissed face wished to have wings of his own. He was only thirteen, but he was bright. His obsession ran deep; he studied countless aeronautics textbooks he stole from a library at Petrovia memorizing the equations and becoming proficient with high-level math and physics concepts at his mere age. His only roadblock was experience, he needed more than food and air, to fly. He spent most of his time in a junkyard a few miles away from Biroga where he befriended the attendant, he called himself Ole' Rusty and the two would work tirelessly on barely functional contraptions, hodgepodges jury-rigged from the recovered scrap of Imperium aircraft. One day, on a chilly November, Ole' Rusty and Tarko got their bird to fly. It was a rust-red crop duster that was turbulent from the get go. Its turbines screeched like a wood chipper and its wings were shaky and barely stable. Tarko didn't care. He loved the feeling of cold wind brushing past his face, ruffling his hair as he ascended. The smell of burning fuel blessed his nostrils and pangs of dust hit the back of his throat, as his jaw was agape with amazement. Nothing could beat the feeling of soaring through the sky; his dreams were coming true at an exponential rate.
From up on top, the scrap on the ground looked like colonies of giant ants congregating in a desert. He felt powerful and free. To feel like the Sky Wolf, a notorious Imperium pilot, he attempted his signature stall maneuver. He would intentionally point his airplane perpendicular to the ground and when his speed hits zero, he goes all-in in a certain direction. He only really did this during airshows, but it inspired Tarko who wanted to master all great aerobatic techniques. But he was a beginner. It was his first time performing such a maneuver, and with inexperience came error, and his plane fell to the ground. He was able to escape with a parachute strapped to his back, while the airplane slowly fell onto the ground. Amidst the fiery grave of the Rustbucket, Tarko slowly descended with a gentle glide. Ole' Rusty came by to try and comfort Tarko, but the only thing that greeted him was an extreme face of elation, as Tarko smiled from ear-to-ear, wiping the worry from Ole' Rusty's aged and furrowed brow.
Five years after the death of the Rustbucket, Tarko enlisted into the Liberation Front. The war at Grisham was not going well, where the Imperium and Harolda exchanged mere inches back and forth for five years. Realizing the stalemate, Harolda sent three soldiers: Tarko, Kosoka Bromana and Rubi Tole to hijack three F-23 planes and deliver them to an HLF engineering compound in the North. The operation began with Rubi disabling the cameras with a specialize frequency jammer, blinding the enemy. This allowed Tarko and Kosoka to stealthily maneuver around the complex. Through a series of close calls they zeroed in on the airfield. Tarko's eyes lit up; he saw the F-23 standing idle on the airstrip. Rubi gave them a machine which could hijack the ignition system and Tarko decided he would serve as a distraction, by stealing an airplane and forcing the focus on him. He had learnt to fly even better after testing over fifty iterations of the Rustbucket, and he felt combat ready, so he broke into one of the F-23s and took off.
As the engines roared, the eyes of the guards were drawn to the plane, as it oriented itself towards the edge of the airstrip. Quickly, radio chatter filled the air as they attempted to confirm if it was an official take-off. The answer was swift, but Tarko was able to take flight and in a split second, a cacophony of gunfire rained upon the jet. Smoke from the guns rose slightly above their barrels and orange dots populated the compound, it was too late. The four AA guns station atop the four corners of the compound began to orient themselves but Tarko snaked his way through their fire. two Cavalry planes were called.
A lot can happen in a minute. Some can dash over a hundred meters, some can fall in love, but for Tarko, he understood the F-23 in that time, grasping its intricacies and idiosyncrasies. The Cavalry Squad attempted to ground him but he zigzagged across them with expert flying. He was an acrobat in the sky. Kosoka and Rubi stood behind the cover of two separate F-23s, transfixed at the display of ingenuity. "Damn that kid can fly," said Kosoka exasperated by the technique.
The dogfight was impressive. Tarko used the altitude to his advantage, as the Cavalry planes were slightly inefficient at orienting themselves vertically. Exploiting this weakness, he used a technique where he'd halt his forward acceleration, angle the nose of his jet forty-five degrees towards the ground then carefully controlled his forward speed to fly in a curve beneath a target, then just past the thrusters of the enemy, he'd sharply adjust his angle to loop behind the enemy until he was upside down, his nose pointing to the enemy tail, and he'd fire a missile, knowing that the slight delay between adjustment made them blind for a second. Boom! The first of the Cavalry fell. It was shocking.
The second Cavalry plane was on pursuit. It was a hair away from the underbelly of Tarko's plane, but Tarko accounted for this. He began by quickly stalling his engine, and his plane swiftly entered a free fall, dropping over ten meters. Then we performs an aileron roll to the left of the second plan and maximally accelerates forward simultaneously, orienting the cockpit correctly once again. In the chaos, Kosoka and Rubi are able to steal two other planes, and they shot down the second plane while it was in pursuit, and they swiftly retreated.