Made some more progress and tweaks to this iteration. The name of the game is figuring out a stealthy design, but still takes elements from the Combine's brutish/eastern bloc/riot cop style armour. In this, the Combine are progressively more "fucked up" as you go up the ranks, becoming more and more synth like, so designing some body-mods, such as camo, body temp regulator, etc is in mind. Still noodling with details as the full fit comes together.
My current thinking is this outfit is either scavenged together or Alyx successfully killed and assassin and runs off with the spoils, sucessfully hacks those body mods and gets herself a pretty sniper present...
I cannot say I have a fully fleshed out story. Naturally takes ideas from Epistle 3, more or less, but I bunch of the work I plan on producing was meant for Boreal Alyph, so I'm repurposing more or less of it as my own ideas, like this, for this project.
This design definitely isn't ending here, but I'm pretty happy with this so far. I'm trying to get as much feedback as possible and making changes here and there and eventually make a pretty rendered version. Any feedback to help make this more convincing is welcome.
I guess I need to make a disclaimer just in case but this is not for BA! This is just a personal project that more or less takes some ideas from BA.