Axton positioned Franken just behind a flimsy wall made of what seemed to be iron siding that had very nearly rusted all the way through. It appeared as though this section of the compound was more of a shantytown, but Axton was curious as to whom this seeming shantytown was for. With the sheer numbers of grunts coming down from low orbit, it might be for them, but a closer inspection led Axton to believe that this was the place where Stebbs’ former ‘unpaid and unskilled, permanently indentured laborers who may or may not be also used as sex toys’ resided. At least, before Axton had pulled a fast one on the asshole of a Mayor and liberated the slaves from the plantation, I mean the compound.

Axton waited until just before the song kicked into the higher beats before pushing Franken’s thrusters to maximum and smashing through the rusted-over metal siding like the god damn Kool-Aid man, swinging the massive sword in its right hand around with nary a care in the world. The numerous thugs under Stebbs’ employ had little to no time to react before the large metal weapon removed body parts or bisected them entirely, and fewer still were able to even put a decent scratch on Axton’s Suit due to the mix of speed and the large tower shield in Franken’s left hand.

With one section mostly cleared of hostiles, Axton and Franken surged towards the next area, slaughtering the heavily inbred security guards/ hired goons with reckless abandon. Despite the number of kills Axton was racking up, he noticed that there did not seem to be an overall drop in the number of bodies in his way. What made him even more uneasy was the fact that his HUD showed more of Stebbs’ goons appearing in areas he had completely cleansed of their presence.

He was about to wonder why that was the case when the realization that, duh, he was in a virtual reality-based massively multiplayer online video game hit him like a truck. Of course, he would have no end of thugs to deal with… unless…?

Axton continued his rampage as the din playing over the loudspeakers both on his Suit and all throughout the compound neared its end, but even as the music began to fade, he still kept up the process of massacring what seemed to be an endless horde of backwoods freaks. At first glance, it appeared as though Axton was directing Franken in a seemingly random way, sometimes ignoring entire mini battlegrounds to strike at others.

This was, of course, just a clever ruse. If someone with enough vision could see what Axton and Franken were doing via a bird’s eye view, they could see that the pilot and his War Suit were inching closer and closer to the shuttle landing platform, all while drawing the heavily armed guards that were around said platform away from it.

Each time Axton purged an area of most of, if not all enemy combatants, it drew the attention of the more elite guards that were keeping the landing platform safe and secure. By the time they were on-site, however, Axton was long gone and said guards had to deal with the growing insurgency on their own. Or at least they had to do so until more mobs popped in, at which point the guards would have to walk all the way back to their station.

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Axton had nearly drawn off all of the guards when the shuttle began its approach again. However, this time the shuttle had its few weapons trained all over the place. It seemed the lower number of guards made the shuttle crew a bit more cautious.

“Fuck.” Axton cursed as he realized that there was a high likelihood that the shuttle would not come back in range if he drew out all the guards or if there were no guards at all. It was now or never.

The music had fully faded out by this point, so Axton cued up another track, this time from a very old turn-based game based on a popular ‘real-robot’ anime series. This time the sound of music was enough to immediately put everyone on their toes as the riff from the electric guitar was followed by a choir-like wordless vocal sung by a single person. This was going to be no ‘Hydra Waltz’ but a man could dream, couldn’t he?

Axton pushed Franken’s thrusters to maximum once again and shot the War Suit into the air before allowing gravity to take its hold over Franken and himself. Thankfully, the automatic systems inside of a War Suit could tell if said machine was about to make a hard landing, and Franken’s thrusters kicked in just before landing on the hard, reinforced concrete floor. This did, however, cause Franken to slightly slip across the floor, but that was just fine in Axton’s mind as it lowered the odds of one of the guards getting a good hit on him with a more powerful weapon.

A quick glance to the side let Axton see the terrified faces of the heavily inbred pilots of the shuttle, but it was not as though they could pull back now. No, they were too close and they likely had already locked their approach in. Given that these were highly purebred/ inbred people, they almost certainly did not have the mental capacity to change such programming on the fly, so at best they would be able to hover around near the platform and hope that Axton would either go away or at least not attack them.

A few high-power blaster rounds screamed past Franken’s upper area, an attack that was quickly followed up by several rocket-propelled grenades. Axton drove Franken to what he assumed were its limits, but a single RPG managed to score a hit on the arm carrying the massive sword. The exterior plating was not enough to deal with the shaped charge, but thankfully Axton had thought ahead and added a composite armor underneath Franken’s exterior plating. While only comprised of neokevlar with metal plates woven into it, the material was much better suited to dealing with a shaped charge than pure metal armor alone.

Unfortunately, it still was not enough to stop the shot from taking that arm out of commission, causing Franken to drop its sword. Axton cussed out the bastard who had hit him and took evasive action. He may have lost his main weapon, but he still had some more to use when the need arose. As the War Suit skated around the platform, two half-cylinders on either side of the chest slid down to reveal Axton’s secret ranged weapons. Or, at least they moved down enough to reveal two of the four, those two being a pair of heavy machine guns that then began to open up on the guards.