Axton looked down at the crippled War Suit and its wounded pilot. That last swing of the morningstar was a shock, but Stebbs’ Suit was too badly damaged to move properly. At most the mayor would be able to pull something like the skeletal killer machine did in the original movie; one of the good ones; the one from before the sequel and before they rebooted the series a total of 4 times in less than half as many decades. Maybe it could crawl forward using its one remaining arm to drag itself towards him, but that would still leave both the War Suit and its pilot vulnerable.

“You know, now would be a good time to give in and accept your fate.” Axton said as he stared down at his opponent. Unfortunately, it seemed that Stebbs and his Aureole were just as determined as that first time-traveling robot assassin had been. Stebbs and the heavily damaged War Suit tried to reenact the final moments of that old classic and used its last bits of power to try and get closer, pushing through dirt and spilling fluids all over the ground.

“It…. Isn’t… over… yet…” Stebbs muttered through whatever pain he was experiencing. It seemed that nothing aside from death itself would stop this fucker in his tracks for good.

Franken walked closer to the essentially crippled mech and lifted its War Suit-use broadsword over its head.

“Just give up. It is all already over. Just die with what little dignity you have left.”

Axton’s words fell on seemingly deaf ears, and so the Player switched the way the sword was held and drove it down into Stebbs’ Aureole, burying it deep into mech and pilot alike. The screech of metal scraping against metal drowned out the sound of flesh being impaled, but it soon became clear that even being impaled by a massive sword was not enough to put the bastard of a mayor down. Yes, he would die soon after, but the mayor was not dead yet. Instead, he started… laughing? What, was this that old movie with the alien hunter?

Stebbs’ laughter was intermingled with coughs and sputtering, but he just did not stop, and this was greatly unnerving Axton. Axton nearly withdrew the blade from the body of his opponent, but something inside him screamed at him to just leave it in there and instead take a decent distance from his foe. Axton heeded his gut feeling and left his big blade lodged in Aureole’s back, Stebbs himself and the ground. As Franken reversed to a distance of about 50 meters, the alarm bells in Axton’s head rang even louder and Stebbs, for his part, kept laughing like he was an alien hunter that had just gotten his ass handed to him by a certain buff actor.

“Oh, no. Don’t tell me….”

Axton put up Franken’s EM sensors and noticed a surge of energy building up in the compound. The distance between him and that place was decently large, but with buildup he was seeing there was a not-so-small chance that both he and his War Suit would be brutalized by the explosion that was soon to come. There was no place for him to go, no place to hide, and so the only option was to try and put as much distance between himself and the imminent explosion as possible.

Ironically, his retreat had put him closer to the building power, and so Axton pushed all power that Franken could spare into the movement system and floored it, rushing past Stebbs and-!

As Franken went past the Aureole, Stebbs’ Suit mustered that last of its strength and nearly impaled Franken with its morningstar. This sent Axton and his War Suit tumbling across the ground with a massive dent in the middle of Franken’s chest. Axton tried to get his machine to its feet, but the overtaxed reactors in the compound went critical before Axton could move.

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The colony was already on fire, but for a brief moment the flames were put out by the absurd pressure wave before what remained of the place was essentially obliterated by the eruption of power.

…

Axton opened his eyes and found himself still inside his War Suit. It seemed that Fortuna had smiled upon him, at least somewhat. The countdown to the wipe was nearly over, and from what Axton could tell, Franken was a mess. The arms now were both entirely inoperable, the legs were either ripped apart or impaled by metal and the only systems that worked were the main camera, the loudspeakers, and the four ‘secret weapons’ that were still in Franken’s chest. By all rights, it was a miracle that they had not cooked off when the generators went boom, but Axton had other things to worry about right now.

The camera slowly turned back on and Axton saw a rather humorous sight before him. Just across the nearly destroyed colony and lounging in a pile of rubble was Stebbs’ Aureole. The gold that once adorned it had all been blown off and the mech was now limbless and had a massive hole clear through it. It appeared that when the reactors went off, they ended up dislodging Franken’s sword from Axton’s enemy, though not without pushing it around a little and making an even bigger hole than before.

However, what made Axton irritable was the fact that it seemed that Stebbs was still not dead. Obviously, Axton could see the mayor’s body through the hole, but he could also see that the damage to Stebbs was not as great as he had thought it to be. Stebbs had indeed suffered a mortal wound, but that wound was not the full-body impalement that Axton had tried to go for.

Instead, the left side of Stebbs’ body, from the very edge of the shoulder down through the waist, had a decent chunk of the organs and tissues on that side heavily damaged, almost having been completely severed from the rest of his form. There was blood flowing out of the wound, but not as much blood as one would expect. Axton blamed the heat of the blast for that, as it was likely that the head had caused the wounds to cauterize. Either that, or the game was being a dick to him, which could very well have been the real issue.

Axton couldn’t move, as Franken’s cockpit was seared shut, but then again, neither could Stebbs. At this point, it was only a matter of whether the mayor would die first or whether the wipe would begin before that. Axton, however, was not going to let that thread dangle. Axton flipped a switch which led to the two heavy machine guns and two single-shot guided missile launchers revealing themselves on Franken’s chest.

“Say hello to the Devil for me and tell him to schedule me in to help torment you when I kick the bucket.”

Axton pulled the trigger, and the dual HMGs emptied their last bit of reserved ammo into Stebbs and his essentially destroyed War Suit from just a few tens of meters away. Once that was done, Axton fired off the two missiles and watched with a twisted sense of schadenfreude as they both struck Aureole’s chest simultaneously, dead on, and just an inch away from the gaping hole in the enemy mech’s torso.

The explosion was glorious, and Axton couldn’t help but smile at bits of the antique scattered around with the same force you would see from certain vehicles a stereotypical episode of that old show about busting myths. The smoke cleared and Axton noticed something rolling towards the place where he lay trapped inside Franken. The last bits of dust settled, and the camera revealed the gruesome truth.

“Man, you are durable…” Axton muttered as he looked down through Franken’s main camera at Stebbs’ severed and scorched head. Closing his eyes, Axton relaxed in his metal prison and waited for the countdown to end.

『Attention! The Beta Will End in 5 Seconds! Thank You For Participating! See You Again! 』

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