As a seemingly random barrage of ranged fire from Spider-Can kept the smaller, more nimble, and less well-armored War Suit at bay, it also had the added effect of sometimes catching the larger, bulkier, and generally more durable War Suit from a series of angles. The auto-mortar, which had long since languished from lack of use, was now lobbing shells at varying angles and from varying positions, as the nimbler machine it was attached to darted around and provided fire from practically all angles.

Franken, on the other hand, had gotten in close to the more than 70-ton war machine and was using its smaller size and faster, more agile movement to it and its pilot’s advantage by delivering precise slashes and stabs with its pair of combat knives. The larger machine, which stood over two and a half meters taller than Franken, swept its gigantic double-headed battleax around with neither grace nor accuracy, and each wide, sweeping attack was filled with openings both on the wind-up and the follow-through.

Despite the fact that Franken could get in a few precise jabs and slashes with each wide arc that the battleax made, the damage that Franken was able to do was middling at best. Sure, the precise nature of the strikes made the chance of scoring a Critical all the higher, but this battle was akin to a Level 1 Rogue trying to take down a Level 10 Dungeon Boss that also happened to be a Tank.

Certainly, damage was being done, and a Critical here and there was a welcome thing, but when the most damage said Critical can do is 5 Hit Points and the foe you face has an excess of HP exceeding roughly 1,000, the number of times that a strike would need to be landed would always be far too high for one’s comfort.

Axton may have once beaten one of the Remastered Remastered Remasters of one of the Souls Games as a Deprived, but even that feat was only done after extensive preparations. This battle was one with minimal prep, if any at all, and Axton had no foreknowledge of his foe’s attack patterns, or if there were any in the first place.

Thankfully, though, the current champion that he was facing was either the world's biggest meathead or he had gotten so insanely rusty that the idea of mixing up his attacks proved too difficult for him to even begin to comprehend. So far, aside from the occasional and random overhead or diagonal swing, the big lug that he was fighting kept using the same old back and forth sideways swipe with his big ax.

Of course, Axton knew that if that thing made contact with Franken it would rip the War Suit open like a circular saw going against a tin can, and so a decent amount of caution still went into Axton’s and, by proxy, Franken’s every movement. As Franken delivered yet another strike to the knuckles of the giant, near 80-ton War Suit, its pilot’s heart skipped a beat as the digit his War Suit had struck began to go limp.

“Finally!” Axton thought to himself as he drove Franken around the left side of the overly bulky and overly decorative War Suit. “Let’s try something a little more… adventurous.”

As the massive battleax swung towards Franken’s head, Axton pulled his War Suit into a crouch and simultaneously lunged forward while brandishing one of the two combat knives as if it were a fencing sword. The blade cut just a little bit into the waist joint of the Rhino-themed War Suit, but Axton had angled this knife sideways so that as the enemy turned they would do some of the cutting for him.

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Sure enough, the largest red number that Axton had seen above any War Suit’s head in some time let him know that his new idea was indeed a sound one. Sure, he could whale away like some scrub for potentially hours on end, trying desperately to avoid any attacks coming his way while slowly chipping away at the foe’s overall HP…

Or he could instead use the foe’s bulk and power against them. After all, this last strike had not been a Critical, but the numerical damage that it had done had exceeded the previously largest amount of damage he had dealt to this fucker in one attack during the entire course of this whole damn battle. And the previous lineup of damage outputs that counted Criticals in it as well.

Dodging another swing from the giant war machine’s even larger weapon, Franken angled both of the combat knives to run at least somewhat along the side of the foe’s wrists. Unlike all the previous times that he had struck there, this time, the blades cut far deeper than before, though not deep enough to render the wrists useless, let alone critically damaged.

Another mortar shell slammed into the opposing War Suit from directly above, and while it did not produce any visible damage save for some blast scarring, Axton noticed that there was a slight delay in the usual swing from his foe this time. This got him thinking, and he got another one of those nasty, terrible ideas that his foes always seemed to hate him for. Or at least they would hate him for them if they lived through them.

Sure, Spider-Can had its hidden super rocket, but it also had a few lighter ones bolted to it as well. Once upon a time, these had been guided missiles designed to be fired at far away opponents to deal damage that its guns and mortars simply could not achieve.

Now, though, those single-shot rocket launchers were not bolted on the way they used to be, oh no. While Thomas could fire them off, they were now truly dumbfire, and as such, they were not as useful as they once were. Now their main purpose was either as a last-ditch weapon or as what they also doubled as.

Franken peeled away from his foe and lept up as Thomas jettisoned one of the four disposable single-use rocket launchers from the back of Spider-Can, and as Franken used its mix of inertia and jump jets to spin around, it caught the falling disposable weapon and then skidded across the ground like a giant, mechanical ice skater.

Clutching the weapon underslung under the right shoulder, Franken charged back towards the lumbering war machine and then skidded to a halt as it took one knee, which shook both the machine and the pilot inside and scraped all the paint off of Franken’s right knee and lower foreleg. Then, with not a single second passing since the cessation of movement, Franken fired the disposable anti-armor weapon that it held under the crook of its arm.

The rocket, though small, flew true, and slammed into the same shoulder that Spider-Can’s initial shot had stuck mere minutes earlier and injected its nasty payload directly into the machine’s internals. Just as Franken Mk 1 had learned during its first outing, this foe learned all too well that Aerosolized Incendiaries were illegal for a reason.

This also taught its pilot why he and his companion should not have given them to their cronies. After all, one man’s unused, utterly illegal ammo leftover from their defeat/ death is another man’s salvage that can be reworked into a rare, exceedingly dangerous piece of single-use kit.