The nearby animals were certainly missing a few brain cells each based on their willingness to abandon their initial ambush policy and go all-in after Axton had killed some of their own, but perhaps that could have been chalked up to the cybernetic upgrades that had found their way into these beasties. Well, it was either one of those two options, or perhaps the fact that this was a video game, and most gamers would be rather peeved if the nearby enemy mobs were a bit too smart for their own good.

Either way, the rest of the pack charged Franken more or less as one, with a few trying to circle behind the large metal construct of death to strike from the rear. Of course, with Axton being a Player/ Outworlder, he could tell based on the HUD alone, not counting Franken’s own sensor suite, that this was going on.

Despite the recent update to the game patching, nerfing, and buffing certain issues (or so it was claimed) one of the things that both made it into the release build and past the first major patch was the issue regarding certain terrain features failing to offer the bonuses to certain actions that they should. In this particular case, although the tall, dry grass was up to Franken’s armpits and the animals were much, much lower to the ground than that, the grass provided absolutely zero bonuses to the animals’ ability to sneak up on anyone, let alone an overly attentive Player.

To Axton and to Franken’s sensors, it was as if the grass wasn’t even there at all, being nothing more than a few odd pixels that blocked sight, sure, but not sensors. There was a certain bit of irony in the fact that these critters slinked through what they thought would cover their approach, only to have been noticed far sooner than they had expected due to their silhouettes being easily seen and highlighted in a red glow.

But enough about that stuff.

The hyena-coyote cyborg crossbreed things made it to within a few meters of the extent on Franken’s melee reach before a twirling swing from the giant metal man caused them to backtrack a bit. It seemed as though they had not factored in Franken’s speed, maneuverability, and reach, especially when armed with a combat knife big enough to be a decently sized ‘regular’ sword at bare minimum.

Of course, given that the previous groups had also failed to account for this, it wasn’t a surprise to Axton that they now stayed at a distance and began to circle, looking for any opening that could be exploited. The AI in this game could be dumber than a sack of bricks at times, but other times the intelligence seemed to dial up to 11, and the ludicrously fast pivot from blind rushing to using the tactics or real animals showed that the VRMMORPG, while absurdly detailed, also still needed a fair bit of polish.

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Franken held its combat knife in the proper manner, facing the way that knives were intended to be used (for the most part), but Franken’s hand (and the knife within it) was angled at a roughly 70-degree tilt. Due to the work that had gone into this iteration of Franken and the fact that it was designed more for quick attacks, its pilot did not feel concerned that the knife was angled this way.

After all, Franken’s wrist joints were able to spin its hands fast enough to make a single knife into a single-bladed buzzsaw if angled properly, so what was the harm in engaging in a bit of Hollywood theatrics? And if that wasn’t enough, this version also had some other tricks up its sleeves that made it structurally weaker, but still fast and deadly as fuck.

The critters around apparently didn’t know any of this, though, and continued to circle for a while longer until a pair got the courage needed to launch a ‘surprise’ attack on Franken’s back. This, as you might imagine, did not go as well as the animals had thought that it would.

Rather than turn about-face and expose its back to the other mobs, Franken merely rotated its arms in its shoulder sockets to grab the skull of one of the creatures and jam one of its combat knives down the throat of the second one. With a whirring of some damn fine motors, the arms returned to their normal position in front of the mech before letting the impaled mob slide off and crushing the reinforced skull of the other.

“Got any tricks that your predecessors hadn’t already tried to pull about five times by now?” Axton said with a voice full of snark. He did have reason to speak like this, though, as he was right and there had been a few other packs that had tried that trick before. Not that it had worked then, mind you, but it was the thought that counted.

Whether or not the animals could understand him was, in Axton’s eyes, utterly irrelevant. He was alone right now, and while he did sometimes like playing alone, this was the first time that he was actually alone in this game for any decent length of time that wasn’t pure, non-stop action. As a result, he had a lot of time to come to the conclusion that he much preferred to play this game with other people alongside him.

Maybe he would start a Company and be the first Player in the game’s history to make NPCs a part of one? Well, that didn’t bear thinking about right now, as if his mind wandered a bit too much he and Franken could be in some deep shit.

Another one of the hyena-coyote things moved closer, and this time Axton directed his big, stompy death robot to back up. He wasn’t scared or nervous or anything like that, but given how dumb these and other animals here sometimes seemed to be, he was at least a little bit sure that they would mistakenly think that he was about to try and run.

Given that he had killed the two of the pack that were behind him, leaving that path open, it could certainly seem like he had an avenue to retreat. A few more steps and a slight push from Franken’s thrusters ended up convincing the nearby beasties that the big metal Kinder Egg and the treat hidden inside of it were both about to run, ad rather than do the smart thing and let him run, they once again proved how utterly boneheaded the AI in the game could be at times.

Axton shook his head as he saw the silhouettes of the creatures in the tall, dry grass grow a bit bigger as they tried to rush him.

“Predictable morons…”