A trio of earth-shaking metallic noises sounded from the sand, three feathered spears of livingmetal bursting through the air no less than four times the speed of sound towards the weak-point. Their tips glowed as they superheated in mid-flight, and they buried themselves into Asura’s arm with the force of a vengeful god. Milliseconds later a resonant ringing sounded, and the lances exploded, ripping his arm to shreds down to the synthetic bone.
The arm fell limp. There rained down a great torrent of black ichor, shredded synthfiber, and scrapped metal, pooling in the sand into a pond deep enough for one to swim in.
Asura whipped its head around to stare down the perpetrator, but already, Fulgent was gone from its sight, like a ghost in the wind. It growled so loud the earth shook and stared towards the line once more, the rage which took hold of it pushing the machine to burning yet more of the Machinist’s blessing in a single-word command.
“҉̠K̢͓͔I̦L̟͇̰L͝.”͔̘̥͡
The rovers stirred, beginning to advance once more, soon to leave the zone of effectiveness for Armless’s trap. He had to make a choice - continue the battle with Asura, or spring his trap here and now, giving the walker an opportunity to do whatever it wanted.
A split-second passed. He had initially intended to use the Oscillating Distortion Projector to destabilize the payload and begin a chain reaction that would detonate every rod in the fraction of a second, but the weapon wasn’t fully charged. While it lacked armor-piercing capability, it could perhaps keep Asura still for a short time, but… If that were the case, he would need another way to trigger the payload.
Another split-second.
An idea.
“How far can the cockpit datacables extend?”
Extension range varies from cable to cable.
At minimum, no less than this unit’s full height.
“Can they bear my weight?”
Calculating...
Routing extra power...
Overriding safeties...
Affirmative.
“Ready the Oscillating Distortion Projector to fire at partial charge and activate the cockpit ejection mechanism. Do not disengage datacables upon ejection. Override all limiters.”
Understood.
Armless felt energy flooding his system, pressure building as never-intended energy exchange between his and Amalgam’s systems began to occur,
“Apeiron, ready firing mode. Maximum Power. Long-Range. Wide-Area. Multi-Pulse. Total Annihilation.”
“Alert: Required power output beyond safe levels. To avoid burnout, limit usage,” it warned.
He sent a confirmation ping, and it responded in kind.
“Fire mode ready: B.F.G.”
Armless let go the choke-hold on his own perception of time, and allowed his planned course of action to unfold. He couldn’t deliberate forever, even if his and Amalgam’s combined processing power could make a single second more than long enough.
Amalgam dumped the energy it had built up into the Distortion Cannon, forcing it to spin up from a standstill in a near-instant as the jaws of its arm slammed open and the arm aimed toward Asura. Whilst this occured, Armless willed the ejection mechanism to fire him out of the cockpit, using the datacables that enveloped his form to maneuver himself in mid-air as he focused on aiming Apeiron down on the advancing horde. Already, a good fifth of the enemy rovers were out of the area of effect. He wouldn’t be able to wipe them out in a single stroke, no matter how much destruction he rained down.
“Stage one initiated: Targeting pulse.”
Apeiron’s grippers reared back as pressure built in its firing chamber, a bright glow shining from the muzzle. The grippers slammed forward, arcs of lilac leaping between them as the muzzle projected thousands upon thousands of scanning pulses - too low-energy to be visible by the naked eye, but clearly visible to Armless. In an instant they mapped out the widest viable target area with a nearly inaudible chittering. For a split-second there was silence, and Asura’s mad gaze shifted to focus on Armless.
Its arms dropped. It leaned forward. N̸o̷ ̵y̴o̶u̴ ̸d̸o̸n̸'̴t̷!̸ it barked over comms. Void energy flowed through its systems, synthfiber contracted, and the thrusters in its legs exploded. The ground under its feet shattered as it leapt forward, reaching out with its right arms to try and grab at Armless’s datacables, whilst its middle left reared back for a punch to the base of Amalgam’s lower right arm.
An unstable maelstrom of void energy ripped forth from Amalgam’s third arm, tearing the ground in front of itself asunder and catching Asura in it’s instinctive charge as it slammed right into the shredding tornado. A thousand-thousand immaterial blades ripped at Asura’s form as the vortex enveloped its upper body, simultaneously pushing and pulling from multiple directions as if to try and rip it apart. The tornado filled with shrapnel and synthetic flesh as it tore a myriad of tiny pieces from the surface of Asura’s body, his three limp arms flailing wildly in the artificial wind.
Simultaneously, Apeiron completed its targeting pulse, successfully painting hundreds of rovers containing thousands of individuals.
“Stage two initiated: Target priming.”
Its grippers turned on their joints, facing outward, then flipped backwards into a shape somewhat resembling the arms of a bow. Another pulse escaped the barrel, this time to “trigger” the buried rods and cause them to disintegrate into airborne void energy. The rods began to glow brightly in their shallow tombs, and soon afterward great geysers of lilac exotic particles erupted, seemingly with no effect. A fraction of a second passed. A few of the rovers slowed, their occupants still curious as to what was going on even as a boundless rage drove them onward.
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“Stage three initiated: Total Annihilation.”
One after another, separated only by milliseconds, hundreds of thousands of unstable beams screeched forth from Apeiron’s muzzle, catching ambient void energy in their path and compressing it into razor-sharp explosive particles no bigger than a speck of dust. They ripped a myriad tiny holes into the rovers, the men, the ground itself in their area of effect, forcing the unstable energy they carried into the holes like immaterial sewing needles.
Geysers of blue blood and viscera began to spray from the holes as thousands of pained and enraged screams echoed on the wind. They were soon silenced by a concierto of detonations as the crystalline sand finally lost coherence - one last series of blood geysers burst forth, flashes of lilac shining from within the affected rovers. Their hulls deformed and bulged in grotesque ways from the tremendous concussive forces that had mulched their inhabitants.
A message flashed in Armless’s head as he felt the lion’s share of his built-up energy leaving his body, Apeiron’s grippers retracting as the weapon fell silent.
Alert: Distortion field collapse imminent due to major energy expenditure.
He willed the datacables to pull him back into the cockpit and re-focused all his attention on piloting Amalgam, just in time for the distortion field to begin its collapse under Asura’s relentless charge. Still, over a third of the enemy force remained, driving toward Canyontown with reckless abandon, firing their mountedc energy projectors. Even from this afar, some of the crackling plasma bolts remained coherent for long enough to impact, some ripping through a walkway or two whilst others splashed harmlessly against the monolithic walls. Some of them even took shots at Amalgam, but strangely enough, it was as though something made them whip their aim around just before firing. Amalgam noticed this strange targeting behavior and commented.
Asura is forcing them to miss us.
He still thinks himself deserving of a duel.
More clangs resounded from the dunes, the angle of fire originating from behind the enemy line. There was no more than half a second between each shot, and each of the tremendous metal spears destroyed at least one rover, sometimes even catching two or three in the blast of metal spikes. The resulting barricades served to slow down the advancing horde, but not by much.
Armless wanted to make a stand at the town gates, but he knew he had to fight Asura, or else more devastation would arise. The mad walker would kill a dozen times more people than lived in Canyontown and Exile-town combined. Still…
The skull-faced man gathered a bundle of energy and sent a short-range burst transmission toward Canyontown. “The plan has failed, I repeat, the plan has failed. Proceed with defensive battle as planned and enact contingencies as necessary. I have no choice but to deal with the enemy walker.”
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Acala and his two companions reached the surface to be greeted with something far worse than commotion, this being all of the townsfolk either gathered in firing positions or hiding away who knew where. They stomped through the empty main street as quickly as their machines would go, Dygenguar soon taking the lead whilst the Shield-armed Walker fell behind, G-Kaiser itself being in the middle.
By the time they came barreling out the front gate, the battle was already underway, yet the enemy’s line remained still on the horizon. He witnessed Amalgam and Asura facing one another down, Amalgam bursting forward, and the struggle that followed, culminating with the earth-shaking suplex and Red-eye’s blinding display of focused firepower.
All the way, the trio continued running, their land speed hopelessly lackluster considering the mind-numbing speeds at which the two war gods engaged with one another. There was another flash and another screech, and two thirds of the enemy force were erased - somehow, the fact Armless could do such a thing failed to surprise Acala. “Of course he can do that,” he thought. Then the transmission came.
“The plan has failed, I repeat, the plan has failed. Proceed with defensive battle as planned and enact contingencies as necessary. I have no choice but to deal with the enemy walker.”
They stopped dead in their tracks, faced with the advancing wall of rovers. Acala made a split-second decision, spurred on by an impulse from a place he didn’t know resided in him.
“G-Kaiser can’t fly unassisted, but… Skull-1, Skull-14, throw me. Proceed to retreat and form a defensive line with the others. That’s an order.”
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The distortion field finally collapsed, the projector slowing to a halt and retracting. Asura’s momentum carried it forward, but Armless was ready for it, willing Amalgam to duck diagonally down and deliver a pilebunker-assisted left hook to its torso, managing to catch the same hole in its armor he had punched previously. This time, black ichor gushed out. However, once more, the stake got stuck - not because of plating, but because Asura had anticipated this move and diverted resourced into that specific region of its body in order to allow its self-repair system to act quickly enough and catch Amalgam’s pilebunker rod amongst the roiling mass of synthetic flesh.
Once more Amalgam was stuck, and this time it was Asura who held the advantage in momentum, slamming into it and delivering a punch with its left arm straight to the dome over its head. A sickening crunch reverberated, soon followed by joyous laughter from the mad walker’s maw, which it also broadcast across every transmission channel available to it.
Amalgam met the next punch with one of its own from its upper right arm, at first faltering to Asura’s superior short-impulse strength but equaling it in sustained strength. Simultaneously, its lower right arm moved in from below, its four jaw-like grippers clamping onto the unprotected underside of Asura’s forearm and biting into the synthetic musculature with tremendous force. Asura unleashed a punch to Amalgam’s head from its upper right arm whilst it delivered a downward elbow onto the pilebunker housing on Amalgam’s left arm, attempting to jam it to prevent the stake from retracting. The first elbow did nothing. The second made the joint buckle, if only slightly. Amalgam stomped its right foot into the sand, firing the thrusters of the left and delivering a colossally powerful kick to Asura’s side, buckling the plating and imparting enough force to make the pilebunker dislodge and the mad walker cartwheel some distance away.
Asura regained its composure nearly instantly, even the buckled plating returning to its initial shape as if nothing had happened. Still, the hole in its side remained. It walked toward Amalgam, a sort of feral levity present in its step as it mocked. “͝Yoư’̀v͜e̵ ̢ca̛us̨e̡d me̢ n̷o ̡en͜d ̕of troub̡l͘é, b̕u͟t̕ your͠ ̧s͞l͞a͘v͠e͜-d͞r̨i͟v͢er ̛h͠ơlds͟ ͘y͟o͢u͟ ͝ba͠c͡k,̶ li͟ttl͠e br̨othe̵r̕!. ̀A coưple ͡mo͝re g͞òod̛ ̶p̡unc̴h̨es͏ ͢and I’̢ll ͟h̷a̴ve̵ y̴o̕u̴r̷ m̛a͏n̸-͟sh̶ap͞eḑ ̀b̡a͟tţér͟y a͜ll͜ t͢ó ͘my͞self̢.”
Asura will likely retreat when the rovers are too close for us to intercept.
Suggested course of action?
He sat in the cockpit, and thought. With every grain of focus he could muster, Armless willed his perception of time to a slow and he thought. Even if he managed to disable Asura, the enemy line would reach Canyontown and likely tear through its defenses. His focus faltered, his energy infrastructure overtaxed by the B.F.G.’s usage.
Asura took a step forward. Its foot touched the sand, and in an instant, it ignited the thrusters on its legs and charged once more, shattering the ground, breaking the sound barrier, and rearing up all three of its good arms to deliver a barrage of strikes that Amalgam had no hope of blocking or countering before they did serious damage.
Then, the zero-latency walker-to-walker comms came alive.
It was the Word-bearer, but that wasn’t the listed designation.
It was Acala.
He was screaming, and from the direction of the town gates, a walker-shaped object was fast approaching. The frog-man’s voice rumbled across the comms.
“Trust in the Skull Battalion, Ouroboros!”