As though a burning meteor, the Monolith Sword’s red-glowing silhouette fell from the sky. With a succession of horrible tearing and scraping sounds it seared and cleft its way through meters of synthfiber and infrastructure, but the most distinct were the sounds that issued forth when it broke through Asura’s livingmetal bones. Like a great choir of hammers on anvils, wherein the former shattered the latter with the strike. Asura’s mass already skewed to the right somewhat, it began to lose its balance and fall to the right, and its gaze naturally fell upon G-Kaiser’s form. Whether it was the shock, the force imparted, or simply the damage to its systems finally catching up with the beastly machine, Asura let go of Amalgam altogether in that moment, making no attempt to grasp after Armless when he willed the cables to retract back into the cockpit.
Acala’s voice hissed through the voice comms as the G-Kaiser struck ground, ripping a channel in the sand as it landed, barely missing Amalgam. “Leave the mad thing be, Ouroboros. They need us at the walls,” the toad-like pilot said as he impelled his machine into a running start back towards Canyontown, breaking into a series of rocket-assisted leaps.
Without hesitation, Armless followed suit, directing power to Amalgam’s thrusters and Graviton Manipulation Engine as he moved it to a run. The former sputtered and ignited, whilst the latter began to emit a loud whine as it reduced Amalgam’s effective mass, allowing it to perform long, high-velocity leaps, much like the G-Kaiser.
A mad cackle bubbled up from Asura’s limp form as it struggled to stand up, veritable rivers of black nanite-slurry gushing forth from its stumps as it struggled.
A weak, disbelieving mutter of ̹͈“̧A̲̕ ̶glo͙r͓͉̫i̟̗̺͘f̰̪͡ie͏d̥̣̖ ͕̺͕bl͟udg̹̠̬eo͔̹͍n͟…” echoed across walker-to-walker comms.
Neither Acala nor Armless gave the mad, walker-shaped thing so much as a second glance, their minds were not directed towards it - they were both fully committed to defending Canyontown.
As they both neared the enemy force, they could see the defensive line that was forming. A great bulwark of several dozen walkers forming up in front of the gate, with more emerging out of the shaft at the back of Canyontown like insects coming forth to defend their hive - the warriors of Skull Battalion had figured out the smaller and more mobile of their walkers could scale the shaft far faster than the lift could be operated.
Upon the walls thousands of guns bristled, trained on the enemy, the wielders waiting for their targets to come into range. Bolts of sizzling plasma continually splattered against the city’s walls as the rovers at the very front finally reached their effective firing range. Few of them managed to fire more than one or two bursts before their cabins were ruptured by a high-caliber shell or melted into slag by a massive glob of plasma from the walkers.
The battle for Canyontown was already well underway by the time Acala and Armless reached the line, landing only a few dozen meters from one another, and no more than a couple hundred meters from the very back of the attacking horde.
“Begin charging the Distortion Cannon.”
Affirmative.
The two warriors briefly looked over the battlefield as they decided on a vector of attack. “I’ll take the left side, you take the right,” Acala croaked into comms jokingly.
“Sounds good,” Armless agreed in a deadpan tone.
A cackle that bordered on a croak sounded from Acala’s side. The G-Kaiser hefted its sword off its shoulder into a javelin-like hold and broke into a run, firing up its thrusters before it stabbed the Monolith Sword into the ground, using it as a vaulting pole to launch itself into another rocket-propelled leap. The red glow had faded from its edge, but as the walker flew on a parabolic trajectory into the enemy ranks, its blade began to glow once more.
Armless wasn’t behind either, simply repeating the same thing he had done before to leap into the fray, diverting power to both his thrusters and Graviton Manipulation Engine for a brief burst of flight.
The rovers were approximately a third as tall as Amalgam, which didn’t help them stand up to the walker’s incomparable bulk whatsoever. Landing directly atop several rovers and crushing them underfoot, Armless let go of planning and gave himself to the carnage, his mind contented by the veritable abyss in combat performance between an Igron assault rover and a living walker such as Amalgam or Asura.
Utilizing its left arm as a pivot point against the ground, Amalgam entered into a thruster-assisted low kick, and didn’t come to a stop - instead, it transitioned from one leg to the other, effectively performing an elaborate high-energy acrobatics routine that transformed its massive, armored lower legs into devastating bludgeons. Its razor-sharp, wedge-shaped leg plating allowed even relatively weak kicks to shear through their plating like butter.
They couldn’t predict how Amalgam would move, their plasma-bolts simply bounced off the slabs of nanolith that were its legs. Without stopping or even slowing down, Amalgam’s dervish-like assault smashed and cleaved its way through rover after rover, carving a path of scrap metal and gore through the attacking Igron force.
Acala, meanwhile, continually exploited the Monolith Sword’s tremendous mass to swing G-Kaiser around with downward slams and stabs. He combined the leverage afforded by his weapon with bursts of rocket-thrust to leap across the battlefield like a vaguely humanoid ball of flaming death and toxic, void-saturated smoke.
However, he couldn’t afford to be as reckless as Armless - he had to take care to dodge and perform evasive maneuvers, even actively deflect incoming fire with his sword. Every once in a while a shot would strike his armor, but unlike Amalgam’s, it wasn’t resilient enough to simply absorb the energy without some damage.
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Even still, from far behind the battlefield, great spears of livingmetal still rained down on the enemy, detonating just before impact into cones of metallic spikes. They destroyed two, three, sometimes four rovers at a time, then crumbled away into black sand within seconds. Fulgent knew not to aim anywhere near her allies, and had the precision to avoid even risking friendly fire while still providing aid by strategically eliminating enemy rovers on Amalgam’s and G-Kaiser’s flanks.
The three of them couldn’t take on the entire army of assault rovers, however - many of them advanced, reaching the defensive line only to be set upon by a wall of death no single walker could ever produce.
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High upon Canyontown’s walls, Nesgon watched over the battle, mentally calibrating the graviton accelerator in his right arm to a long-range mode. He had his doubts and fears in regards to whether the walkers in the Vault could be brought online in time, but the continuous swarm of machines climbing out of the cargo shaft and stomping towards the main gate to join the line spoke for itself. Many of them were armed with printed weapons, from bludgeons and swords to slug-throwers and plasma projectors. The smaller among them tended to bound about or move smoothly, whereas the few that approached Amalgam in size were ponderous titans of metal.
The largest walkers formed the line itself, whereas the smallest waited just behind the line for an opportunity to flood forward and pierce the approaching enemy force, then rip it apart from the inside. Upon the walls, every man, woman, and even child able to wield a gun was stationed, all equipped with radios, all waiting for Nesgon’s signal to fire.
It would be a single word, known among all to symbolize an overwhelming volume of firepower so condensed it can neither be dodged nor resisted.
The Old Dragon’s voice rumbled across the radio waves as he formed a livingmetal stake inside his forearm, as the whine of a graviton accelerator built and the projectile was ripped forward by a short-lived gravity well.
“Danmaku!”
The walls above and earth below shook in equal measure.
Blinding light shined before them and deafening noise resounded all around.
The booming and cracking of slugs being launched and breaking the sound barrier.
The screeching of ionized air and crackling of plasma bolts.
The whine of accelerators and clanging of their livingmetal projectiles.
The combined might of thousands armed by the weapons of man there resounded all at once, raining down death upon the encroaching foe, melting, shattering, and ripping apart uncounted war machines and killing uncounted warriors more in a single salvo.
The dust cleared.
There were still hundreds of them, now unable to advance over the wreckage of their comrades.
A gap opened in the defensive line as the Shield-armed Walker stepped forward and aside, along with two others of similar size.
The mechanized butchers of Skull Battalion sprang forward, their swift walkers flooding forward through the gate and dancing through the field of destroyed rovers to set upon those beyond. The defenders upon the walls continued to rain death in short, concentrated bursts, the initial salvo having either emptied or destroyed many of the printed firearms.
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Skull-1 led Skull Battalion’s charge, Dygenguar’s cyclopean form launching itself deep into the enemy ranks in a manner that matched its official designation - a high-velocity deep striker. It was armed with printed weapons much like the others, in its case a pair of box-fed slug-throwers, with bulky pieces of starship plating fashioned into handheld cleavers and strapped to its back as backup weapons. They had added more plating over the biggest patches of exposed musculature on the body, but with so little time, most of its upper body remained exposed.
In its wake there would’ve followed Skull-2, 3, 4, and 5, forming Skull-Team 1, were they present - only Skull-3 and 4 had reached the surface in time, and walkers from other teams had to substitute. Skull-Team 1 would lead the charge as a whole.
So it was that Dygenguar’s pilot was met with combat for the first time in his life.
He had been picked for Skull Battalion for two reasons. First, he was the most intimately familiar with human technology, or at least as intimately as one could be without truly understanding it.
Second, he was one of the few who had acclimated to the usage of dataplugs, and one of the even smaller few who didn’t have the slightest aversion to doing so.
He reveled in the feeling of being one with a machine.
It was the only way to escape his broken shell of a body, burned by unstable void energies to the brink of functionality, much like the bodies of uncounted others who explored the wrecked starship before him.
When he stepped into the cockpit and pushed the dataplug into the slot on his neck, Surzed of Clan Karuta was no more.
He was Dygenguar, and Dygenguar was him.
Dygenguar’s cyclopean form launched itself forward with slug-throwers in hand, at first running until it reached some distance from the gate, then unleashing the full force of its musculature into the ground to truly explode into the enemy lines.
Like a building-sized bullet, it soared over the field of wrecked rovers before impacting with a functional rover, bulldozing over it and several others before slowing down enough to hit ground. Surrounded by enemies all around and deep behind the front of the line, the one-eyed destroyer was right at home. Its pilot was overtaken by the raw drive that only survival instinct backed up by unassailable bulk could provide, unleashing a torrential flow of hot metal from its slugthrower whilst stomping and cleaving all around.
The first bolts of plasma struck its musculature, ripping the bundles at the very surface. Neither man nor machine felt pain, and Dygenguar’s self-repair system quickly jumped into action - the ripped bundles whipped about wildly like strange, headless snakes, only to reconnect and pull back together as if nothing had happened.
Another bolt struck, this time hitting the slug-thrower, melting its printed barrel shut. It was useless. Dygenguar dropped it, slamming its grasping hand downward into a rover it had flattened previously, piercing the roof and grabbing the main structural strut, transforming the vehicle’s wreckage into an improvised shield and charging toward the source of fire - two rovers to the left. Unceremoniously stomping on one whilst cleaving asunder the other, Dygenguar was struck once more. Again and again, individual rovers would pepper the great machine with bolts of hot plasma, individually not enough to do any lasting damage.
And still, his comrades couldn’t reach him, not for lack of effort or ability, but simply unable to cover so much ground so quickly.
Continuous sub-optimal combat performance detected.
Enable auxiliary combat cognition centers?