“So, this place wasn’t even designed by the Warp, was it?” I conjectured aloud, allowing my eyes to go deeper, looking into the pulses of energy that formed this place and its boundaries, definitely sweeping out from the direction we were heading. Briggs lit up his and did the same. He didn’t have the Knowledge Depth that I did, save in a couple key categories, but he had mechanical insight that wasn’t all that out of place even dealing with multiple types of physics here.

“No.” He pursed his lips. “You ever seen the harmonics for a Crown field?”

“A mechanical one?” I riffled through a perfect+ memory. “Can’t say I have. The psionic version is basically a mirror of a magical one with adjustments for psi vs mana. I can’t say I’ve seen someone using a weird science Crown field...”

“Well,” he mentally pointed out some of the sweeping patterns in the sky and land, mixed into all the other shit and actually pretty damn hard to pick out, “those look like an inverted and very large Crown field to me.”

Brainfarts exploded in my backbrain as the researchers promptly went diving for verification and correlation. They were having exciting times back in the labs... especially after some of the Coronal and Umbran researchers were invited in and didn’t want to leave...

A Crown field was a personal version of a Throne field, the Protection from Chaos effect that let most ships sail through the Warp. Inverted... not opposite. Opposite would be Protection from Law...

“Vulnerability to Chaos?” I murmured, spinning through the math and Craft of it. Protection effects were defensive, abjurative effects, right next door to the living axiomatic Fate-based repulsion effects of Curses. This was like a combination of the two...

A massive area effect field that rendered the area vulnerable to the Warp. The Warp would be able to infringe on reality within the area, but the fact it was an artificial field would mean the effect would be intrinsically unstable, especially since in reality it would always be moving relative to the Warp...

“I’ll run with that,” I agreed. “The different tech zones would be from different harmonic overlays, like standing waves of specific intensity or type, allowing different levels and types of synchronization. Where the edge of the field is would be akin to a spatial breach, but more like a reality re-write. That also fits...”

“Which begs yet another question...” he nodded, while the eggers in Markspace verified the preliminary readings, and were going for stress-testing against all the factors they could think of.

“More like sticks it screaming in your face, demanding your attention.”

“Uh-huh. So, I don’t suppose you have the schematics for a Throne Generator.”

I shook my head. “Hadn’t been necessary. They only make them in the Core System of a Sector. TL 12 stuff.” Helldiving was only TL 11, of course...

“Mmm.” He looked at the sky again, before dropping his glowing eyes again. Gold backlights on the pale violet looked soooo sexy... “So, just how big a Throne field would be needed to generate an area that covered half a continent?”

“Ugh. I know so many people who want to invert a Crown field and find out.”

He chuckled at the idea, despite himself. Yeah, you wouldn’t get executed for starting a Warp Incursion for nothing, would you? “We still have to go through this area...”

“Yeah, I think our chances of clearing it are pretty low,” I murmured as the beam cannon of the landcrawler followed whatever massive shell from the main gun, and punched through the chest of the megamech. There was a half-second delay before the fusion core overloaded, and nuclear warp energies went kablooey in ectoplasmic nuclear fire.

A missile came falling from the sky at Mach 20, punched into the landcrawler, and set off its own power core. Briggs and I watched, devasight making us immune to the blinding effect, and Radiant resistance meaning we weren’t worried about radiation damage.

“What do you think the chances are that we’ll find non-Warped forces here?” he asked rhetorically.

“About the same chance as it would make for great fun on the part of the Warped Gods,” I replied thoughtfully.

“Well, don’t kill humans not showing the signs of the Warp Gods,” he noted for us both, his helm snapping closed. He pulled his shoulder-las mount out of his Masspack and quickly affixed to his left shoulder. It synched up quickly, hummed, and began to look about independently of him, prepping to rotate. The power cable extended into his Masspack where his supplemental generator was humming, and frost fell from the barrels, ready for some extended usage.

“Buying into the whole future is ranged combat meme?” I asked, laughing, as my Tails rose behind me, and burning Spikes rotated around them. Paten was in hand, waiting for use.

“Hammer Shards max range fifty yards. Need something with more reach,” he admitted without shame. “Shall we?”

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“We shall!”

------------------

It took us a while to locate something that wasn’t Warped. That’s code talk for saying we slaughtered... a whole lot of stuff.

Briggs was at least four times as strong as I was by now... which is pretty damn impressive. His armor was built to brace him, but didn’t really improve his Strength. The fact he didn’t really need any strength enhancement is what made his armor so damn powerful.

He could heave and throw a tank over on its side... or a Greater Demon. His Sun Strike could totally cave in the treads of a tank and instantly immobilize it, or shatter its turret and render its guns unable to move. Ripping open the hatch after that generally wasn’t too hard, although he usually left it for me, as my Tails could extend down in and take out the crew better.

Yeah, that was superhuman strength for a Rantha Hagspawn, with full Marks, ExLite, Heavy Gravity Training, Source Empowerment, and being so damn tall and impressive... la la la... mind on business...

It didn’t take much to verify who we had to shoot and kill, given how barmy they were, and their flesh was often rotting, glowing, writhing, or mutating badly, and they had lights in their eyes that didn’t belong to the sane.

Standard las-weapons were basically useless against us. Radiant damage was simply not something that could threaten us short of cannon-size, so the corrupted soldiers using them were just chaff to be cleared out as rapidly as Baned auto-fire could acquire and release.

Demons of the Warp generally weren’t happy to be hit by Blessed Laser fire, i.e. The Light. Going from Fire damage to Radiant damage was a nice upgrade they didn’t enjoy at all, and which we were more than happy to inflict upon them.

From the perspective of most of the troops, we were just too tough, too invulnerable, and too accurate when shooting. Paten wasn’t very big, but his auto-fire was still up to twenty a second, and our nice Rantha Ranged Attack Bonuses were base +10. Spraying down a company of men as I passed over a trench line and landing twenty hits out of twenty shots was not difficult at all, and Briggs’ spinning auto-laser could be even more vicious. If his plasma horn lit up and filled the air in front of him with a bolt of ten thousand degree fourth state of hot matter, it inevitably killed dozens instantly.

Still, we were about progress, cutting a swathe straight through all the warring factions killing all the other factions, much as we might like to stay and shovel Karma into the bottomless holes. Of course, we could always shoot behind us...

Occasionally, some smart guys on flying vehicles would be drawn by our speed and the screams in their coms, and come racing in to deal with us, or walkers gone organic, possessed mek suits, rumbling tanks or half-tracks, whatever could be bestirred, would turn heavier guns on us... and we shot them back.

Construct-bane Sun Shots could take an engine right off a plane, blow out the engine on a vehicle, shatter the cockpit of a copter, take off the leg of a walker, and remove the head of a mek-suit. We were far from reluctant to take out the crews manning heavier weapons directed our way.

Happily, the bigger mechs and tanks were generally focused on one another instead of us, and just idle shots and AoE’s weren’t going to do anything to us. If they were in our way, we’d naturally take a short and careful pause to deal with them.

Chalice ripping through cables and Beat blowing out joints was enough to rapidly cripple pretty much any mech, and they had horrible times trying to track us when we closed on them. Of course, the battlefield had shitloads of cover, from wrecks to trenches, and we wouldn’t get close to the true war machines if we could. Given our ability to jump and run, it wasn’t like we didn’t have a lot of options on where to go, and if they wanted to have a grand battle of armored cav between themselves, they were welcome to it.

Of course, if they took shots at us, missed, got frustrated and started chasing, well, damn good Karma for taking out tanks and mechs, you know?

-Ten o’clock, fuzzy. Some Karma?- I /asked him. He glanced over in that direction as some Dancers and their sextoys went exploding from kinetic overindulgence, popping like water balloons, while his autolas was ravaging the many-hued, pastel-scaled reptiles that served as their mounts with explosive savagery.

There was a Greater Sluggor leading an army of Pusboys, Lesser Sluggors, and shambling demons of bulk and debatable veracity at some other force holed-up inside some kind of bombed-out bunker that was trying to put up some kind of defense. The whale-sized brute was making his way over casually, dropping more Pusboys to race ahead of him, and urging on his lesser demons to greater glory and efforts, this was their chance to distinguish themselves before their Patron Oozegramps...

-Sure, why not?- His thirty-foot bouncing strides veered off, and our combined fire began to clear the road in that direction, then off to the sides. We both didn’t let the slime trails from the demons touch us as we raced up behind them.

The Greater Sluggor was conveniently at the rear, but that didn’t mean we were sneaking up on him, given the odd placement of eyes and mouths on his great gooey, slimy, rotting worm-like body.

But that was fine. The eyes just made convenient targets.

Rapid-fire blew away all the Pusboys in the area, and some of the other demons looked back in shock at an attack coming from the rear.

I led the way, Chalice flaring with all sorts of antipathy to a thing of the Warp, and the Nimbus and Corona effects were bright indeed.

Yeah, its skin was magically reinforced ectoplasm, impossibly obdurate... but the psychic energies didn’t give a shit, turning every strike into a touch attack, bypassing all that natural armor, and then discharging a whole lot of Blessed Stuff into the squamous things writhing inside those folds of rot and corruption... explosively.

The Soul Strikes slashed across its spirit, rending its psyche viciously.

Prepared Action, discharge, Standard Action, keep moving, discharge. Five Stars meant five points of its intellect was just shredded by psychic knives. Free Action, focusfocusfocus, discharge... and Grym released his prepared Focus.

Its intellect went from genius-level indulgent I’ve-seen-everything to equal to Briggs’ boot, and that drool wasn’t just a polite affection now.

I opened up a gaping rent in the thick neck and head as instinct spun it around, and a fist bigger than I was slammed into me like a truck. The filth on it alone would have eaten a human away before their shattered corpse could hit the ground, but I was simply launched in an arc, accepting the blow and turning it into a graceful arc of constant fire into the demons below, and at my landing area.

Briggs didn’t bother to run up along the backside that had exploded in flames, taking a 5g jump directly over everything, Beat up, and taking advantage of the Butterfly Sting I had given away to give him an opening and free crit.