Turns out Cee wasn’t the only one with some persistence to her abilities. The flecks of light Juniortron was throwing off began to resolve into golden spears, hovering near him as they multiplied, building up into what promised to be quite a visually spectacular volley as light flashed and glittered off of them. Within the chaotic concealment of her Red Moon Cloak, Cee quirked one eyebrow up as she regarded the building attack. Golden Boy up there sure as hell knew how to play to whatever intangible crowd he was trying to impress, but the long build-up to his attack gave Cee plenty of time to plan her counterstroke. The spears started to rain down, arrowing in with excellent aim at where Cee would have been had she continued her cruise at a steady velocity and vector, blanketing the area around the target point as well, attempting to strike her from the sky in a storm of golden needles. Whether Juniortron had chosen a wide-area attack because he couldn’t properly target her through her Cloak or as a measure to try and limit her evasive capabilities didn’t really matter – the Agent was well prepared indeed for this sort of assault. The heavy revolver in her left hand, already aligned with the mechanoid and thus also aligned with the axis of the spears’ travel, spat four of its preloaded rounds out from within the clawing, mind-twisting fog of the Red Moon Cloak. They were not, however, aimed for Juniortron. Not this time. This time, the rounds were [i]Pompeii-B[/i]* shots – basic variations of Cee’s typical nuclear graser strike, which Juniortron had been thoroughly introduced to by now. These ones, though, did not produce a focused bolt of coherent gamma – the Pompeii-B variation omitted the one-shot magnetic lensing in favor of a larger payload. They were, in effect, regular explosive bullets whose payloads simply happened to be nuclear rather than chemical in nature. The micronuclear detonations were still [i]significantly[/i] more powerful than any conventional explosive round could be, though. The four Pompeii-B rounds Cee had fired were aimed precisely, detonating amidst the descending spear-storm and heavily disrupting the attack. Nuclear airbursts shattered a portion of the descending spears above Cee, within the outer edges of the Red Moon Cloak’s influence. She moved through the resulting dead zones within the maddening concealment of her Cloak, the meticulously aimed holes in the spears’ coverage providing her plenty of room to evade. Only a scant few of the golden spears threatened Cee at all, and those were easily enough dealt with via the interposed face of her Bastion. She deflected away those handful of vague threats and dismissed the remaining pair of Pompeii-B rounds in her cylinder, watching as the mechanoid dove down amidst his spears and bored his way into the [i]Glorious Venture[/i]. Clearly he had plans for the derelict ship, though what he was going to do with an ancient, rusted-out hulk possessed of virtually no working electronics, engines corroded into eternal uselessness, no fuel reserves, and a hull [i]severely[/i] compromised by the passage of time, Cee could not be assed to guess. Nor did she care. What she did know was that as mildly amusing as it had been to explore the old wreck, the [i]Glorious Venture’s[/i] days on this benighted old world had come to an end. Whatever Juniortron was doing, he’d made a serious tactical error in entering the ancient ship. Inside the [i]Venture[/i] his superior aerial mobility was nullified…and he was a more-or-less stationary target. Cee shortened her flight arc, quickly positioning herself about a hundred meters in front of the ship’s bow, aligned with the vessel’s spine, Gunsmoke held up in front of her. The heavy shrouding above the weapon’s low-mounted barrel sparked, then blew off, panels flying back behind Cee to reveal a small cylinder, roughly half the length of the gun’s barrel, suspended between a pair of tiny magnetic anchors. The cylinder was black – but not the jet black of a coat of paint or electrical tape. Within the deep, inky blackness of the cell, an entire galaxy looked to be hidden within the shifting liquid motions within the slowly rotating cell. Well…’slowly’ at the very first. As soon as the device was revealed, its spin began to drastically accelerate, energy flooding through the magnetic linkages. A deep, reverberating whine began to sound, shaking dust and rust from the [i]Glorious Venture’s[/i] hull. Crackling arcs of errant energy coursed from the gun over Cee’s left arm as the weapon began to transform, and Cee’s arm with it. Gunsmoke’s barrel elongated, thickening heavily at the base, while spiraled, claw-like rails extended the weapon’s rifling beyond its bore. The revolver’s grip expanded, merging with Cee’s fingers as the entire weapon shifted to a uniform, ash-like grey. Scales of that same ashen grey traveled up Cee’s left arm, engulfing the entire limb. Feather-like structures unfurled from the ashen scales; a cluster of them around Cee’s shoulder, a smaller cluster around her wrist, a handful strewn randomly around the rest of her arm. Finally, the elongated barrel split, six arcs of metal creating a spiral cage around a howling, barely-tamed newborn star. The [i]Angel’s Arm[/i]* was the most basic application of the power of the ancient, artificial Angel locked away within the old gun’s power cell. Legends of the world from which the weapon took its name spoke of destructive power unrivaled by any other weapon – blasts capable of putting craters in the moon overhead, attacks whose mere backwash was enough to devastate entire cities. Cee’s Angel’s Arm was not so powerful as all that – even Gene’s intervention back on Vestusio could not change the fact that Cee was not Gunsmoke’s original, long-lost intended wielder – but it was certainly powerful enough to blast effortlessly through an old, rusted-out tomb of a vessel. Which was exactly what Cee needed. A mental twist of her currently-phantasmal left trigger finger unleashed the Angel’s Arm, heralding the final death of the [i]Glorious Venture[/i]. A column of sheer destructive power over five meters in diameter erupted from the Angel’s Arm’s barrel like a horizontal volcano, crashing through the corroded civilian-grade hull and time-worn interior structure of the aged ship with all the force of a cannon through cobwebs. The barely-diminished cannon bolt tore through the engines at the rear of the ship and continued on, brilliant white light etching sharp-edged shadows across the wastelands of Tarkarus as the all-consuming beam burned, eventually spending its fury on digging a map-altering crater out of the side of a distant mountain. Within the [i]Venture[/i], backwash from the Angel’s Arm blast raced throughout the ship’s corridors and maintenance runs, destructive energy diffusing in a hellish web all through the ancient vessel. Juniortron had almost certainly avoided the Angel’s Arm’s primary blast – though if he hadn’t, it was unlikely there’d be more than a few bits of charcoal left of him. Nevertheless, Cee hadn’t been counting on catching the alien mechanoid with the Angel’s Arm directly. No, that was too optimistic. What she [i]was[/i] doing was, in some ways, crueler. The scouring devastation released inside the [i]Glorious Venture[/i] by the Angel’s Arm attack wiped away what little structural support the old ship had left. If Juniortron was able to avoid the Arm’s backwash, violent surges of energy crashing through the vessel in chaotic, impossible to predict patterns… Well. Then he’d have to deal with the half-molten wreckage of the [i]Glorious Venture[/i] collapsing in on him in the wake of the Angel’s Arm attack. Cored like an apple, there was no way for the historic colony ship to even begin to support its own weight. With a tremendous grating rumbling roar, the ship fell in on itself, collapsing into a jagged, unlivable tangle of worthless wreckage. Ideally with Juniortron at the bottom, cursing his gorgeous and infinitely talented victorious assailant’s name with his final few processor cycles, but that remained to be seen. Cee grimaced faintly as the Angel’s Arm receded in the wake of the cannon shot. Her arm returned to normal, as did Gunsmoke, complete with new cowling over the Angel’s reactor. The weapon smoked and steamed – fortunately, Gene had been able to remodel it such that it no longer destroyed itself whenever Cee invoked the Angel, but ‘not completely ruined’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘in prime shape’. The Agent slapped the revolver back into its holster as she took off towards the wreckage of the newly destroyed [i]Glorious Venture[/i], cruising around it in a wary ellipse, looking for signs of evil killbot activity. She kept her shield squarely between her and the wreck, fingers of her now-empty left hand held slightly splayed, ready to snatch any of a dozen different Godforged armaments out of the aether at the first sign of resumed hostilities. Even without a discrete weapon, however, Cee still had the building charge in her Lament. The unearthly din of the [i]Venture[/i]’s collapse had drowned it out for a time, but the seething spark of built-up power in the Lament had grown dense enough to start humming as well. A sharp keen, tearing at the winds around Cee, growing more and more audible as the wrecked Venture settled and as power continued to flow into the spark through the web of lightning suspending it in her Halo, the weapon’s howling song growing louder all the while. If Juniortron showed what passed for his face outside the new-made scrap heap, Cee was pretty thoroughly prepared to separate it from its general existence. *[hider] -[i]Pompeii-B[/i]: Simple brute-force rounds, derived from the Pompeii nuclear graser system. Pompeii-B shells omit the magnetic lensing microsystems engineered into normal Pompeii rounds, replacing them with a slightly larger and more damaging micronuclear spark igniter. As such, Pompeii rounds create an ordinary (for a given definition of ‘ordinary’) nuclear explosion at their point of detonation, if a very small one by the standards of nukes. One of Cee’s quicker and more useful area-effect techniques, if one with a very strictly observed minimum range. -[i]Angel’s Arm[/i]: Cee’s Gunsmoke-G is a relic of an ancient hero, recovered by the Yggdrasil Crew and…appropriated…by the android when she raided their armory for gear after they woke her up. Gunsmoke’s only special property, beyond the unusually rugged construction that allows it to withstand usage by Cee, is playing host to the Angel, an artificially created demigod-like creature capable of producing an enormous amount of energy and, to a limited extent, matter-energy conversion. While the Angel’s power is immense, the entity is difficult to rouse from its sleep; Cee can only wake the Angel up once in a given encounter, after which it falls into a deep slumber and cannot be awakened again for a minimum of several days. As such, the Angel’s Arm is useful as an Instant Snapshot Doomcannon, but is effectively a one-shot weapon. [/hider]