Juniortron had, [i]somehow[/i], managed to escape both the flooding backwash of the Angel’s Arm attack and the subsequent collapse of the [i]Glorious Venture[/i] without damage.  At least, physical damage – though he’d managed to erupt from the ship anew mere (metaphorical) heartbeats before its collapse, he’d turned to stare at Cee and shut down his showy Robo-Jesus aura, seemingly paralyzed by the catastrophe he’d narrowly avoided as he made no attempt to initiate a new offense.  He simply stared at Cee, watching her in her defensive cruise around the wreckage of the old colony ship.

Or where he thought she was, at least.  The sense-twisting madness of Cee’s [i]Red Moon Cloak[/i] was still in effect, as Juniortron had taken no action to attempt to pierce or dispel it, nor given Cee reason to believe it was ineffective.  The reverberating hum of her building Lament charge was audible even through the Cloak, though its source was as distorted and nigh-impossible to pinpoint as every other bit of Cee was.  Her shield was up, her Field was charged, her Cloak was undisturbed, she was as yet undamaged, and her enemy was just sitting there [i]staring at her[/i] rather than trying to end her.

The corners of Cee’s lips turned down in a fiercely disapproving scowl.  She was beginning to think that Mister Robo Jesus here wasn’t taking her seriously.

Nevertheless, they were right back where they’d started, for the most part – a few hundred meters of nothing but open sky between them.  Cee could hurl artillery all day long and waste most of it on Juniortron’s agility, while the alien mechanoid had not yet displayed anything that stood a reasonable chance of getting past her Bastion in a ranged duel.  She could probably chip him to death over the course of several hours…but now she was too irritated to do that.  Now she was going to beat this asshole’s non-face right off his skull tube.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoEKbGbKHq8][u]Pressing the Attack!  The Ferocious Fangs of Nidhoggr![/u][/url]

Behind Cee, weapons started forming.  Roughly as long as her forearm, each device looked a bit like a toy rocket – about the size of a short poster tube, with a single engine nozzle at its base, a spiked tip at its top, and an array of steering fins at either end.  As soon as each device finished forming, its engine ignited and it streaked away, curving around to orient on Juniortron from a myriad of different angles and directions.  The missiles were swift indeed, though not invincibly so, nor was their tracking particularly tight or infallible – though the weapons would certainly strike an unmoving enemy, it was possible, even likely, that Juniortron would evade incoming warheads, or shoot them down as they approached.

That didn’t matter.   It didn’t matter for two primary reasons.  One was that the missiles did not all carry identical payloads.  Some turned out to be flash warheads, detonating in the space around Juniortron in brilliant, gouging bursts of ether-rich light and booming thunderclaps of noise.  Those [i]Stardazzler[/i]* warheads were intended to assault conventional senses and render their targets blind and deaf.  Some warheads turned out to be EW platforms, generating phantom electronic signatures of missiles that didn’t otherwise exist and letting off intense bursts of electronic noise.  These [i]Migraine[/i]* payloads were electronic equivalents of the Stardazzlers, meant to fox synthetic detection systems and camouflage the approach of damaging warheads.

Some of the missiles carried [i]Superbubble[/i]* payloads, able to briefly generate a spherical barrier encompassing themselves and a handful of other missiles, interdicting enemy interception systems and deflecting any shots they didn’t outright block away from the missiles they protected.  Some of the missiles carried remote-delivered Pompeii graser shots, striking at unpredictable times from unpredictable angles with bolts of coherent gamma radiation from well beyond the range most expected missiles to threaten them at.

Any missile that wasn’t one of those things was a ‘simple’ micronuclear payload, delivered in the same manner that missiles had been delivering explosive payloads since the beginnings of recorded time.

The second reason why Juniortron’s defensive measures didn’t really matter was that the missiles did not stop forming and firing.

The [i]Fangs of Nidhoggr[/i]* was not so much a singular, one-and-done technique as it was a continuous sub-process, initiated by Cee and then left to percolate in her secondary systems until such time as she shut the ‘technique’ down.  So long as she desired them to, the Fangs would form behind her and fly towards her foe on randomized tracks, each missile armed with a different type of warhead, surrounding Juniortron in chaos and devastation.  With the Red Moon Cloak still in effect, the mechanoid would be unable to trace the origin point of the missiles – they would simply arrow out of the cloud of existential chaos surrounding Cee and orient in on him from a huge number of different vectors.

Activating the Fangs did require Cee to step down the supply of power to her Lament, causing the weapon to build up additional charge more slowly, and running a pseudo-automated process such as this one meant tying up most f her secondary processing power and causing her Godforge respond slowly to other needs until she terminated the Fangs…but until then, Cee’s secondary combat systems would fling missiles at Juniortron nonstop while Cee herself focused on other tasks.

Such as dropping down next to the slagged wreckage of the [i]Glorious Venture[/i], hugging the wreckage for cover as she started arrowing towards Juniortron’s position, keeping close to both the wreck and the ground in order to use the ravaged vessel as a shield.  Within the befuddling concealment of her Red Moon Cloak, Cee and her rolling artillery storm were impossible to pinpoint for direct counterattack as she approached.  Indirect or area attacks, such as a reprise of the spear storm, would be badly impeded by the interposed bulk of the wrecked [i]Glorious Venture[/i] – assuming Juniortron could stay unexploded long enough to throw such attacks in the face of the Fangs of Nidhoggr’s continuous assault of grasers, explosions, and intensely disorienting bursts of ECM and sensory overloads.

No more pussyfooting around with null-effort pistol potshots and exploratory strikes.  It was time to take this planet-cracking jackass to pieces.

[i]End-of-Turn Status[/i]
[hider]
[b]Current Status:[/b]
[i]Title In Effect: Pirate Queen
System Integrity: 100%
Entropic Order: 0% Penalty
Combat Status: Engaged – All Green[/i]

[i]Red Moon Cloak: Active[/i]
[i]Fangs of Nidhoggr: Active (s. processing 65% tasked, Godforge 60% tasked)[/i]
[i]Sinner’s Lament: Active, Charging (ALERT: 70% reduction in charge speed in effect)[/i]

[i]Ether Field: Green
Ether Stream: Green

Gunsmoke: Yellow
A. Bastion: Green
A. Adjudicator: Green[/i]
Phantasm: [i]Green[/i]
[/hider]

[i]New Stuff Breakdown[/i]
[hider]
[i]Fangs of Nidhoggr[/i]: An area control and denial ability created by Cee to assist in combating enemies which hugely outnumbered her, or enemies resistant to singular, focused attacks.  Designed to run in Cee’s secondary processing systems once initiated rather than requiring her direct focus and attention, the Fangs commandeer most of Cee’s Godforge in order to continually create, target, and fire a constant stream of mini-missiles at enemies.  Cee can vary the overall mix of payloads in any given instance of the Fangs’ operation, and is able to arm the missiles with a large variety of different types of warheads.  Activating the Fangs requires a constant draw of power, reducing the amount of energy available to Cee for other purposes, and similarly takes up a significant portion of her secondary processing budget and her Godforge’s capabilities.

[i]Stardazzler Munitions[/i]: A form of flashbang technology pioneered by Cee, typically employed in thrown or rocket-driven munitions, though Cee can also generate a burst of Stardazzler light from her Archangel’s Halo at need.  Stardazzler flashbangs emit a burst of specialized, ether-saturated light designed to do to supernatural or ‘sixth’ senses what normal flashbangs do to regular sight and hearing.  Beyond this wider spectrum of affected senses, Stardazzlers do not possess any other unique characteristics.  Cee herself has engineered filters into her own eyes which reduce the effect of close-range exposure to Stardazzler light on herself and largely eliminate distant Stardazzler bursts’ effect on her.

[i]Migraine Munitions[/i]: Electronic warfare systems occasionally used by Cee as a digital smokescreen of sorts, blinding and potentially damaging electronic senses with a constant chaff effect of white noise and savage bursts of electronic distortion.  Simple but effective EW ‘screamers’ of the sort commonly used in battles across the cosmos.

[i]Superbubble Munitions[/i]: Based on extensive study of Crim El Furaga’s [i]Kijinjiraden[/i], the ‘Sword of Protection’, and its ability to invoke a nigh-impenetrable barrier of holy power.  Superbubble munitions are several times removed from the original Kijin; their barriers are perfectly breakable and only last for a few moments at best.  Nevertheless, Superbubbles are surprisingly strong for their size and the amount of power invested in them, standing up against far more punishment than most would expect a low-level barrier to take.
[/hider]