[h2]Maceroy Falthon[/h2]
Not only did Marie dodge, off the tower no less, but her first shot indeed met its mark, piercing a hole through Maceroy's lower-left wing and digging a good way into his stomach with the leftover kinetic energy. A loud hiss escaped him as he continued to fall, though the damage was not so severe that he couldn't slow his fall back to reasonable speeds. Even through the tower. Even as the tower collapsed… hold on, had something else hit it? He hadn’t been able to spot anything else, but nonetheless...

As the place began falling into itself, Maceroy propelled himself out of the collapsing brickwork, using a finger to forcibly dig out the bullet lodged in his side in the meantime, complete with additional bleeding, before his own nanites healed over it. That’d just make things awkward later on. As it stood, neither hole was too severe even to slow down his flight, and he estimated that they’d both heal over within the minute. With that done, he let himself hover down toward the ground before the bounty hunter, partially cloaked in brickdust as he landed before her smoking barrel.

Admittedly, he ought not to have been distracted from her words by the yelling of a rather angry female voice. But to him, it sounded… mildly familiar. Like a voice he’d once known, altered almost but not quite beyond recognition. He couldn’t help but look over to see what the fuss was about; two harpies presented themselves, both with red-coloured feathers, and... wait... the feathers, the face... surely not...

‘Evie?’ he whispered to himself. It couldn’t be. The last time he’d seen her was-

He was distracted from his thought process by the sound of a weapon loudly transforming. A glance over showed that the former sniper rifle was quickly turning into two pistols, and the gunwoman leaping up to catch them in mid-air. Bringing his lance to bear in both hands, he span it up again, taking to the air and flying toward Marie on his upper set of wings whilst angling the lower set around much of his body. No doubt, he’d realised, any projectiles those guns fired would be as armour-piercing as the full-size variant; however, they’d surely be comparatively slower too, maybe a smaller caliber, and certainly less damaging. Therefore, by angling his wings appropriately, each projectile could be deflected rather handily, causing minimal damage that would then be easily repaired by the nanites in his body… and she was muttering to herself. Or to somebody else. No wonder.

As he drew close, not willing to waste his attention on forming a sentence for the moment, Maceroy first attempted to buffet her with one wing to disorient her, and then lashed out with a heavy two-handed swing of his lance at full spin, one that would force her in the direction of the harpies if she avoided it as he planned. Of course, there was always the possibility she’d do something otherwise, but he was counting on either the wing impact or the attempt to avoid it to leave her with minimal time to consider her options - and more importantly, minimal time to take advantage of the inevitable corresponding gap in his feathered shield, lowered as it was to allow him to swing the lance in the first place. If he could get more bodies into the fight, he could distract the human’s attentions, and perhaps get in the lethal hit against her as a result.

[@Banana][@The 42nd Gecko][@Lmpkio]

[hr]

[h2][color=orange]HR-513 - The Harvester[/color][/h2]
(actions taken by order of [@Spiffy])

As HR-513 watched his would-be partner’s actions, simply to make sure the harpy didn’t take any serious damage, so too did he keep watch over the rest of the battlefield, in particular the intense combat raging between the demon and angel at the battlefield’s center - and moreover, of the fairly massed support the one was receiving compared to the other. It was not that the Machina lacked such troops, of course, merely that most had yet to engage with any foe, angelic or demonic, and would likely perish quite quickly for how they focused on horde tactics. And yet, it seemed to him that a few stray shots from that far-distant army may well lead to far-ranging damage - perhaps even striking himself or Maceroy in the process.

Besides which, he pondered, it wouldn’t do for him to simply sit by and do nothing to support his faction. Not as future High Cartographer.

Aiming his weapon arm in the direction of that angelic support, and noting the white wall that seemed to manifest about them as he did, the Harvester charged his first attack for several seconds before finally firing, sending an immense wave of bright-blue warp energy surging toward the army rapidly. Everything solid in its path seemed to vanish as it made contact, though in truth, it was merely transported to the Harvester’s side, only to vanish again as the detritus was warped a second time into the main body of mass making up the Harvester’s true body and compressed to so much neutronium. For the power of the warp blast, this minimal input barely affected it, though for the distance covered, many kilometers in a shockingly short span of time, the actual amount of energy it lost was likely significant.

HR-513 had already calculated that the leftover energy would be needed to overwhelm the defenses that had been set up and warp any angels in the area into his own vicinity - since it was also likely that additional defenses would be set up by those who had produced the initial barrier, he had further charged it to overwhelm reasonably strong defenses beyond that. Much as he detested unknowns, sometimes one had to figure out their optimal result as best they could.

If all went as expected, the warp energy would likely reach the targeted area twenty-point-two-four seconds after it was fired. It would likely be noticed ten-point three-eight seconds before impact, and on impact, it would likely expend a large proportion of itself to warp away the defensive barriers set up to stop it, either shattering them completely as their seals were forcibly torn away, or simply trapping any excess energy within the remnants. Not that HR-513 expected much excess to remain after the fact.

Any troops caught in this warp energy would also be warped to HR-513’s side immediately, where they would consequently be subjected to personal-scale, warped-in bursts of solar mass, hot enough to essentially fry each soldier as they were caught in them- either by cooking their entire bodies or by simply destroying their fragile brain tissue if possible- and killing them as quickly as possible. But [i]only just.[/i] Too much energy used in that affair would be wasteful; not enough would of course mean additional energy was needed to end them properly, a waste in itself, though it may be inevitable that some would have the strength to survive that initial blast anyway. Once again, unknown variables conspired to mock his efforts at precision. It was a risk he would have to take, for now.

[@floodtalon][@Inner Demon][@Silvan Haven]