And so they watched. They skimmed the surface of the storm like kingfishers, and they plunged deep, deep into its mists, like loons, feeling for even the slightest wriggle from their foe, who they knew now for a fact was somewhere out there, at once the hunter and the prey. For they may have emerged from any angle, the detachment's weaker side or its stronger, or either flank, and somehow the Nine had to put their three pairs of eyes to guarding all of these at once. Gan, eager to outsmart these phantoms, switched to his external acoustics. But of great metallic stomping he only heard Chlotho's and Rose's, and the wailing of the fierce winds drowned out the rest. He tossed the switch back down again, returning himself to the muted silence of the thermosealed cockpit. He was beginning to see the jaws of wolves and tigers in every wisp of smoke; the glittering scales of a barracuda in the glitter of the snow. It wasn't paranoia. The storm, huge and primal and intoxicating, had only stirred something in the dark caverns of his brain, a creature which had been hibernating there in the warm pink folds for 200,000 years. Though his hands still shoved and tweaked the cyclics, and his fingers still jabbed and flicked at switches and buttons and valves, Gan was no longer aware of such technologies. He had already devolved. Now he was a huntsman in Dark Africa, gripping the wooden haft of a spear while he peered into the elusive grasses of the savanna. Then, underwater, and the waters were turquoise-clear, and he held his breath and gripped a coral reef in one hand and wrested an oyster from the rock in another, and all the while there were yellow jaws coiled in the alcoves, and silver jaws flashing in the peripheries of the deeper blue. How long it must have been, Gan pondered, since man had experienced such rudimentary terror. He'd bred it out of the wolves, after all, and turned them into dogs. Until Gan remembered that this was war, and when a wild and ancient moon birthed no animals to hunt them, men were more than pleased enough to hunt each other.

But when nobody had come for them, and the landscape under their artificial feet refused to change in gradients larger than a little hill here and a little gully there, Gan faced a new and antithetical danger, too. He flexed his fingers on the cyclics, and gripped them hard enough to sprain the intricate little muscles within; he blinked hard, as if to bat away the ghosts of the past. His blood had dumped the adrenaline, and soon it was becoming truly exhausting to expect danger from every side and all sides when his senses told him time and again that beyond the cockpit window laid only a cake of rock and snow and the fog smoothed over it like too much fondant. The cold and the shriek of the wind did not reach Gan in there, a caterpillar goo in his metal and glass cocoon, and so once the nerves subsided, all he wanted to do was sleep. Sleep in the cockpit, and then when the enemy found him, sleep in one of their prison cells, then sleep on the shuttle after his buddies broke him out. Basic taught a man how to fire a weapon, how to polish his boots, how to dig foxholes; but it never seemed to prepare him for how very boring war was—until it wasn't.

When Gan wrested his eyes open, having closed them for maybe twenty seconds, his mech and his body cooperating in autopilot, he was met face-to-face with a shape materializing from the mist. He would be thankful in retrospect, that he and this other pilot had paused in unison. As for Gan, his sluggish thoughts went roughly as such: this mech he stared at wasn't a Phalanx, not a Hunchback, and it wasn't an Armageddon-class Mk2. And once he'd figured that, its model and the identity of its pilot no longer mattered.

"FUCK!" Prodded into action like a calf sniffing too close to the electric fence, Gan [i]bashed[/i] his cyclic to the right, sending his hip pivot into overdrive and thus his torso into a shoulder-roll. The unidentified mech was close, as orchestrated by the unwavering thickness of the storm; close enough that there was no time to switch, and more importantly, no gain in switching, to his targeting-tracking systems. The other mech shot first, but missed, loosing a volley of explosives which began just over Gan's starboard shoulder, then careened off into the sky with the recoil. Gan shot second, free-floating his arm reticles over a target area almost too big to miss, and not hesitating to pull the trigger. A tremendous booming fireball issued from the barrel, large enough to entirely consume a small mech. Though the railgun used no explosives to propel its projectiles, it launched them so quickly that they ignited the air, even air as cold as Triton-5's, through friction alone. It sent the Basilisk staggering backward as it soaked up the recoil, first in its elbow joint and then its shoulder bracket, designed and redesigned to absorb this recoil without shattering. Finally, a tungsten dart, about the size of a desk lamp, broke the sound barrier, exceeded it by three or four times, and slammed into a target up to 240 kilometers away, farther than most horizons in the solar system; or, as in this case, about 100 meters away, across a short outcrop crusted with a thin sheet of snow.

The enemy mech was reeling and stumbling before it knew what hit it, but before Gan could push through the recoil and center his other arm for a second shot, it had recovered its senses and retreated a good distance backward into the mists, obscuring his line-of-sight. Still, if there was a lance of them out there, he'd know which one he hit by the crater on the center-right side of its torso, representing just over a ton of armor vaporized in a single shot.

Shortly after, an autocannon volley from one of Strauss's arm-guns lit up most of that same area. Like a cluster of cherry bombs compared to the Basilisk's war-torpedo, they pop-pop-popped in too small of a radius to cover a good area, and so Strauss swept his aim across the line of dirt that he wanted to set on fire, and little bursting flames erupted in a crescent along the ground.

Gan switched off the jammer.[hr][table][row][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/617914243760783381/910545177574277210/romeo_action.gif[/img]
[color=2e2c2c]________________________[/color][/right][/cell][cell][code]"Shit. Did you hit it?"[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][/cell][cell][right][code]"Think so."[/code][/right][/cell][cell][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/890757730925703198/hothead_calm.gif[/img]
[color=2e2c2c]________________________[/color][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/617914243760783381/910545177574277210/romeo_action.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"You 'think so'?"[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][/cell][cell][right][code]"I'm pretty fucking sure, okay?!"[/code][/right][/cell][cell][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/890757730925703198/hothead_calm.gif[/img][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/942258370528833607/militia_leader_calm.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"And just who the hell ARE you? That's military-grade hardware you just shot at my boys, amigo. Not exactly the stuff that gets contracted out to a yard like this. What business do soldiers have here?"[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][/table][hr]Gan realized quickly who it was that spoke to them, if not, yet, why—or whence. Somewhere out there, just out of eyesight. Only that mattered. He looked down at his comm array to see how the rookie was handling all this, and how Chlotho wanted to proceed; but neither of their faces had yet betrayed how their nerves were holding up, or what slapdash plans they were incubating in their brains. Thankfully Strauss spoke first, handling, presumably, the enemy commander on the whole Nine's behalf.[hr][table][row][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/910545174676008960/romeo_casual.gif[/img]
[color=2e2c2c]________________________[/color][/right][/cell][cell][code]"Why? If you like our answer, are we all going out for a beer and a blowjob together, kumbayah?"[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/942258370528833607/militia_leader_calm.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"It could be that our bone just ain't to pick with you. That's all. As long as you ain't killing my buddies, and you ain't here to stop us."[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/910545174676008960/romeo_casual.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"This is Phalanx-Alpha-Tango with the Fifth Airborne. Same here. just as long as you stand down and stop breaking OhmCorp's toys."[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/942258370528833607/militia_leader_calm.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"So that's what you are. Mercenary scum!"[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/910545174676008960/romeo_casual.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"You should be more grateful. Whether you live or die, my paycheck stays the same. That means I have no reason to waste my shells on you until you give me one. So stand down."[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/942258370528833607/militia_leader_calm.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"That little spray-and-pray you just pulled begs to differ. Besides, what we're fighting for is bigger than you, me, or any of us."[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/910545174676008960/romeo_casual.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"..."[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/910545174676008960/romeo_casual.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"Then have it your way."[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/942861240827531284/romeo_struck.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]![/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/942258370528833607/militia_leader_calm.gif[/img][/right][/cell][cell][code]"Gladly!"[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][/table][hr][center][hider=Recommended Listening][youtube]https://youtu.be/YUpX1jFspqQ[/youtube][/hider][/center]Explosions. They went off all over Strauss's frontal armor, the worst of the damage being done to his legs. But Gan had been watching closely; the enemy had launched no missiles. And he believed them when they said they didn't have railguns, coilguns, PPCs, or any other miltech which would let them shoot faster than the human eye could see. He would have heard the sonic boom besides. How? How had they cracked the Phalanx's armor without missile racks, without electromagnetics, without bloop-tubes, hell, without so much as having to leave their cover? Once again he had to stow his questions, however, as once the Phalanx began to stumble backward, its pilot shaken into a stupor, they charged, all of them, three old, rusted, minermechs clearing way for a fourth. And that one was a true and proper war machine, with weapons and tracking systems, armor, and a damn pissed off pilot; not pulled of a yard, but bought from military auction ... or plundered from a guard detail.[center][hider=The Leader's Warmech][img]https://cfw.sarna.net/wiki/images/c/c2/Hellbringer_RGilClan_v01.png?timestamp=20210415225609[/img][/hider][/center]As for the three leading the charge, Gan was starting to get a better picture of their weaponry. He thought back to the wreckage he'd spotted [i]en route[/i] to the relay point; cranes and diggers burned off and replaced with makeshift gun barrels; crudely welded, and filled with the gunpowder shipped in for blowing out mineshafts and loosening slag-rock.

Miners? Were they miners, Frankensteining their own warmechs out of the minermechs they used on the job? If so, why were they attacking a fellow camp? And why did they have to go behind their employer's back instead of calling in more security, or hell, requesting a transfer?

And why were those three Frankenmechs rushing dangerously deep into their formation?

That last question answered itself before Gan could begin to speculate. Gathering at the Phalanx's meaty legs, they switched on their weapons and got to work burning through pipes and cables, welding through armor, and just about eating the legs off of their mountings. Hurried blue flames licked fibrosteel until it glowed orange-hot.

[hr][table][row][/row][row][cell][/cell][cell][right][code]"Rose! Chlotho! They're using mining equipment for weapo——plasma cutters! Those are plasma cutters! Get them offa him!"[/code][/right][/cell][cell][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/890760953463988254/hothead_calm.gif[/img]
[color=2e2c2c]________________________[/color][/cell][/row][row][cell][right][img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/617914243760783381/942258370528833607/militia_leader_calm.gif[/img]
[color=2e2c2c]________________________[/color][/right][/cell][cell][code]"Not so fucking fast!"[/code][/cell][cell][/cell][/row][/table][hr]The commander leveled his guns—twin PPCs on the primary, still not enough to answer for the half a dozen explosions earlier. His whole mech was a hodgepodge of short and long-range systems—turrets and flamers for infantry, medium lasers, SRMs—a classic corposec loadout, trying to be too many things at once and middling at all of them because it "increased field performance" for an underpaid security officer who didn't know with what armaments or at what distance a hypothetical baddie would want to engage. Those projector cannons and missiles would be dangerous, but Gan wasn't thinking about them at just that moment. If they were using minertech, that meant those explosions which had gone off on the Phalanx were ...