The ground beneath was dry and crusted with a mixture of what was definitely blood but other fluids had intermingled, turning into a layer of scraping, staining crust like a mixture of scabs and solidified pus. The shotgun was no different other than the crusty, grainy pieces of meat encrusted with exoskeletal growths, the weapon's targeter lights blinking as if awakened by Salvator's hands. The weapon was heavy, even for an experienced and augmented soldier, yet its weight was unusual; it shifted and shuddered as if reluctant to face whatever hellish force had scourged the life from its prior owner.

As if out of some primal fear, the weapon itself reached out.

Salvator would detect it on his HUD; notifications of attempted communications channels opening and preview messages in an almost hieroglyphic language. As if someone had ground up a collection of insects and arranged them into stark geometric characters. It was a vrexul language specifically, one of many and rendered in some sort of cold character of weapon permisison and targeting system calibration. 

This meant a number of things:

1) This shotgun was likely from a gun-platform type biomechanical drone; something it was common to see deployed as a part of vrexul infnatry squads. Yet if it was a size and shape that a voidhanger could use it, it was likely manufactured with the intent of giving it to local rebels.

2) Its lethality was considerably higher than a conventional shotgun. Unlikely to the same degree as one properly scaled for its creators but the tips of the slugs almost stared at Salvator. The bandolier of rounds had a threatening weightiness to themselves; perhaps one could simply beat someone to death with it like a flail. This thing could probably punch through a fully power armored UCL trooper with a direct hit or two to the chestplate.

3) The ability to do so had not stopped what were at least four vrexul soldiers (plus an indeterminate amount of biomechanical drones) from being slaughtered into festering slag. Given by the scourged rocks and the chunks of rubble surrounding them, they had put out quite a bit of retaliatory fire.

4) Apparently it was also sending a transmission to the communicator panel, silencing the beeping if only to replace it with a reverberant, crackling drone. 

5) In short, the weapon like many vrexul technologies primarily associated with the Intransigence, it was essentially "alive" and if it did not shut up, there is no telling who might hear them.

The rock slab that Kleo had stuffed herself behind was somewhat misleading. It had looked like a single large jutting rock formation but the actual "rock" part of it was maybe less than half of its actual bulk. There was solid natural formation there but a huge part of it was shorn off; the whole upper part of it looked as if someone had hacksawed it away with the uneven and even near-toothed, raw way it had been forcibly removed. 

And by the grooves that were cut into it, it had been with a solid round weapon of some sort. A smell of slightly stingy, metallic odour wafted from behind her cover and if her eyes followed it, she would see the circular back-end of some sort of shell embedded in the ground. A circular back-end larger than what one might even load into a vrexul autocannon.

Like the one that lay cracked and bent, nudging up against her knee like some dying animal begging for release or relief. The weapon itself was a broad, semi-rectacugular prism shape simple in structure yet lavished with shifting carapace and slithering bioelectronics, bent at an awkward as if it had been forced into a 45-degree v-shape. Its barrel was torn off with serrated wounding patterns and the creatures that lived inside to maintain it could be seen in the little gaps within its battere shape, life leaving them as it did the weapon.

It belonged to the other part of the "rock" she had been hiding against; the slouching cadaver of an enormous vrexul. Undergrowth camo-pattern body, covered in a layer of dust likely from the rock it had unsuccessfully used to shield itself from its foe, half of its skull torn open, leaving her with the empty pupil-less ocular dome stare of its one remaining primary "eye" and the imperceptible emotion of its incompete mandibular array; perhaps horror, perhaps hatred, perhaps some sort of empty machine-apathy many were stereotyped as possessing. 

She could see shapes moving within the various other holes in its body; glistening in the thin rays of light that peaked through the flog and the flares of light from the distant-yet-ever-present battle. Shapes not of native scavengers but living things carrying out whatever tasks they could to maintain a long since deceased form, perhaps in denial or they simply were not biologically programmed for anything else. 

Ilshar's guerilla career informed him of some of the patterns and marking not on the front of the various shorn-off vrexul armor chunks but their underside. Patterns inscribed almost as if they were runes seemed to speak to the distant memory of far more violent years; symbols that seemed to gnash at the mind with scything mouthparts laden with teeth, eyes that stared not at but through the psyche in pseudo-geometric patterns on shield-shaped faces. At once militant in severity yet occult in the specifics of construction; hardline militant groups no doubt possessing a similar hatred as the ZRF for its foreign oppressor. 

The piece of carapace he held was inert yet he could [i]feel[/i] something within; maybe some sort of wiring and electronics preparing to link up to a full-spectrum combat suit, or something that squirmed and crept in its little dark realm of bioengineered robotics-intertwined complexity. He was not merely picking up supplies for repair but something that almost felt like the living, hateful will of another hardened insurgent.

There was something... odd about the body however if he looked closer. Parts of it were shattered and a gruesome labyrinth of annihilated anatomy, yet there were certain components that were missing. The tarrhaidim had no doubt seen the bodies of vrexul before (perhaps he had been responsible for a number of them), and it was rather telling certain components had been removed. Not just organs but something else. What exactly was difficult to discern yet there were parts of its lumbering corpse where connector veins, internal limbs, and claspers were rather delicately pulled away or excised, laying on the viscera-strewn grass or sliding around in its shell. 

There was something off about some of the organs that [i]weren't[/i] removed however, as if they were bereft of the hellish trauma visible and tangible on the others.

Almost as if they had been [i]planted[/i] in the corpse after the fact. Like clusters of fleshy grapes, worm-like veins laced through them, and very slightly growing and tensing as they they traced like trails through their bulbous mass. It was biotech, perhaps not vrexul, but it looked like it had been implanted in the body after it had been averted from living unto death. What was its purpose exactly though?

As the microforms traveled across this landscape, the severity of the scene grew clearer. Some of the shell casings here were almost as large as the little drones themselves and these were not Veiled War era suprlus ones. They were at least from three to five years ago; a few could be seen embedded in a particularly large 12 foot long vrexul slumped face down in the dirt; exit wounds on its back as massive as the dinner plate sized ones they saw punched through the trees earlier. At least nine of said wounds on its body; likely some on the shattered sideways-earwig shaped autocannons that were attached to the underside of its arms but those had been cracked in multiple spots and-

Signal interference, connection fizzling, warning signs; Echo's on board systems were detecting some sort of signal passing through the area. No, it wasn't passing but bouncing about, multiple points of contact - including the corpse that Ilshar had procured an armor shard from. The digital feed faltered yet control of the drones wasn't being affected. It wasn't jamming but some sort of ambient static in the air, the drones unintentionall picking up some of it. 

Investigating further, it was connected to the vrexul bodies. Not the corpses in and of themselves; multiple HUD-markers indicated it was something inside of them that was generating the signals.

One drone, the one furthest from the others however, was picking up a sort of light invisible on the physical spectrum. A laser of some sort; stopping right on its body. 

Something was targeting the drone but it wasn't firing. 

Not yet anyways.