LustForDecay

The Envenomed

The mass, power behind the thrust, and velocity of the warmachine made it a functionally unstoppable force on the battlefield. Even bereft of missiles and autocannons, that much weight at such speed had no equal amongst the envenomed. Unstoppable however was not a synonym for insusceptible and "unstoppable" did not merely mean external forces forcefully ceasing its motion either.

A convergence of events would demonstrate this in short order.

The first was a volley of needle rounds. A few pinged off of the thick plating of its legs, inches from the wheels where others had scored. Here the metal was not of the same make and density which rendered theme easy pickings for the hyper-accelerated projectiles. The layered materials were meant to take the strain of a massive machine already partially supporting its own weight on ski-like railings, not precision needles peant to pierce the solid-yet-not-metallic mass, rending at first trenches then breaking the underlying supports, joints, and gears that held it together.

The second was a series of long bursts of larger, thicker, far less precise yet sufficiently clustered bullets mere eyeblinks later. These slammed across the back of the machine. A fireworks displays of sparks peppered the boxy bulkhead out of which emerged the antennae yet the thin appendage fared no better. It was a smaller target than the wheels but where it connected to the vehicle was soft enough for rounds to bite and tear into. Sparks sputtered out and comms channels sputtered and coughed back into life, the raw feedback burst a breath of relief and of surprise. A trail of smoke and blinking, popping flakes of light were left in the machine's wake.

The third involved multiple autocannon rounds slamming into its body, accompanied with a generous spray of .50 calibre bullets. The heaviest bullets and shells available to the squad indiscriminately bust, battered, and smashed against the bulk of the enormous war machine. Rifles and machine guns would scratch and maybe dent. Echo's autocannons gnashed and devoured, ripping out bigger and bigger chunks on its nearing approach. Yet it had something even heavier than those: its own mass. Lesser in size and bulk than the enormous frontline titan but with its already sustained damage to critical components, it was in no position to dodge the massive, wounded bulk of Echo slamming against its side.

The fourth was a few hair-raising moments before the critical impact. As if in retaliation for nearly being mulched by antipersonnel missile barrages earlier, the ulvath loudly roared as the targeted components paid the price. Machine gun rounds swarmed hornet-like into blasted camera-pod atop the autocannon, gouging, gutting, and dismembering it into a withered stump. The trail of bullets traveled over shoulder padding and into its back, bursting open the base of its antennae and turning vital systems into a fiery inferno of smashed electronic and jolting arcs of electricity.

In the timespan of under half a minute the enormous threat went from akin to a condensed train barreling towards a notably smaller hexapodal walker to a partially burning effigy belching fire and molten slag. The wheels that would have supported its crouched stance were but parodies of their former stability and integrity, its jamming systems and fearsome shoulder-cannon in similar condition, and its body smashed off course by a short-ranged ram. 45 degrees off from its intended path, a tree in its path practically burst into woodchips as the others that had fallen crumpled and cracked apart as it slid straight through them. Huge clods of dirt split and flew into the air as it slammed down the slope, sliding now on its side as its free hand tried to dig its fingers into the ground rending trenches nearly big enough to lay down prone within.

It was hard to tell where it had stopped. The sound of groaning metal and coughing thrusters was not the angry, ambient roar as before but a now threatening if muted cacophony. Not in the distance yet not near either. Movement could be heard as the weight of the machine worked against its splayed, stunned body. The pilot within was slamming fists into the ground perhaps in rage but by the rising sound of grating gears and whirring servos, likely forcing its body upwards. There was struggle but a struggle spirited and enraged in its alternating tones of crackling whirrs and mechanical growls sounding out over the hissing crackle of its various annihilated components.

In the midst, all comms jamming had vanished. A window had been forced open but already it was beginning to narrow.

The Envenomed

The warmachine stomped forward not with clumsy lumbering but a deliberate, predatory gait. Every step was measured in a machine-economy of motion but its movements belied a fluidity not often associated with warmachines; human-like in the degree of articulation of every step and the shifting of its digits across its enormous rifle-weapon, fluid and lacking the stutter-stop of a proper robotic construct. There was a living being inside of it and one that appeared supremely confident in its capability for eliminating the retreating Envenomed squad. It did not even turn its body as its shoulder mounted canon fired another salvo, briefly illuminating Ilshar in the dawn-bright blast of its explosive shells. The swiveling camera atop the turret froze and tracked them, the canon itself preparing to line-up a shot.

Noticing its quarry retreating from the League outpost, the machine's pace sped up and one could almost feel the malevolent excitement no doubt welling in the pilot. Yet its immense stature and capability for destruction came with a few caveats. The flames, debris, and dust it kicked up even from missed shots cratering the earth or annihilating vegetation made it difficult to see smaller targets. A voidhanger laying prone was easily mistaken for other bodies broken or crushed beneath its feet and the debris laying about whether artificial or natural.

Salvator's HUD immediately noted a number of distinctive characteristics of the machine, highlighting a dome-like space around its body and the shield-like plating on its right shoulder. The former caused his HUD to blur and distort a few times - some sort of disruptive field, likely electro-magnetic in nature or otherwise with some sort of disruptive capability, presumably working as shielding or target jamming. Yet given by its strength and the particular output, it seemed designed to disrupt weapons fire, presumably just directed energy or beam and similar types, and the armor itself while tough didn't seem indestructible.

The source of this was behind the shield - in the shoulder itself, but connecting to its "shield" which seemed to amplify its effects. Analysis concluded that solid rounds would likely do much better or entirely ignore this barrier; perhaps that is why it was so intent on separating them from the outpost they had previously raided.

It appeared its thrusters were currently cooling down; it had rushed all the way here and might not be able to use them for maybe a minute. There appealed to be wheel-like contraptions within its dense legs; likely to be used in conjunction but as they moved further from the base and towards the slopes they had travelled up, it appeared to be preparing them for usage again. Its balance upon them seemed precarious; they looked almost reverse engineered from certain construction machinery, likely not entirely intended for such a massive machine, even if they clearly worked to a degree for wheeled travel.

While the gun-pod mounted camera was an obvious avenue of sight, it also had its head and two small slits atop its "middle" shoulders - those two had small cameras. Behind them, an antennae connected to likely what was the source of the communications jamming, somewhere within its back. Also of note was its left arm's inner elbow having somewhat softer armor than on its right. The only problem was that when it raised its weapon, the posture of its arm ensured that was well concealed unless one had a higher vantage point.

Salvator's rifle cracked and the to unaugmented eyes invisible barrier around the machine flared like a plasma globe touched by a human hand. Sparks flew as bullets slammed into the camera, interrupting the shoulder-cannon's aim. Armor dented and bent and gouges were torn across the the length of the circular white top, sending out crackling electricity and sparks. The camera swiveled rapidly yet it struggled to see, the canon now forced to rely on the shoulder and cranial cameras to detect the voidhanger.

A luminescent smear remained however, as if someone has spilled glowing paint on some glass dome, awkwardly hovering in the air in front of the camera. It was not entirely blinded but with its visual functions partially impaired and now a near-blind splot from the angle where Salvator had shot, it could not accurately target him with that. Yet that still left its shoulder-cams and head along with whatever sensory equipment it had, trying to home in until it saw the figure breaking from cover.

Yet rather than its machine gun, the sound of shrieking missiles answered, four in total launching vertically from pods located on the top of its square shaped blocky "outer" shoulders. They spun in the air, dancing in intertwining trails before they began to descend. Two slammed into where he had been hiding, reducing the trees to splinters, but the other two shot wide. One erupted 30 or so feet from him, the force of the blast sending a spray of dirt, rock, and wood that blanketed him in the chaos. The final one however swung away and towards where it thought Ilshar was hiding, detonating in the tree tops above roughly 20 feet from him and sending down a shower of shrapnel and burning foliage. While the tarrhaidim was not in the primary blast range, they would have to watch for stray burning metal and vegetation.

Yet it was not the only heavy duty machine in this fight. As it turned its attention back to Echo, it abruptly stopped as a bipedal war machine leaped out of its body. The blink-long pause was all that was needed for the endform to score a nasty volley across its torso and its machine-gun rifle. The machine jerked almost human-like, neuroreactive networks kicking into overdrive yet far from fast enough to dodge Echo's weapon fire. Rounds slammed and shatter against its torso, halting its advance, but the ones that hit its rifle cause its whole right hand to whip back, scarring and gouging the weapon across the length of its receiver-body and where that connects to the long barrel. Exposed metal and firing mechanisms were revealed for a brief moment before it staggered back again, this time from a spray of machine gun fire from Ilshar, raking across its head in a shower of sparking hits and rattling impacts.

Yet rather than directly retaliate, it suddenly bent its legs with the length of its knees now laying parallel to the ground. Scans indicated a rise in temperature coming from behind its hefty shoulders. The previously scanned side-leg mounted wheels unfurled and pressed to the ground as its thrusters roared, sending it forwards directly at the warform. While its machine gun and missiles might not possess the raw power to fully crack the unztadlige's armor, its massive bulky and shield-like shoulder it now was bringing to bear could easily bowl the machine over and send it potentially tumbling down the slopes the Envenomed had previously ventured up.

The Evenomed: Violent Military SciFi Action Across A Post-War Expanse

@Arkitekt

Honestly with just a bit of tinkering (plus a few other things), this would not be hard to make work for the setting. Most of it works pretty easily. Have you seen the Character Sheet Outline? Would just need to figure out what her background is wrt to the lore (what faction she was with before if she even was with any of them) and for you to DM me her Actions Of Interest.

The Evenomed: Violent Military SciFi Action Across A Post-War Expanse

is this still open?

@Arkitekt

Yes it is. Jump on the discord if you can.

The Envenomed

Jubilation had overtaken their allies, raging with the same intensity as the wounds blighting the flesh of realspace. Where the icons of imperial domination once stood was the bleeding pollution of ethereal distortion, tearing metal, foliage, dirt, and implant-ridden flesh alike. A hated enemy reduced to even less than the term should allow; what need did they have to even pay attention to their allies - their means to an end? Yet it had been done with their help; the revolutionaries were dogged and harsh as living under the boot of membranous and pink-fleshed frequently was, but they liked to think of themselves as a different stripe.

"Friends, friends of the Struggle! Now, those who died before us can rest with the footfall of our dancing in their ears, not the rumble of their armor!" The sound of the gealtirocht leader's hand slapping the upper back of Salvator went out with an audible clunk. The tone of stern vitriol had vanished; alien still to ears both human and post-human, but bereft of the tone that felt accusatory even if solely aimed at the occupiers.

"Our mission is finished! No need to bother with this hunk of junk. Why, maybe we can recover it for our own means, at the very least as a trophy!"

He was too focused on interrupting himself, pausing to shout and banter with his surviving friends. Many of them had taken out personal hand-phones - cheap, off-world, and just from a glance unsightly with the various modifications they'd no doubt had their own engineers install. The little clicks of their phone apps going off in sequence could barely be heard above their celebrating, the cameras like a tiny pitter-patter of clapping and applause to the cacophony of their joy.

His eyes were not following the inputting into the control panel of the artillery cannon; the way the weapon shifted and groaned barely garnered attention from the surviving insurrectionists, even as the barrel began to shift. Until, it had shifted too much and Salvator said what he said.

In the brief moment before Salvator vanished from where he once stood, he would not have required the most advanced scanners to know the way the eel-like being's features had twisted.

His comrades had turned, hearing the blink, seeing their allies suddenly falling back, and feeling, hearing, dreading the way the dots had fallen into place.

"You... all along you were-"

The cannon fired and silenced the leader's voice, a wash of ethereal power coming over them. Some had fallen onto their knees, phones dropped, watching as the same wrath that had given them historic victory now stole the taste of victory from the battlefield. The bunker, a fare more diminuitive structure than the mobile command center or repurposed stadium, was not silhouetted against the birth of a wrathful sun. Neither did the support trucks and their convoy; with the same uncaring judgement of the beyond, there was but a near-perfect inverted-dome crater.

There was no time to watch the scurrying of horrified, shocked Front forces; now tasting the same horror inflicted onto their tyrants in a cruel twist. Their weapons would speak.

Near immediately, a rail-cannon swung forth and zeroed in on the largest, heaviest target - the same one that had formed the bulwark of their advance. Rifle fire and grenades flew as readily as howling rage, too incoherent for speech as language and round flew with equal intent. A few rounds glanced the unztadtlige's armor, a few clanging against its bulk - rattling armor, but brusing rather than cracking. Semi-automatic weapons appeared to turn automatic, a torrent of blasts erupting as the traitors fell back.

A crackle over the coms; friendly, but blurred, grainy, unclear doubly so over the retaliatory barrage sent from former allies.

"-Active jamming! We can't track your location, ghost data-"

A sound like a whistle tinged first with a loud thud. Before even enhanced senses and ocular capability could detect it, two human bodies simply vanished; clouds of fizzling mist and squirming innards leaving two torsos standing. Two trees in front of the Envenomed squad's retreat simply lost massive chunks of mass around their middle; bark exploding outwards as if tinder, sending bramble and branches crashing down before them.

"-Unit! I repeat, specialist-"

One of the humans leapt out of the way, rolling away from a torrent of smoke-trails slamming in a v-shaped line. Anti-personnel rounds shred three more survivors - comrades became skeletal remains, tattered centipede-like creatures holding onto bits of bodily mass and armor, the other surviving gealtirocht a pincushion for serrated, whirring shrapnel-saws slowly powering down as if fattened on anguilline meat and juice.

The one who jumped gripped his midsection; the pain of re-attaching to the lower torso was punishing. His aim was shakey - cracking off two spiteful shots at the Envnomed, before he ducked again.

"-Bile! Can't land until-"

One last scream of anger as the same weapon that pulped the first victims fires; this close, it was a piercing report, a firecracker in the lower registers - a deep gavel pound rather than celebratory popping. The gealtirocht's voice vanished as did his body; raw physical shock from a massive automatic rifle-cannon overwhelmed reinforced armor. Turned to a footnote in history before his body even fully became a scattered mess of multicolored, moist matter and electrcuting armor fragments. The hellish spray of gunfire swept over the battlefield and the rest of the ZRF vanished behind it. No silence stilled the battlefield as dirt and debris rained, a counter-rhythm against the pounding, heavy footfalls of an approaching threat.

A shipping container groaned as a mammoth forced knocked over, the jutting tail-fins of the burning gunship swatted away with even less trouble soon after. Through the smoke of its judgement, it stomped through.

ENEMY HEAVY ARMORED WALKER UNIT: RESOLUTE-CLASS UCL MULTI-WEAPON PLATFORM

BGM: Byatis - Apology of War

What stomped through did so as thruster jets on the back of it shoulders powered down, blue anti-grav pulsations diminishing as wheels on the edge of its boot-like feet retract, stability prioiritized over speed. At 26 feet tall, it was even denser in its bulk than the warform even if its two visible weapons were notably smaller. A preliminary scan revealed missile pods stored in its shoulder but soon, electronic disruption makes such things difficult - something on its body is deliberately targeting them their coms and combat electronics. The former was silenced yet the latter can only struggle.

Given by the muddy-looking smears on its knees and hands, combined with the crude graffiti of a string of triangular, mantis-like heads impaled on a sword with a wingled handle, it's clear it had been very busy even before it was called over.

The heavy duty "machine gun" in its arms locked onto the warform immediately and fired, not just at the Envenomed but through the trees they are putting between themselves. A few rounds slammed into Echo's multipedal body; they did not pierce, glancing hits, but they hit hard enough to stagger the massive warmachine. Its shoulder-mounted cannon swivels around; it points at Ilshar's general direction... but it seemed to avoid aiming at him deliberately. Perhaps it was unable detect his specific location - the camera-pod sitting atop of its shoulder mounted cannon scanned the area. The weapon thudded out its judgement - HE-shells flew as close as within 15 feet of the hidden tarrhaidim, annihilating whatever foliage was behind him, lighting up the woods as the massive machine advanced!

The Envenomed

The massive cannon's joints pulsed and a deep, meditative hum serenaded the turning of its enormous barreled body. Like the mechanical gears of some ages old contratpion, the very movement of which felt dangerous in a sense for all of the advancement and refinement it possessed. Legs took turns digging into dirt and turning in place before raising and digging into the ground as sliding plates half-buried the sound of whirring backup system duplicate gears beneath as its smooth body seemed to almost shift liquid-like in spite of its metal merely point its barrel at the target. The weapon leaned forward, the shadow it once cast in the absence of much of the surrounding foliage stretching now towards the cliff-edge of the mountain, near hailing the distant shape that rumbled past the treeline of the mountain opposite.

With a deep breath, the machine began its judgement. The same feeling of hyper-tension against mind and against skin permeated the air; the space of which began to bend as if exposed to extreme heat. Shapes, bodies, foliage, remains, gunship wreckage - for a moment they twisted and bent as natural boundaries became watercolour blurs, light sucking away like luminous gas in the sight of the group. It snapped back to normal as the weapon's "exhaust" gaps seemed to both radiate and retract the very light they emanated; an azur blue that faintly shone on the area before coalescing into semi-material raw power. Ethereally resonant seals made from the very human wiring and electronics within collaborated with scielto construction materials as the fierce though restrained glow of the rune-like inscriptions lit up among the length of the weapon.

Raw ethereal power reached the peak of its amassing pressure and in the same thunderous report that shook the mountains and the trees, imposing its anger and will upon the Envenomed and all others who traveled or hid upon the mountain, the weapon fired. The midday of the battlescarred firebase became a blinding dawn of harsh blue-white as the very muzzle flash of the weapon vanished into the void-tearing exposion. As suddenly as it came, rattling the metal of destroyed war machines and the bullet-ridden trees that overlooked them, the flash was gone and they could see the massive globe of pulsing cobalt aquamarine that soared like a cloud made of raw, pulsing, otherworldly power and mass.

As it descended, somehow neither emitting nor absorbing light, flashes of tracers and piercing blue beams shot up from the rumbling metal shape. It some sort of large armored transport, its own weapons fire momentarily revealing it to any sort of telescopic visual capability from where the Envenomed were located - long enough to be a mobile command center and armed well enough to dissuade drones, aircraft, light vehicles but not the enormous pulsing doom that slammed into the ground to its side. A star blossomed in its wake as it expanded from a dome-shape of raw, arrogant white-blue yet the smooth sphericality of it turned into the unruly, bubbling, frothing rage of a proper explosion. Metal was silhouetted temporarily against the hellish inner blast zone, trees, people, drones - withering away, tearing apart, vanishing as a massive crater of crackling, distorting, bleeding reality manifested where it had landed.

The Envenomed and their allies were too far to feel the neuroethereal interference it would have caused but even they could see the once blocky, multi-sectioned body of a massive command vehicle now twisted like fluids frozen amidst the crest of waves. That was all that was left, beyond teeming smears of now rapidly manifesting dwellers of the oneiric chasm, flooding into realspace to feast on the brutally deceased left in its wake and sources of raw, sparking electrical power that were left bleeding and sputtering.

Almost immediately, the League battle-lines buckled. From up top, they could see tanks abruptly pausing as their rail-cannons stopped mid-targetting. Some fired wildly, shots going wild and tearing lengthy trenches far off from the mecha and other vehicles they were targetting. Once mobile defensive positions paused abruptly, feasted upon by storms of concentrated tracer fire. Gunships circling overhead abruptly paused, uneven fluctuations in firing circles making them easy prey for quad-winged, rapidly flapping bolt-like living projectiles swarming and attaching before detonating in brusts of green, maddening fire.

A full scale retreat was in question but the weapon for all its ponderousnessness turned faster than whole battallions could run. A second massive burst nearly a minute after the first from the weapon's barrel; this time the target would not be a recipient of the mere blast itself but a direct hit. The pulsing sun, like a twitching egg-sac filled with swarming, sliding, and jittering light, descended and the impact was no less horrific. The command centre was an enormous buliding, almost like a small stadium, but it suffered horrifically from the direct strike. The ravenous blossoming of the ethereal sun swelled in size just enoguh to barely cover its curving walls, disintegrating girders and reinforced skeletal structure like burning paper, leaving them withered chunks.

The frenches, the makeshift sub-units, and the vehicles and any infantry among them however - far less remained as the blast wave and void-borne shock slammed into them. Bodies half-vaporized, half shattered into litle symphonies of floating bone, armor, pulp and various bits of fragmenting mass rapidly converting into the unearthly mulch of the void. The metal of machinery cracked and shattered, fragmenting at joints and crumpling at reinforced points, muted explosions of munitions materializing into flourishing, frozen amalgamations of pointed blasts trapped and frozen in place before fading into blurry nothingness.

The ground itself had fared better, kicked up and torn open, yet anything that stood upon it was not returned to dust as much as converted into unearthly, desecrated, un-matter.

All of that was hard to focus on as the rebels, bloodied and worn, raised weapons in victory - hollering, exaltation, cruel taunts, celebration. The pyroclastic extravagagnce below raising their spirits as much as it did the Front forces now storming onto the shattered lines of the enemy.

[TARGET ACQUIRED. COORDINATES MARKING. DANGER CLOSE.]

A third targeting reticle over their HUD's, visible only to them, just as the synthesized voice and coloured text was only perceived by them.

It was not further into the enemy lines, disorganized as they were, nor the opposite mountain top.

It was off to the sides of the battlefield - at a bunker of some sort, the road directly to it blocked off by a pair of enormous and fallen mecha League in origin.

Given the infantry seen entering its hole-punched circular structure and supply vehicles moving in around it over the crater-ridden ground, it was fair to say it was in the hands of allies.

The target marker hovered over it patiently.

"Be fast. You have company. Our allied vanguard detected a spike in raw power readings and something both armored and highly fast moving up the mountain. Do what you need to in order to eliminate the target. Very fast; we are convincing them to hold position. We cannot guarantee it will work."

The special forces team sounded... calm, oddly enough, intentionally even in spite of the fact that the Envenomed team were between two possible disasters. One of which was celebrating around them, stomping and raising fist or firearm alike. Another, little more than a report of a distant threat far off from them... but for how long?

The Evenomed: Violent Military SciFi Action Across A Post-War Expanse

Interest is also piqued!

@Gordian Nought

Jump on the discord!

The Evenomed: Violent Military SciFi Action Across A Post-War Expanse

Hello I found this thread from the link in the ooc, are y'all still recruiting?

@Queen Arya

Correct. Would you like to hop on the discord?

The Envenomed

In minutes the concealed position had been turned into an open-air cemetary as the last of defences manned and summoned was set upon by the suviving opposition bloodied and enraged. Ragged camo cloaks torn with holes and out of which jutted long rifles jabbed at frantic, huddling security forces. Near point blank rifle fire tore clean through metal, ballistic under-weave, and partially augmented bodies in neat holes. Heavy duty scatter-shots tore apart cranial protection and mass alike for those who attempted to escape. The truly determined, whether by devil-may-care bravado or some suicidal proffessionalism, fired wildly at the snaking forms as slugs dove through mist and pointed fangs parted biomass and armor.

It had seemed like a painful forever but one armored, alien foot stomped down on a now fragmented skull and grinded into the mush of metal fragments, bone, and organ mush beneath. The gavel had sounded and silence would not answer; the sound of wreckage burning and the ravenous worms destroying the last bits of troopers they could find continued.

As if to break the tranquillity setting over the pulsing ambience of the distant battle happening just over the ridge of the clifftop they were on, a loud and familiar buzz sounded out from the communicator panel - Salvator's HUD immediately was bombarded with infosharing requests, almost obnoxiously enough that it appeared they were trying to brute force their way into controlling his systems as the device all but rattled and exploded off of his storage.

This time however, the message wasn't spoken aloud but forcefully cracked out of their private coms, into their hearing, internal data receptors, closed communication channels and however else they could intrude.

"We cannot advance any further," To the Envenomed it would be as if someone was yelling into their ear, their very stream of consciousness, or otherwise intruding on their privacy. Yet to anyone else, they would hear nothing beyond maybe a faint buzz at best coming from some of their teammates' helmets. "Resistance is stiff, but we have our targets! Confirm control of artillery piece!"

The very reason they had been sent here sat surrounded by the scattered remains of those who had manned it, an enormous mass like some enormous petty emperor. The four legs it sat on seemed stubby before but they were even thicker than the warform's legs, with visible joints meant to curl up for transportation but for whome the gears and axes that defined them looked like they might crack and break under the mere motion of such. Its cannon was wide; enough to fit one of the civsec troopers in straight into its maw. The smooth surface of it looked unnaturally so; the metal itself a faded greyish-white, as if from some sort of combination of skeletal colour yet sculped almost like marvel if not for the blemishes of lightly glowing ridges and gaps along with subtle bumps along the length of the cannon.

A faint sense of tension pervaded the air; not from the thrill and fury of battle but something else that hung within the very space around it. It tingled skin and caressed bone, seeming to whisper to the mind not in truths or temptations but raw id and seeping symbolism of inexplicable un-logic but something deeper and within every cell and vein. The ZRF troopers staggered about for a second, huffing and stabilizing themselves - some took out chemo injectors but the single remaining gealtirocht grunted as the air in front of his skull distorted for a moment; light simply did not pass through and it blurred as if exposed to intense heat on a summer day.

"We have multiple high-value targets to eliminate. Marking now!"

It was the same fully armored Intransigent commando as earlier, but there was no direct camera feed. There likely wasn't a point; heavy audio-filtering was being employed. Sometimes his words half cut out before the background noise vanished and his voice, forcefully separated from it, spiked in volume almost enough that it began to clip.

Multiple data-uplinks; this time, not requests but forced manifestations upon whatever targeting or HUD systems were in use by the squad. The handheld computer's screen blinked and flickered as it forcefully began to manifest three large upside down orange triangles, tip pointed downwards and distancting in metres manifesting overlaid across their vision if they possessed the cybernetics, biomechanical or otherwise integrated capability for such.

The first target was on the mountain opposite of the very one they stood on; the specific target in general was hard to determine - constantly fluctuating numerical measuresments of distance resulted in the targeter-triangle growing and shrinking. Yet if they zoomed in with whatever optical enhancement capabilities, they would notice quite a few trees shaking about and a large black shape moving between them - something metallic, lumbering, yet not slow - seemingly in the direction of the receding CivSec frontlines.

As harsh as the insurgents had been hit by the civsec defenders, the battle line had moved tremendously since they last spoke with the Intransigence commando group on the ground. The same defensive emplacements once firing at the surge of resistance fighters now found themselves as their beacheads and rallying points for the swarm of darkly patterned troopers and blocky, aged tanks vaulting and rumbling across the battlefield.

The next target marker above a spot roughly 10000 meters away, far off into the defensive lines of the UCL backed lines. A dome like structure of some sort like a giant glassy eye and out of which milled machinery and personnel alike. Targeting data suggested it was a sort of command center of some sort, possibly a major communications hub, and it was by and far the furthest target.

The third however... a red triangle manifested on the corner of their HUD's or equivalents, crossed out by red lines and with an equals sign to its right. [TARGET DATA VERIFYING, PROGRESS UNKNOWN]

"Eliminate both targets."

All the while, the surviving ZRF troopers looked at the squad somewhat impatiently. They were under the impression they were trained to use this technology; some of them certainly looked the part.

"Your hesitation is grating; man that cannon, it's what we brought you along for! The remains of my comrades grows colder by the second."

The same scielto who had spoken with them over the intercepted coms jabbed his finger at the unmanned weapon as the once-bisected human soldier staggered alongside him, his steps unsteady but his agitation no less visible.

"Do not let them get into the com channel. We require the first two targets eliminated before we can reveal the third."

OUTLAW SPACE

How far does the fantasy aspect of it go?