LustForDecay

The Envenomed

As the gunship descended, most had been quick enough to get out of the way as its chin touched the soil followed by the rest of the bulk. Flames and smoke billowed from its husk as it tore up soil and flattened tents underneath, crushing any corpses that lay on the battleifled and smashing a few of the repurposed shipping containers out of the way. As if dead-set on finishing its job, it was moving directly towards not just Kleo but Alice, a vengeful final sendoff for its ultimately futile efforts. Precision was not the name of its game and its huge bulk did not directly slam into Kleo. Yet what was left of its wings and a jutting missile pod slammed into Kleo's sides as it came to a stop dead in the middle of the battlefield, the force easily enough to knock her off of her feet.

Alice would fare somewhat better but secondary detonations across the bulk of the fallen machine sprayed her body with hot shrapnel, the sputtering wreck seemingly hungry to get in whatever hurt it could before it was reduced to useless slag. The metal fragements did not cut deep but the near-cauterizing heat and blast-like spray made it clear they would have to relocate soon.

Meanwhile, the half-guerilla nodded to Salvator and sprayed the entire container's contents into his lower body, covering it in a soapy mess of frothy bubbles before tossing the canister away and picking up the assault rifle. As Salvator momentarily disapepared from sight, a full load of cadenced bursts sounded out and caught the gun platform's attention and that of the squad it was guarding. It was enough that as they focused on the pressing threat furiously emptying a weapon not intended for fully automatic fire, they did not notice the voidhanger threat until it was on top of their very gun platform.

The platform paid little heed to the sudden booted weight on its upper body, not until a knife dug into vulnerable electronics and joints. That's when it paused and the sudden lull in suppressive fire let the half-guerilla retaliate, popping out of cover just long enough to catch distracted civsec rifleman in the chest and face. The others spun to notice what Salvator was doing far too late for the crack of their rifles to do anything. The gun platform bucked and shook, but Salvator has removed himself with a blink, just in time for the ensuing explosion to send a plume of fire and shredded metal outwards.

The entire squad perished in a storm of shattered armor and dismembering fragmentation, leaving three more plus their quadripeds to deal with.

Having extricated him from a close-quarters battle with a berserk automata, Ilshar's machine gun resumed its grisly work and sent an advancing duo of civsec troopers hunkering to the ground. The shielding of the gun platform accompanying them flared to a near opaque level, deflecting bullets off into trees and the surrounding dirt as it expanded into a dome-like shape around its body. The gun-platform held its ground, swivelling its turret to face the source of suppression, one it intended to answer with a considerably larger and higher-output machine gun.

Targeting systems locked onto Ilshar's chest and a full spray of luminiscent bolts spat out in flashes of muted light, shredding the tent behind him and cutting through the smoke beginning to spread onto the battlefield from the massive wreckage of the still-burning gunship.

There was a world of difference between the energy discharged fired by the gun platform and the entire autocannon used by the unztadtlige endoform stomping its way back across the battlefield. The quadriped stopped abruptly, hunkering as a few stray rounds slammed into its shield now flaring with power as it neared its breaking point. That was enough to get the duo of civsec troopers to break from its protection, stray rounds kicking up fountains of dirt as they slammed mere feet from their location.

The remaining two gun platforms immeditely stopped firing at the rest of the squad, pelting the massive armored titan with concentrated gunfire and the rifle rounds of their surviving infantry accompaniment. None of this prevented the final bipedal robot from having its chest and cranium caved in, before flying out of the tent and into a whole squad of infantry and their quadriped support.

At the speed the junked robot fell, the shield did not activate; it simply was not fast enough. Yet the raw mass behind it and the brute strength of the huge unztadtlige turned it into a projectile more than a match for the armour of the quadriped. Legs buckled and armour bent before the hulking turret-machine was knocked clean over, rolling thrice before both robots slammed into a large shipping crage, spewing sparks and smoking black.

Enemy infantry and quadripeds had been halved and they were getting desperate. The remaining two gun platforms began to fall back, eight infantry spreading out as they tried to form a defensive perimeter around the massive artillery platform - its wide base like some enormous four-legged iron mat, huge digging legs entrenched in the soil and the unnaturally smooth, almost living shaped metal-like composite of its hefty barrel glowing with a latent, resting power.

No matter however; a beam of hyper-accelerated particles dropped their number to six, two soldiers sharing the same gaping hole int their chest as one of the surviving gealtirocht troopers advanced. The only of two it apepared, assisted by a mere four human infantry, including the foamed up, freshly bisected one - now grabbing his once missing lower half as its legs began to twitch and he began to reconnect.

"THEIR HOPES LIE CRUSHED AND THEY ALL BUT BEG FOR AN END! LET US PAY ONTO THEM WHAT THEY HAVE PAID UNTO YOUR FOREFATHERS!"

This time, the gealtirocht commander spoke with no voice-distortion and not on private coms. They could hear him, see him perched on top of one of the two destroyed gun-platforms, his rail-cannon slung and a long weapon almost piscine smooth but predatory in its pointed shape, taking pot shots with lances of cold blue particle beams. A desperate security trooper tried to blind fire over the trench they'd built around the bun platform but soil was poor protection for hyper-acclerated particles - his body slumped soon after as they could see and *feel* the morale drop in the surviving troopers.

They were panicking, desperately trying to find more cover and fire off what weak retaliatory fire they could, their taxed gun platforms struggling to adapt to the fact that they were cornered - wild sprays of pulse-beam and chin-mounted gatling fire going wide.

It was a matter of time before they were fully crushed

Closed

I think we should start up a discord. Would be be easier to keep track of updates and discuss the RP there.

Closed

Will there be a discord later? What's the limits of technology in the setting? How "hard" is the scifi here? Is stuff like magic/the force/biotics/warp powers/telepathy/etc. allowed?

An adventure in a sci-fi setting

Possibly interested.

The Envenomed

The missile that Alice fired was old, probably older than the gunship she was firing it at, and its age was painfully clear. Lock-on systems slowly calculated the distance to the target and the particular design element to track, waiting for the all-clear sign of a pixelated missile to manifest before it would automatically deactivate the safety mechanism. It might have been considered a godsend for infantry in its heyday but even before the floundering gunship, its clunkiness in both physical design and targeting was far from ideal.

The payload however was promising, smoke trailing behind a pointed missile designed to pierce and obliterate a variety of targets airborne and ground-based.

The chin-mounted chaingun swivelled with a pause in firing as it began to spray wildly towards the direction of the missile. With on-board systems handling targeting the struggling pilot was able to notice the missile while battling the jerking, damaged aircraft. The hefty vessel jerked rightwards, staggering drunkenly as the curve the missile's trajectory sliced over the same side its still burning missile pods had been. Residual shielding flared a light rose-red, solidfying patterns of condensed energy almost threatening to shatter like glass from the mere pass of the projectile, signifying thier severely degraded state.

With the Envenomed focused on an airborne threat however, the remaining survivors of the League-run firebase made their move. Their infantry had been depleted - maybe just 11 left but they had one key advantage still.

Four key advantages on closer inspection

Walker Gun Platform

Shuddering from behind the smoke kicked up by the conflict, the units previously disabled by the armored trooper's cranial explosion shuddered back to life with flickers of blue LED's and the slow rising of power signature readings. They were vrexul in origin; their arachnoid appearance hinted that much, but they had been simplified from their original designs. Bioplating was externally absent, shielded in composite flexi-metals that stretched and bent to the shape of the reinforced organosynthetic mass beneath. It had only four legs rather than the six to ten often fielded by this platform, possibly combined into the meaty limbs dragging them into a steady march. A chin-mounted tri-barrel gatling swivelled left and right as if providing additional sight for the frontal eyes, armor tapering off towards their split vertical arrangement.

The main point of focus was the laser turret sitting tyrannically upon them, a cruel and pointed despot watching from a subtle camera between its dark bulk and the denser shoulders connecting to its frontal limbs. It was a darker shade than the faded grey-blue stripe pattern of the rest of the machine; it seemed they were recent arrivals to this world and were finally about to be used. They advanced in a reverse circular formation - the two furthest arms were the furthest up, the two in the middle deliberately lagging behind them, providing cover for the space of toppled trees and hole/corpse-ridden no-man's land between both opposing forces.

One of the remaining ZRF troopers spun out of cover, three bursts slamming not into metal but a field of spherical, rippling energy flaring a resolute blue. He spun back behind the bisected shipping crate Alice was running to but not fast enough. His rifle flew out of his hands as bolts of bright purple punched clean through the armour, splattering his arm into bone fragments and synthetic material. His chest and its armour erupted outwards next, silencing any cries as he fell face first to the ground. The sound of the automata's accusatory shimmer-crackle report echoed amidst the gunfire.

It had come from the right arm of the advance, the ape-spider-platform having gained a partial flanking shot on the guerilla before its chin-mounted weapon whirred and began spitting energy-shrouded bolts, tearing through a partially collapsed tree. Bark split as a stream of rifle-grade rounds flew right at the voidhanger. Even through the carnage she would be able to catch a glance of three infantry advancing behind it, aiming to close in and try to force back the ruthless onslaught to protect their only real chance of survival burning in the sky. Desperately they fired a spray of bullets her way, shredding the bits of fallen tree that remained obscuring their sight.

The bisected shoulder immediately tossed itself into cover next to Savlator and pulled a grenade from part of its armor-vest, smeared with its own fluids and primed it. It landed near the leftmost arm of the gun-platform backed advance and blew apart in a storm of needles, a small blizzard that caused the shielding of the gun-platform to flare an angry pinkish-blue. A few of the soldiers fell back, shrapnel biting through armor and into flesh. One slumped back only for their neck to disconnect and send the head rolling into blast-crater; he had been the closest to the storm of needles, unwillingly having shielded the remaining two, trading shots with the half-soldier. The gun-platform did not fire upon Salvator yet; it appeared its shielding was interfering with its targeting with all the interference just yet, even if it had a fairly clear shot from between a few partially defoliated trees at the voidhanger.

They had not arrived fast enough however to stop his appropriated rail-cannon from preparing to fire. The angular blade-characters of gealtirocht language manfiested on Salvator's screen as targeting reticles and data-feeds blurred into static before roughly solidifying and stabilizing. Multiple lines overlaid on his visual feed indicated the very straightforward travel path from projectile to target as the rising numbers hit 100%.

The weapon rocked, not quite a kick as much as a shove, as a flash of white-pink spiked out of its mouth. The gunship's chin flared white as sparks and flames erupted outwards; the mounted weapon vanished as did a concerning portion of its lower body, turned into a gutted, warped trench. The machine wobbled precariously as its stream of gunfire abruptly came to an end, the space around it distorting from the effect of the energized hyper-accelerated round turning its lower shielding array into a distorted blur of fragmented, rapidly dissolving mist around itself. Only pod-mounted autocannons remained, firing a wild if inaccurate salvo towards Salvator and his half-trooper ally, themselves hastily shoving in a new mag as he pointed furiously at the CivSec troopers and their gun-platform almost blasted by the AP/HE rounds slamming on their location.

A digital notification popped up on Echo's gestalt consciousness-computer-network. Target lock x2, missile launch, anti tank - two streaks swirling as they descended, attempting to slam into the endoform. A smaller target than they were typically used for; the missiles were wobbling somewhat as they adjusted their flight path but no less concerning.

Another lock - x3. A trio that this time flew in more deliberate arching patterns, locked onto the power spike detected from the warform charging its mighty cannon. The trails of smoke rapidly dissolving yet leading back to the smoking, sparking airborne wreck orbiting towards the direction of the now silent artillery cannon as it attempted to gain some distance. It was still closer to the ground than it was when they initially engaged it and given how one of its engines was sparking, it was likely having trouble maintaining consistent altitude. Its aggressive dodging manoevres were taxing it dearly.

A poor move.

Perhaps it was hoping the interference from the battle would interfere with Echo's sighting, or that its missile would be able to knock the cannon off course - it did not see which ones connected, likely at least two, but energy beams flew faster than even cutting edge homing missiles. A lance of light malevolent and judgemental cut across the length of the battlefield, through smoke and spiking readings on all HUD's and biointerface systems, through the belly of the aircraft, its tail-wings and as quickly as it had manifested, it vanished.

A gutted, flaming wreck began to descend, missiles and shell munitions either having detonated or been erased from being as it slammed through a now splintered tree, into the middle of the no-man's land, the force of its final flight dragging it across the ground and towards the staggered Kleo. Corpses were crushed or tossed aside, craters torn up, and for a few moments all infantry and even gun-platforms hunkered down as its sparking body spat fragmentation and sparks all across the battlefield. Kleo had likely heard it, maybe seen the streaking partially disembowelled burning meteor as it slid her way with enough force to knock over a tank, digging a massive trench across the middle of the battlefield as it went.

Such carnage did not distract the gun-automata in the least as it stomped forth and in the confines of the tent, blunt metal meeting back as crates, furniture, spare supplies, and all matter of debris scattered or broke under its relentless attack. There was neither vigour nor hatred in the strike; cold calculation of attack vectors and force of swing were all that mattered. Its camera eyes locked onto Ilshar's momtions as it strode forth, shooting out a hand to grasp his elbow to try and stop his swing. Its other hand released its grip on its own light machine gun, letting it clatter to the ground, connected to it still via its ammo belt leading into its back. It immediately swung its now free hand horizontally in a nasty chop aimed at Ilshar's neck, one that could easily break an unaugmented human one at the least.

Ilshar's fist intercepted its face, causing the head to swivel rightwards and its own fist to swing wildly; maintaining trajectory yet minus any course correction or additional accuracy. It was stunned for a moment but only a momnet. Gears complained as it shead moved back into position, its hand still gripping Ilshar's elbow as it raised that same free hand again aiming to bring it down like a hammer onto the tarrhaidim's skull! Fingers clenched, arm rigid, light machine gun swaying against the ground and bumping against crates and empty magazines - it almost seemed hateful.

The Envenomed

As numbers dropped across the board, Security and Reclamation forces scrambled wildly into and out of cover. Branches and tent-mesh ignited or tore, spraying fragments and particles into the air. HUD targeting systems were starting to glitch and distort with digital ghost data and false positives; iron sights zeroed in shaky and uneven.

With a distant gunship far beyond the range of small arms raining down anti-personnel fire the advantage lay with the security forces; slowly more and more of them peaked over their crates and fallen trees, potshot snipes turning into full bursts of shredding fire. Intermittently the multi-barreled cyclic terror from above joined in as beams of near invisible bullets vaporized tree bark, reinforced metal, and the stomach area of a human body.

The upper torso slapped to the ground as the voice-suppression settings failed and a garbled patchwork of digitized scratching and inhaling gargling emerged from the half-person. A trail of bulb-like biosynthetic viscera, clearly not native to their body, twitched and squirted onto leaves and ashes as if signaling the the integrated armor backpack to split open across its seems. Contents spilled as four arachnoid limbs black and gleaming fresh dug splitting-tips into thick, blunt-toe-claw digits, draggint its body wounded and twitching across the ground. The rifle in its hand spat half brace against their shoulder, bumping against debris whether from the destruction of material or bodies. Volleys went wide but their ascending, diagonal pattern made them unexpected - a cybernetic human head splattered its contents out, chin to crown split open from a three-round burst revealing the wiring and digital-interfacing systems once concealed by meat and bone before crumpling to the ground.

The soldier's mind, even infused with stimulants and combat drugs, knew even such valiant efforts could not win the battle, not scattered and decimated like this. The voidhanger rummaging through tents and crates was a major target but in a rare blessing, the UCL strategy of saturating the air with fire superiority had a silver lining. As bullets big and small pelted off emplacements, crates, and disabled automata even someone like that could become very hard to spot. Not to the trained sense, distorted by the same chemical injections keeping its user alive, as the bisected scout. The now spider-like soldier crept closer, the trail of blood closing from clotting as internal maintenance parasites worked in overtime threatening to overheat and fall apart if they pushed themselves any further.

It was a surreal scene, the blurred and nonsense garble-speak of the insurgent punching the air with a free hand that threatened to slump over dead and useless. Salvator probably did not notice him, likely busy ducking behind cover as bullets and energy bolts competed with oxygen particles for dominance of the space between both forces. His scans indicated multiple tubular objects, 80% of them positively identified as anti-armor launcher systems but a disappointing 35% as possessing target-tracking capabilities rated for the range they were engaging at. The huge shipping crate diagonally sliced from the ensuing carnage, its top half having slid forth and digging trails into the ground, seemed to be where more than a few were located. A tempting target yet one exposed to the surviving security forces and for whom the tree cover was nonexistent.

The missiles whether detonating by choice or by Echo's active defence procedure had torn open the foliage above and revealed the bright sun above to glare on the piling bodies beneath. And the slanting half-cargo crate, big enough to fit a whole group of power armored UCL troopers, was precariously exposed to the air.

There were other launchers around - to the right of the encampment nearest the cliff and a steep tumble there was some sort of heavy duty mounted missile platform. Sparking and with a few of its launcher tubes half melted by stray energy bolt fire but mmostly operational if they could start up its firing mechanisms. Underneath one of the gun-platform infantry support walkers, laying flat on its belly like a large dead gorilla, some sort of portable system lay hidden, one of the more high tech ones. The only problem was that it was at the front of the cover where the enemy survivors were trying to hold off the onslaught... and there was no telling if that support walker was actually dead.

With their aggressively shortened stature, the bisected soldier waved their free arm towards Salvator, divided by an expanse of ground where one of the dead gealtirocht lay, corpse still smoking from fried systems punctured a thousandfold. A voice emerged from their helmet but the language was unintelligible; perhaps pained groans and alien tongue alike, too indistinct for translation software to un-distort. Yet the shaky hand with a raised index finger and the gealtirocht corpse it pointed at, one with a shoulder mounted rail cannon next to it, made clear its intent.

Those weapons were intended for powered armor... but if these dead gealtirocht were still sparking, perhaps they could be powered or aimed even. They had advanced targeting systems typically meant for ground targets but hyper-accelerated bolts, even if they took a while to charge up, flew far, far faster than missiles.

A plume of dust, the hiss of gas propulsion, and a thin trail of smoke that momentairly shrouded Kleo. Off in the distance, the gunship swung into view as it momentarily broke off. The missile was hot on its trail. Multiple auxiliary weapons spat death through the air, shredding off armor but the missile only twisted and spun as the vehicle grew further and further... before an orange fireball erupted in the air.

It remained an afterimage for a brief moment of relative peace... before smoke and residual flame spread and dispersed like fluid over an immaterial surface. The shape of the gunship, jet-cockpit, slightly bulky green body tinted with the blue of the UCL, short and almost stocky wings bearing multiple integrated launcher pads and under-slung cannons, all distorted in a shimmering dome of shielding. Oil-on-water colours warped across the zone of protection that comprised its shield, flaring across the left side with hundreds of little hexagonal shapes flaring up. An energy shield, one taxed by the blast but now it had learned its lesson.

Bullets were too good for these scum. Smoke hissed out of its "shoulder" missile pods to the sides of its cockpits. Two of the deadly guided projectiles shot out of one of the pods, twisting and streaking as they split - one following the trail of smoke back to the human operator who fired it. The other towards the large and unidentified walker further in the distance - a test shot, HE load meant to ignite the target, make it easier to track and target as well as to test how good the active protection system really was. It had destroyed a bunch of its smaller missiles but this was a larger, faster projectile.

It had not noticed the second anti-air missile being loaded by the other voidhanger.

Nor had it a very familiar weapon that went off just as its HE missiles slammed down - one detonating a mere five feet from the warform, bathing in flames and force, the other where the pilot had guided it to presumably where it last detected Kleo, a similar explosion ensuing at the location. It was not expecting a series of bolts to slam into its frontal shielding, hexagonal energy-field arrangements glowing and thickening as power expended itself to resist power itself.

Heavy duty armor piercing bolts considered the equivalent of crew-mounted heavy machine guns slammed with kinetic force capable of crushing light vehicle armor, digging into the immaterial protection like nails as the bolts spun and drilled, arcs of power flashing from the impact point. The field of energy that jacketed each bullet transmitted itself to the protective barrier; hexagon-segments flaring and solidfiying before shattering as four rounds made it in.

Before safety measures could fully activate, a cluster of missiles erupted and the sectioned shielding across the VTOL-gunjet's front flared and shattered like kaleidscopic glass. It dipped forward as the pilot struggled with the controls, one of its missile pods disabled forming a huge hole in its defences, coupled with the left side's shielding being weakened. It was not out of the fight but they had momentarily knocked it out of commission, if only for a few fleeting moments. Pod and nose mounted guns were likely on AI targeting as the pilot attempted to keep it steady, letting its automated systems to try and target Echo's Endoform.

The nose mounted chaingun fired wildly into the surrounding area, aiming for wide area suppression as two of its four rotary canons zeroed in on the endoform, whirring before a river of armour piercers descended the biped's way. It was halfway the distance it originally engaged from but its high powered heavy automatics were only somewhat less deadly.

As the firefight between ground and sky continued, the tent's flaps were opened and a tantalizing prize laid itself before Ilshar's eyes. A familiar one perhaps; the egg-shaped projectiles attached to a somewhat blocky, canister-like magazine that did not seem entirely congruous with the octagonal launcher with its strict geometric shapes and muzzled barrel. Large but not particularly long, League in origin and the hated foe of many guerillas flying modified spore-colony live-transport organisms, civilian biocraft heavily modified yet for whom the the so called "egg-peg" launcher (its real name a far duller and less amusing series of code-letters and numbers) took so many.

Someone once joked it resembled some malformed, clunky prosthetic limb one might see on a poor refugee camp dweller or those who stayed behind in old mycelial-networked hovel-towns. This was not the exact same as such but the it was hard to deny it was descended from the same bane as many a guerilla knew.

A clack from behind the crates, a stack knocked over, a sputtering form - one of the LMG automata from earlier. Ilshar's presence had triggered a proximity sensor and IFF had determined foe - its weapon swung horizotally, knocking out a hanging neon light with sparking flashes. It was in knife-fighting range and it was programmed to know that; augmented strength swung the barrel of its light machine gun (far from light at all for most) like a club at Ilshar's skull, the force capable of easily braining even a full grown human.

The Envenomed

A tubular protrusion poked out of the mouth of the tent, shaking from carnage rocking the perimeter of the UCL base, its barrel swinging to face the massive unztadtlige weapons platform as all six of the remaining automata began to spread out, focusing their fire on Echo in an attempt to further divide its attention. Deeper into the base, the meat of the enemy forces were engaged in an increasingly protracted battle between high power pot shots from the insurgents and colourful busts of energy-jacketed rounds from the League-backed security forces. For every handful of gun quadripedal gun-walkers staggered back and set ablaze and sputtering from precision rounds, cries rang out as biotech augmented bodies flared their integrated concussion-shield generators, flaring like glass barriers absorbing then reflecting light. Precision volleys of semi-automatic fire were drowned by vicious bursts of automatic fire, forcing the Intransigent back from cover to cover.

The attack was starting to hit its roadbumps and something needed to break sooner or later. The CivSec forces knew that. However they were not expecting the target-marker on their HUD's signifying where Salvatore was positioned to abruptly vanish. The surviving automata paused for a brief moment, scanners thrown off-centre by the abrupt vanishing of the signatures they were using for targeting. Eyes swept the surroundings but the crafty voidhanger was far from the frontline of their perimeter.

Focused on the biggest threat, the elite soldier's sensors picked up the ethereal incursion too late. The EMP rounds had dampened them enough that by the time he had swung around on shakey and struggling legs still bleeding slightly from the needle-rounds, the shotgun's trigger had already been pulled.

The reputation of vrexul weaponry, even when scaled down for usage by less gargantuan species, made itself known by a monstrous kick. Like a wild beast striking his shoulder the weapon howled and shrieked and growled; the sounds blended as one with the spike-burst flash of its barrel lit up the darkened forest hidden by overhead foliage and smoke from the valley. Two slugs slammed then sliced into his side, a chunk of not just his armour but ribs vanishing in fragment of smouldering, distorting ether-burn as bioslugs ripped him open. Charred meat squirting bluish-purple blood, scraped and degraded bone, and complex wiring were visible as the soldier's voice-coms blared white noise before silencing, staggering back as he stumble-dodged away from the voidhanger.

His rifle's grip was loose, spraying wildly as energy-jacketed rounds flew in a wild retaliatory spray at Salvatore. A few of them missed; six automata became five as one's entire torso erupted outwards in sparks and flames from the desperate burst. The trenches torn under his left arm sparked with electricity, regulatory fluids squirting outwards as whatever biosensation inhibitors and medical drugs did their best to diminish the loss. Soon, the rifle fell as his left arm jerked back and he stumbled stunned, feeling the overhwleming, piercing pain of needle rounds through his arm. This time, he needed to pause to seize his hand for a brief second, struggling to try and take out the large drum-mag weapon magnetically attached to his back

The five gun-automata themselves had paused again as the connection to the trooper was severed. They twitched and stuttered, conflicting command instructions struggling to sort themselves out as the five remaining awkwardly tried to retreat backwards. Wild sprays of gunfire shredded cover but glancing shots on the Envenomed would hardly stop their advance or initative. Even the relatively smaller calibre rounds of Alice could pick them off - bodies and heads jerked then sparked as precise needles tore through reinforced torso and skulls. Wires and vital cores were severed and ran through - five became two, barrels smoking and nearing overheat status as they struggled against the increasingly relentless attack.

Echo's lunge sent its bipedal form bounding out of its body, descending with a quip and a deadly bludgeon onto the unsuspecting soldier. Yet at that moment, the tubular protrusion revealed itself - an anti-tank rocket launcher, dumbfire and locally made, dated and hardly worthy of a contemporary interplanetary military.

The Endoform was well out of danger but at these close ranges, even the mighty warform's body was going to feel the hit. Gas hissed and blew out cans of rations and loose miscellanea out of the back of the tent as a shaped armor-piercing projectile shot forth in a blink of a moment. Before the Endoform landed, the missile slammed into the bulk of the Warform's side, erupting into a small blast as it tried to rip into its dense armor.

Barely a blink later, the hammer fell and with it, the head of the soldier practically burst. Reinforced armor crunched and compressed the bone and meat within before the boundaries of structure could no longer take the strain. Fragmenting metal and shredded padding were overtaken by gushing grey matter and cranial biomass, bone fragments and cartilage, meat and teeth, spraying outwards and leaving a twitching, staggering corpse stumbling back before it fell to the ground. The huge weapon he carried clattered first, falling not far from his carbine, both stained with fluid and viscera.

The initiative of the infantry faltered; pot-shots from concealed positions around the crates and cargo piles paused for a moment as their indomitable leader lay gushing and a few inches shorter on the ground. A cacophony of screams and silenced cries followed; the automata platforms they were controlling had also been rendered stunned as if by the shock of such a graphic end. The command link was severed and they too now struggled to change operational parameters.

The perfect prey for not only rail guns and battle rifles to pick off but something fouler and more arcane.

As the CivSec trooper who fired his launcher hastily broke out of the back of the tent, already weakened from the backblast, he scrambled to get behind cover. He shouted something at his comrades, indistinct if likely Dutch over the din of the battle, trying to ignore the gruesome sight as he peeked from around the tree; swearing that the other three dolts needed to lay down far more suppressing fire so they could try to regroup with the others and form a tighter defensive formation near the artillery canon.

In his attempts to load the missile, he felt the strange burning sensation on his foot a little too late, turning to see the biomesh beneath beginning to froth and bubble. Meat beneath soon felt the unearthly touch as semi-augmented meat laced with light cybenrnetics sent deluges of agony into his body. He stood for a brief second before the joints of his ankles collapsed under his weight, gargling as the rot climbed faster than he could crawl as gloved fingers turned into skeletal claws, leaving a half-dissolved mess of bone and drenched metal.

The reek alone broke another soldier out of his frantic potshots, pointing at the cloud as the three remaining soldiers sprinted wildly towards their allies deeper into the base. Faster still now that the ZRF allies were beginning to box the others in. Their numbers were depleted but the loss of the commanding officer and the ensuing stunning of the gun platforms on their spider-gorilla like bodies with single-turreted heavy prism-shape barrels and smaller auxiliary machine guns mounted atop, rendered them as easy pickings.

Perhaps they were the most mercifully treated. A spray of 10mm rounds slammed into their backs as they spun and staggered, armor cracking as one of them fired off a few desperate rounds at the lone pure human operative. It was not long before he slumped to his knees, then his face, joining the others in a bloodied pile not even halfway to their allies.

"THE SPIRIT OF THE SOLAR TYRANT SWIMS AMONG YOUR NUMBER!" The Gealtirocht leader's voice boomed over the coms as the path was now laid bare to join with his forces. While they had the initiative now, more and more infantry were popping from the woodwork, heavy machine gun fire spitting from behind them. They were cornered now, but given the amount of camo-cloaked bodies laying bisected upon the ground or reduced to charred husks on the ground, it was clear they were not going to give-up the area without a fight.

As the battle raged however, a flashing light trailing smoke broke through the treeline, darting between the bark and bramble, slamming behind a few of the large gealtirocht, swallowing them in flames. Another, a third, smashing through a tree trunk and detonating in the space bewteen the Envenomed and their allies and sending a ZRF recon trooper soaring through the air and into a pile on the ground.

As the smoke of the blast cleared, one of the scielto lay on the ground - armor cracked open and cauterized meat visible, his rail cannon sparking as it powered down next to him. A crescendo-hiss morphed into a rattling cry for revenge as the remaining three, battered and burned advanced, switching to pulse carbines and spraying down the ground forces as their humanoid allies now eight in total fired volley after volley-

Before a sound of mechanical droning buzz announced a beam of tracer rounds shredding foliage and three of their bodies into clouds of mist and sparking bioelectronics. Implant organisms fell to the ground, ruptured out of the shattered effigies of Intransigent humanity, struggling to find organs, veins, and cybernetics to maintain as they slowly bled out bathed in the inner remains of their once physically cohesive hosts.

Based on the high diagonal angle of the missiles and minigun fire, it wasn't ground forces they were facing now. Some sort of aircraft had been called in for League support - the one thing standing between the canon and hostile takeover.

"We are pinned! Find a way to get the gunship off of us, we cannot establish visual contact! There must be heavy weaponry scattered about but we cannnot target it from here!"

The Envenomed

Battle BGM: Mefisto - Missing in Action

There was no silence to break but the sound of a carbine sliding between the heavy-duty tones of pounding artillery fire and barking orders. In a flash of a moment the crack of the compact weapon stabbed and cut through the disharmony plagueing the year as electromagnetic rounds slammed against the helmet of the towering armor. The first two rounds staggered him as the faint glow of its visor flickered amidst the sounds of whirring motors arguing against crackling electronics. A harsh garbled bark broke out before electronic vocal-filtration cut out and a rough voice boomed out:

"SCATTER, PERIMETER REPOSITIONING, GO!"

Redundant backup systems and hardened internal protective layers took the brunt of the blast but their limits were tested sorely by the well-placed rounds. The soldier sprinted back, footsteps crunching bramble and fallen branches, leaving deep imprints as he vanished behind a spray of wild retaliatory fire from the automata. He was fast but Alice's bullet was faster. Two near-invisible tungsten needles pierced nearly the exact same spot of both knees as the hefty trooper fell.

Not onto his armored face. He stumbled but moved fast enough to place his arms before him, breaking into a roll and half-suprpessing a pained grunt. The damage was agonizing but an augmented physiology combined with pain-suppressants and nano-repair capabilities was already kicking into overdrive, sealing the holes. Yet the effects of the wounds would stay unless properly treated, not only internally but forcing him into one of the cover of one of the larger trees.

At least, he would have tried if a spray of ulvath fire had not glanced his armor, his quick reflexes throwing him away into a roll. The gnarled bark erupted into a spray of shredded cloud as he fell onto his stomach, shoving and crawling across the ground as the CivSec tropers fired a series of bursts at the tarrhaidim's direction, spread out evenly among the large cargo crate like structures and the trees.

They did not stay static for long, taking measured potshots and it was clear they were meant to be personally guard their towering companion. That threat was positioned in the middle of a square formation. Yet while they focused on Ilshar, their robotic allies had broader aims.

Multiple LMG's opened up arrayed in a rapidly forming half-circle formation spraying off into the woods. Branches exploded into woodchips and fragments, leaves shredding into green mist and the airwaves flooded with the sound of crackling fury. It was hardly accurate in spite of the targeting capacities afforded but it did not need to be. With that many rounds they were bound to hit something; they were still trying to identify where the rest of the threats were and if unable, to keep their heads down with a deluge of fire.

Through the shimmer of the invisbility field, blurring as water ripples, multiple bullets pierced and flew then pinged with sparks against a large, formidable target. The dual-invisbility field of both voidhangers obscured the light of the sparks but only for so much. The advanced scanning capabilities of the automata when networked processed in mere blinks what trained soldiers might need a few seconds. It was not long afterwards that the four CivSec soldiers began falling back to hefty crates and reinforced structures in the area, sweeping their rifles as their scanners began to pick up thermal and electrical signatures with advanced vision modes.

Before any further information could be shared, the EMP grenade had already flown over the cacophonous fire. With its visor malfunctioning the power armored trooper had not seen it and its immediate subordinates were too busy taking pot shots at what they could make out from behind the blur of suppression fire. The casing of the grenade burst and with it a wave of semi-translucent purple-blue light washed out, engulfing four of the automata. The ocular lights blinked wildly as trigger fingers released, abruptly stopping most of the barrage and letting the smoke from their barrels hang over them - the entire left-end of their half-circle formation had been deactivated, the machines standing still or slumping to their knees as heads and arms twitched. Emergency reboot systems were in effect but they would take time to render them combat-ready once more.

One of the CivSec troopers, lining up a shot on the weakening invisibilty field abrutly dropped back into cover as the automata spared the EMP blast twisted their lower bodies, torsos facing the Envenomed as their legs walked back. Their fire came in bursts as they tightened their defences. The sound let-up enough that shouts and snapping volleys could be heard in the background; CivSec troopers moving between the trees further into the occupied area - one of them pausing for a moment, standing almost like the spitting image of a proper firing position from a training manual. A blink later and his upper body became a smoking mess, a u-pipe of melted meat and deformed metal bereft of the head, collarbone, and arms scattered around it and the blue afterglow of a rail-cannon's firing vector hanging in the air.

Bullets whistled then shrieked as they flew, slamming into occupation forces' armor, staggering some before punching clean through others. ZRF squad was advancing; slowly, cautiously, but for every volley sent their way a staccato riposte of single-shot bursts forced the scrambling UCL-backed forces into unfavorable positions.

"Let their flesh feed the Earth and our boots crush their bones!" A familiar, alien voice boomed over the coms as another rail-cannon discharge. At this short range, few things could withstand their raw power or the pain of a non-fatal shot. Someone screamed over the coms but it did not sound like one of the insurgents' own; too distant from the microphone-receiver and perfectly coordinated with the report of the banshee-scream cannon.

A far graver threat to the UCL allies remained, one that was amassing power in a hefty barrel. Yet whereas the distance between Echo and the scielto etherealist meant it could not detect the weapon charging up, this comparably shorter range engagement was another story. Mechanical heads buzzed and swiveled, correlating the visual report of bullets pinging off armor to target location as the active automata's sensors picked up distortions and build-up of energy in the air.

It was just in time for the power armor's HUD systems to regain most functionality.

A split second later, a lance of light slammed into where he had been hiding, disintegrating the crates before melting the reinforced exterior of the massive cargo container and hitting something vital within. The trooper sprinted away as a massive explosion rocked the battlefield, knocking over the front-most CivSec troopers and forcing the rear two to break cover, dodging flaming debris as they attempted to make their way to the power armored threat. One slung their rifle abruptly and broke from his squadmate towards one of the camo-netted tents. The other had tapped the power armored trooper, pointing towards the rapidly approaching unztadtlige.

In spite of the visible bluish-purple blood splattered on his knees and the last flickers of electronics self-repair on his helmet, the tallest of the enemy combatants immediately snapped to action. His surbordinate spread off to the right, obscuring himself from the sight of the whole squad as he dove behind one of the nearby tents. Echo's massive multi-legged bulk surged but nothing about the formidable supersoldier suggested the possibility of flinching. Falling into a crouched position, his carbine swing upwards and he flicked an switch. Already the platform's autocannons had torn and warped the torsos of two of the active automata, leaving them as burning wrecks.

While it left two immediately active, the other four were already beginning to reawaken for a total of six machine hostiles, metal limbs creaking as they began to run, their actions taking a new speed and aggression. A scan from those capable of it demonstrated that the power armored soldier was directly controlling them through some sort of neurocybernetic link yet he was clearly focusing on the biggest, most immediate, cyborg-coral threat. In the time it took for Echo to get into position, three rapid bursts of heavy duty AP -shells, the sort normally used for killing vrexul-level threats were spat out.

Encased in shells of low-light energy, they did not have quite the same violent impact as vrexul autocannon-rifle rounds. Yet they were easily the equivalent of anti-material rifle bullets, larger and retaining even more impact force. Upon collision with a target, the energy field and the internal battery that provided it would discharge forwards for additional explosive power, capable of deforming metal and dismembering meat beneath.

The first was aimed at the "head" of Echo, aiming to at least diminish or damage its vision with rounds that at these closer ranges could scar the armor of such alien threats. The second went a bit wild, hitting a few of the leg-joints on the platform's right side. Flashes of metal on metal and energy discharge marked successful hits but its third burst was cut short as a combination of on-board sensors and those of the linked automata alerted it to the fearsome weapon, firing another beam. It leapt out of the way into a roll but staggered as it recovered from it; the needle rounds that had gone through its legs had hampered its mobility, even if the enormous human was still far more manoeverable than his bulk suggested.

A smoking crater where he had been standing caused a nearby tree to tip over, nearly falling onto the League soldier before he quickly back-hopped, letting it slam down in front of him before staggering to steady himself. His weapon raised and he fired another burst of heavy duty rounds, this time fully automatic and aimed at Echo's "head" again.

"There are more reinforcements, I can see automata platforms activating deerp into the camp! There's signs of smaller gun-platforms activating! Force their commander back, we cannot hold them off for long!"

The careful, precise, almost deliberately spaced out single shot bursts and monstrous rail-cannon shrieks grew far more erratic and inconsistent. Sounds of multiple missile launch systems and rapid fire machine guns were beginning to fill the air. The ZRF forces were still forcing the rest of the artillery site's defenders to focus on them rather than their newfound allies but for how long was another issue.

The Envenomed

"You have the living tank. We do not. This makes you the perfect battering ram."

From beneath piles of rubble and blast-scourged earth, movement broke the sterility of the ruined battlefield. The area where one of Echo's drones had traced the targeting laser to came alive; light-refracting camo netting was tossed aside and moss-shrouded barrels revealed themselves, wielded by bipedal figures in fluctuating fatigues. Their very criss-crossing colour patterns shimmered from the appearance of mottled dirt and rubbled they were previously laying to into a mixture of murky smoke-grey and black-brown-grown mimicking the surrounding treelines and its many gaps.

There were at least 12 of them, rising to hunched posture. From beneath the shimmering camo-cloaks, a fabric-like armor almost like kevlar stretched against their torsos laced with dulled semi-metallic carapace plating. Above which six-spot eyed HUD-visors swept over the ruined area with a far, far wider field of view than a conventional human's sight.

There was no doubt about it that Intransigence funding and support was far more extensive in the region than even UCL news reports were aware of.

"CivSec defences grow heavier from this point onwards. We were under orders to guard the area, but this is too vital an opportunity to pass up on, now that we have proper firepower."

There were more however, hidden in the treeline; not rifles in their hands but miniaturized rail-cannons, slender and sleek but shoulder mounted. The shaped and edgeless metal of their bodies was contrasted by symbols of eel-like, serpentine creatures marked and imprinted across the length of these deadly weapons, wielded by armored fingers of long digitigrade legs cocked like predators ready to pounce. The slightly elongated heads covered in masks of shaped, cranially fitting composite metals, sleek and lined with one-sided transparent-alloy slits seemed to gaze at all yet also sharply in front of them. Each held their shoulder mounted-cannons with one long, multi-joined arm with six long, armored fingers, their free arms motioning to the notably shorter humanoid and tarrhaidim troopers to begin advancing.

"It had a heftier weapon we did. We arrived just in time to find nothing remained. We set-up a kill-zone with bio-sensors in the corpses, but it seems it's not returning. What this squad was doing, we know not. Autocannon-rounds. Maybe another vrexul squad. Maybe a walker. Gunship, even. With your unztadtlige ally however, its fangs will be blunted."

No doubt those four were the squad leaders and given how substantially more heavily armed and armored they were, this still known threat was a major priority.

"We will be concealed in the foliage; a direct confrontation is not our specialty. Once you punch into their lines and confusion is sown, our wrath will be known."

A sound like a muffled saw aggressively ripping up soggy meat emanated over the coms as the heavily armored aliens raised their arms and swung down, half crouching as they stomped in a circular formation; some tribal war-dance punctuated by the sound of predatory teeth clattering and muffled, chanted words spoken.

Its energy bled through the coms, any semblance of their rigid militancy vanishing yet reappearing as quickly as it had been discarded. Like fish who had felt the water's surface disrupted, they shot off soon into the surrounding trees, silhouettes stalking along the treeline as they advanced towards the artillery platform.

==========

The path had grown steeper but the presence of the artillery platform was ever-threatening. The trees had shuddered once, the ground quivering and buildings trembling. Now the foliage around them shook and thrashed as if by a sudden gust of gale force winds, the crumbling ground rocking itself, stone and loose debris tumbling about, and a wave of skin-tingling, uneasy power washed over them with every no longer distant report of its mighty blasts that nearly muffled anything they attempted to say to one another.

Much of the path the Envenomed squad had traveled on had vanished into the jungle again but that wasn't necessary. HUD systems, bioethereal sensory apparatuses, in-built scanners, even their own supernaturally attuned sensory capabilities - everyone knew it was close. Each time the weapons report made the world tremble, the plume of energy-discharge that burst above the treeline flashed warningly but with enough clarity now they were this much closer, there was no more room to really hide.

They were in deep jungle now yet it was hard not to feel exposed, not just from the bright glare of the energy-cannon's blasts but how busy the air itself felt. Voices could be heard, shouting commands indistinctly as a hum of pulsing, intonating density distorted and obfuscated anything discernible.

If they could hear that through the thunderous wrath of the artillery platform, it meant that they were close to both the target and its crew.

Another sound soon could be discerned. Gears whirring, uniform stomps, and the sound of dirt and rubble - it seemed perhaps there was a pathway again or some sort of road up ahead. Through the gaps in the foliage roughly 150 or so feet ahead, armored figures could be seen hurriedly moving through an area of cleared foliage. Some of them were definitely automata; rigid and tall, standing like statuesque products on display at some arms dealer expo before snapping their heads to wherever the hand of a blue-visored, heavily armored trooper pointed.

The former were familiar; they had seen a few of them back in the abandoned settlement, having run down from the hillside to assist but having been deactivated before they could have amounted to much. Yet this time, there were far more of them, at least six in total. The same LMG in their hands but this time it was yet unknown if they were controlled by a particular user or if they had some sort of autonomous capability.

They were dwarfed a few inches by a power-armored soldier.

Power Amored Infantry

No doubt about it, that was not the sort of armor a lesser post-Reckoning power would have access to. Too domineering in size, the brand new servos on its limbs almost profanely out of place in the jungle, and the modularity of its plating far too current generation compared to the heavily retrofitted armor of the CivSec infantry they had gunned down earlier. Its carbine looked almost too small in its arms but as a few of those very humans walked by, gesturing and pointing off down the clearing they stood in, it was clear just what they were up against.

The standard CivSec troopers were a general height of maybe 5''9 to 6''2 but this figure was at least 7''2, their armor a mottled darkened blue, splotced with green camo-patterns. Their carbine dwarfed their rifles, large and thick enough it looked as if hollowed out their rifles could be fitted inside of it diagonally. To say nothing of the barrel-drummed weapon magnetically locked to his back, even longer and larger if difficult to get a read on. The robots themselves were between the CivSec and likely League trooper in size, bringing the group to around 10.

There was a truck most of them were gathered around but past it they could see tripods with what looked almost like triangular communication-dishes made of diagonally pointed parallel rods, camo-meshed tents, and what looked almost like somewhat shrunken down but still enormous shipping crates covered in foliage and bramble.

The Envenomed team had not been spotted but it was outnumbered. While their previous foes had been trained by the League, the likely heavily augmented human while but a single soldier was nothing to be taken lightly. There was a reason they were a superpower; in terms of raw power and durability, augmented League troopers were said to be the most powerful of all the four hegemons.

Based on their body language, this one was not slacking and its high alert state was replicated increasingly in those under its command. They were expecting something and were getting prepared for a potential fight.

The Envenomed

"Starting to think your friend spraying like severed neck might be a liability. Maybe we should take them off of you."

A sound like a mag snapping into place played over the communicator-panel with a long but ultimately empty pause. No crack of the rifle nor spray of blood. Just the echo of submachinegun fire and cold tension, fading into the backdrop of distant battle with its volcanic roars of artillery. The desecrated and re-tooled cadavers rattled dry and crunchy; the thump of the heavy cannon the squad was sent to wipe out shook the entire area, silencing the last of the residual weapon report.

"Your tarrhaidim associate had the right idea. The unztadlige's cannons as well. All teams, stand down."

The surrounding wilderness remained quiet but the microforms had managed to pick up the traces of the sniper's fire - a pile of rubble covered by greenish-grey camo netting, one that stretched its fabric and shifted its colours ever so slightly to the various shifts in lighting throughout the smoky day. Far, far away from the area they had walked through, enought hat without patience and a sharp eye (plus visual manigifying capabiity) it would have remained a well-kept secret.

"You mentioned an objective. I presume it is large, stationary, and causing problems for us down in the valley." The voice continued as the sound of rumbling anti-gravitational engines neared. The thick silhouettes of some sort of aircraft could be seen among the clouds, gliding overhead the way the Envenomed squad had been heading.

"You may have an unztadtlige but they have something worse. You have seen the results; even a main battle tank would have trouble with this many vrexul. Yet you do have an unztadtlige-"

The communicator panel flashed red, green, then blue. The insurgent's voice fanished as its screen lit-up and the static vanished. Video-uplinks connected to the Envenomed squad's individual HUD's or equivalents as a flash of light lit-up the screen, revealing a scene of carnage and confusion.

VIDEO FOOTAGE FROM ALLIED FORCES

Scores of infantry, clad in armor far heavier than the insurgents they had fought alongside, surging forth amidst a creeping wall of fiery blossoms from scores of missiles and pulse-beam blasts raining from above. Heavyset automata, not military in origin but their civilian construction origins obscured behind reinforced armor and integrated heavy weaponry, stormed forth with blazes of rotary-cannon fire and shrieking trails of missiles before staggering or storming through scoring blasts of magnetically accelerated rounds and near-miss missile blasts.

The same squad they had seen in the foxhole viciously advanced, unfazed by the onslaught as augmented bodies snapped their weapons to distant targets shrouded in the haze of carnage and fire. Distant blasts where their rounds connected signaled their precision accuracy, flashes of shadowed bodies distorting and dismembering in the blaze speaking for their efficiency.

It was not long before they crashed behind the hole-gouged carcass of one of the walkers before one of them swung the camera to face themself.

"When this mission finishes pray that I do not take up your lack of disicpline with your handler!" They called out, crunching forth as their cover rattled, spraying bits of metal fragments that caused the camera to blur momentarily. "But you've finally picked up. Just in time, we're a little over halfway to our targets but resistance is stiffening. Are you anywhere near the artillery platform?"