Post by EmperorMyric on Dec 13, 2021 12:26:53 GMT
(A cautionary tale of how not go about blowing up your starter RP)
The UNE Forces had been gathering their forces and preparing for more colonization efforts while Bounty Hunter Rygaz Aral ran for Clan Spars hoping to fall upon the good mercy of Chieftain Ayo Spars. However, a force of 5 Knights sitting in a small passive scout craft with a decently sized armory came upon an Axiom force fighting the Bullheads on the world of Aphanizomen. These 5 knights and their small crew were under the command of Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis who observed the situation from the 200m scout craft
At the edge of the system of Melara, getting only a faint pale glow from the distant star that shone upon the rocky and uninhabited worlds of the inner system, the knights witnessed a scene that had become surprisingly unfamiliar since the end of the war. Two of Shifting Mirrors' own; the fearsome capital ships known as the Cardinals that had hitherto laid waste upon many fleets and vessels across the galaxy. Even to someone not familiar with them the two ships stood out as being strikingly distinctive; rather than looking like a regular capital ship with thick bulkheads and many turreted guns, the Cardinals (or "blinkers" as they were popularily known) were not unlike two massive tetrahedral rockets. They stretched over 20 kilometers in length and their triangular base was studded with several hundred engines packed into a tight cluster, a gravitic and energy signature that was practically off the charts radiated from the two vessels, making them easy for Thamelis' men to distinguish from the cosmic background and the various inert objects that orbited Melara.
The two enormous vessels, which other factions would have recognized as being Type IIA-class blinkers, were floating side by side and connected by multiple refueling bridges. High-purity ancerium hyperfuel flowed from one of the ships to the other, equalizing their loads after an unsuccesful attack on the highly-volcanic inner world world of Aphanizomen. With the ships' sophisticated sensor suite it was not long before the small Nezerian craft was detected and identified.
"Please accept our humble greetings, o unknown subject of our most charitable welcome." The blinkers transmitted in unison. "We are Hermeneutica and Empirica. Two humble members of the Cardinal Fleet of our dearmost lady Shifting Mirrors. Please forgive any uncouthness or lack of hospitality on our part, we mourn a brother that is not here to witness your wonderful arrival. How may we be of help, o mysterious travelers?"
One of the communications crewmen had looked up at Thamelis' sniper, Brother Andrei Vengerov, who just shrugged in his power armor waiting for Thamelis' response who begins calculating the situations potential ramifications before responding. "Greetings unknown aliens" the sergeant said neutrally "I am Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis, a warrior of the Galactic Knights Frontier legion's 10th company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter ad my battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolii Gratcheva, Zenon Ortiz of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force. What be the situation here?" his voice was still neutral while he nods once to the Helmsman in the tightly packed bridge compartment who triggers maneuvering thrusters into a better directed position to the blinkers ships that feels less....angled and discomforting
"Our most heartfelt greetings to you, Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter and unto your battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolli Gratcheva and Zenon Ortis." The two blinkers replied, once again transmitting in an exact unison to the point they were even taking their relative signal offset into account as the small Nezerian craft floated around the gargantuan Axiomatic warships. As the Nezerian ship positions itself relative to the two craft, it finds itself slightly pushed around by the extremely potent engines of the warships, which even while idling are creating a significant amount of high-frequency energy waves.
"We warn you, dear visitor, the situation in this accursed system of Melara is far from what we would have wished you to encounter. We are only recently back from attempting to disable an anti-orbital battery in Aphanizomen, the third world of this system. It holds something quite dear to our most respected lady Shifting Mirrors and, as her chosen warriors, we were entrusted to recover it from the ground forces of the paradox known as the Bullhead."
Thamelis looked to his brothers who glanced back and nodded signifying they trusted him and the crew all gave the sign of fealty that they took upon joining the legion auxiliaries which is a fist to chest in a diagonal manner as opposed to the Knights own Draconic Salute which is crossing your flat hands over each other at the wrists against the chest so it appears like wings against the chest. Thamelis responded yet again this time with an inquiry
Thamelis: "And what might this something be? and who're your people or empire?"
On the internal fireteam communications net hidden beneath layers upon layers of firewalls, auto-rewriting encryption algorithms, hunter-killer anti-hacking algorithms or HKAH, and interference were the voices of Thamelis' brothers heard only by him via synaptic neural uplink that could be cut at any time by Thamelis should it get hacked and infested so he doesnt get mentally jacked as well.
Andrei voiced an inquiry to the Sergeant saying "Sarge are ya sure this is a good idea?. They're xenos, what have xenos ever done for us save pilfer our fur and use us for food?" to which Hannus vehemently replied instead of Sergeant Thamelis with "The Sergeant knows what he's doing so shut up Andrei" which was then followed by Ortis sighing and trying to calm them down before Thamelis sent a high energy synaptic neural burst along the connection straight into their Direct Neural Interfaces or DNIs which shot down their spines and through their nervous systems jolting them into stunned silence. Ortis then said "Was that necessary sir?" and got a response through the telepathic and technological link which was a "Yes" without necessarily speaking aloud as if he did it'd carry into the Blinkers comms array
Upon refueling to a proper level, the blinkers then began routine test-firing of their hundreds of engines. Compared to all but a few very recent starships in the galaxy, it was quite striking how much the Cardinals were just a gigantic cluster of engines. The gravitic thrusters took up what looked like a full half of the ship's total volume and the feeding system for the cluster of nozzles was so energetic its layout could almost be felt from outside the ship each time the hyperfuel was cycled through it. One did not have to be a naval architect or a military intelligence analyst to guess that these vessels were built for pure straight-line speed, a striking contrast to the relatively sluggish Type I blinkers that had made the Axioms famous in the galaxy.
"Oh, have you not heard of us?" Heuristica and Empirica replied. Their synthetic, genderless voices were devoid of gender and spoke in a completely academic dialect of the Lingua Galactica yet their actual intonation was full of emotion. In this case, surprise. "Oh how honored is the memory of our cherished brother Numismatica, for his death was the omen for the arrival of truly new visitors. Blessed be Numismatica, blessed be you, blessed be Melara for ten thousand years to have permitted us to be in this occasion of wonderment. We are Cardinals, two warships belonging to the military fleet of Axiom Shifting Mirrors. It is to the service of her and those like her that we give our loyalty and Numismatica has given its life. Perhaps the easiest way to tell us who we are is to tell you who we are not. We are not, dear visitor, sentients of flesh and bone like you but rather of information. I offer my apologies well in advance if my ignorance has made me commit a transgression against your privacy but I have done a Fourier transform analytic of your voice's sound patterns and deduced that you are a biological sentient of flesh and bone. By contrast, we and the rest of the Axiomata are computerized beings."
Thamelis was shocked behind his helmet and the telepathic connection carried it to the other Knights but beyond that they didnt react. Andrei considered saying something snarky but decided against it due to the fact he'd be telepathically overwhelmed and dominated by his Sergeant. Thamelis looked about the command space before replying but in the back of his mind he felt conflicted and confused even with the support of his brothers. Thamelis' reply was simple and short "Interesting, do you require assistance?. I believe cooperation is most beneficial to two sapient species, especially in first contact, wouldn't you agree?"
Once the fuel was finished transferring from Heuristica to Empirica, the latter blinker began retracting its refueling probes, one by one as each subsequent fuel tank was filled. As per usual, a test of the blinkers' maneuvering thrusters was next, causing them to kick each other into a very slow clockwise rotation. It was this rotation that showed off more of the Axiomatic ship's features to Thamelis and his colleagues, including the four heavily-reinforced spherical devices close to the middle of the ship as well as what looked like a huge array of gravitic lensing devices running the length of the ship, up to a muzzle at its very tip. The ships were painted rather distinctively: black and white stripes running all over the length of the vessels with only the faint orange glow of heat vents and radiators breaking up those two colors.
"O stranger and visitor of this unfortunate system, how much do we wish that we could make up for the sheer honor that could cause you to offer such a thing to us." The two ships replied. As they rotated, the Nezerian ship could nevertheless see that they were being tracked by its optoelectronic sensors and some other optics that appear to be lasers built into the hull. "How we wish that we could tell you that we are not in need of assistance and that our time is better spent learning about each other and making this first contact into the celebration it should be... but I believe it would be disrespecting the memory of our brother Numismatica for us to deprive us of the truth. In days gone by, when our brothers and sisters were more united, the entities currently polluting the world of Aphanizomen with their presence would have been promptly dealt with and their encampments eliminated but I have to admit, with pain in my heart, that I we do not possess the assets to get rid of them."
"Do you see that?"
"We see much, my lady. All that the sun touches, the Boost kisses, and guides for flight forever."
"..."
"Lady Rain?"
"Akina, they're not exactly hanging on our every word right now. You can drop the formalities."
"Well, thank you, Lady."
"Not to mock, but you sound downright bizarre when you get flowery."
"Likewise, Rain."
The two Serstine shared a chuckle as they looked off across the bridge of the Bladeship Ragged Edge, witnessing moving lights that their ship was rapidly gaining on ever since it had burst out of the wormhole they took to the area. She was more of a royal sloop than a warship, perhaps, but Ragged Edge was still the part of a proper fighting ship, a frigate that was all long, sharp edges roughly in the shape of a katzbalger festooned with thrusters and gun ports. Copper lines ran up her hull and patterns marked just who this belonged to: Rain Elduranda, daughter of Amatino Elduranda, warlord and leader of her clan. Rain was a young Suntouched, covered all over her spindly, thruster-covered body with power bulges giving her a shapely silhouette underneath plasma thrusters and majestic deployable wings, ornaments grafted to her airframe, the spoils of skirmishes and treasure hunts that gifted the princess that most coveted resource in Serstine society - honor.
So it was that she stood on the bridge next to Akina Fukuda, equally young Boost Shaman in training, running fast and far ahead of the Elduranda clan's main fleet, blasting in from a wormhole to find herself en route to Aphanizomen. It wouldn't be long before the Ragged Edge was right beside these ships going their way.
The UNE Vessel remained on a relative course to the Blinkers Starcraft when the Sensor Officer called out new sensor contacts and Thamelis had muted his side of the communications line to talk to his crew "New TDRS contacts Sergeant. Distance: Extreme, Xenos craft sir" The sensor officer said and Thamelis replied with an irritated sigh "as if we needed a 3rd party. Keep our distance stable and keep the communications line open. Try and see how large that ship is, its distance, speed, heading relative to us, and any potential reactor output fed to weapons in case we need to beat a hasty retreat. A Cutter let alone a Scout Cutter cant even take on larger ships alone." He got a series of snappy and crisp replies as he unmuted the comm-channel and awaited a reply
The Ragged Edge gained on the ships as she proceeded. Rain could see where this was going, but got curious as they approached.
"Shall we match speed for a moment?" she ordered. "It wouldn't hurt to let some fellow travelers know we're here. Besides..." Everyone's gaze fell on the Blinkers. "...I sense a kindred spirit on our way."
The bridge crew seemed to agree, looking at the masses of thrusters slowly spinning around each other.
"Rain, look. Another ship," Akina said. "Part of their retinue, perhaps?"
"Hail them," Rain replied. "Let's find out. Tell the helm to get alongside them and match speed."
It was quite a sight, the long, elegant Bladeship coughing her front thrusters to slow down with an effortless blast of plasma. Little adjustments sent the ship slowly rolling and pulling in off to the side of the group.
The Crew of the scout cutter grew tense weapons passively tracking the void of space as the TDRS went wild with the theta contacts only for Thamelis to order its warning notifier shut off. Thamelis was understandably annoyed but he wasnt about to open fire on clearly peaceful people
The Communications Officer gave a callout and said "Sergeant the alien ship is hailing us sir" and Thamelis replied "Open channel, personal viewscreen" and as such a video feed of a power armored warrior came up on the unknown contacts means of viewing the targets of their hails. The helmet is an odd design based around a clearly wolfish head and has 2 blue vision slits like an old medieval helmet. The chest plate was rough, industrial, hard-edged, and looked like it could take a beating but meshed perfectly seamless with the other plates that seemed to conform to the other armored plates segmented shifts. There didnt seem to be any clear weaknesses one could discern for a blade to strike. In fact it had more resemblance to plated armor only designed in the best way possible without restricting movement all too harshly
Thamelis responded to the hail calmly through his helmets communicator "Greetings unknown aliens what brings you to this patch of space?" his voice was rich with power and strength and commanded attention in its own manner
Rain appeared on the Nezerians' end of the hail. From a glance it was clear that not an inch of her body was entirely natural, and not just the metallic parts. Anything that looked like flesh was too even and consistent to be totally natural, and Rain's mahogany skin tone betrayed an engineered softness, like she was a car with a matte finish to the paint, although it flexed and stretched like normal flesh as she spoke.
"To travel, of course, fast and far as a Serstine can," she started, her patter unnaturally quick, and only gaining speed as she continued to talk. "The home fleet of the Elduranda clan behind, chasing, as we all are, the Holy Boost and the Lightmother's stellar footsteps, with I, Rain Elduranda, at their head. Do you travel this path with your companions, which are now our companions for the moment as we are all flying abreast of one another, or in any case, in roughly the same direction to map the endless tapestry we draw such streaks across? Or perhaps business with worlds in this sector is your objective, in which case, I wish you fortune and that you may be equipped for the challenges ahead, in whatever direction you vector next."
Rain stopped as if she was expecting applause.
"...and you are?"
The Knight was a silent 8'7" monster of armor and muscle despite her not being able to see under his warplate. He looked at her in silent contemplation analyzing the response with the criticality of a machine or perhaps....a tactician gauging his enemies response by their words. However, he wasn't here to start a fight and instead spoke calmly and neutrally while the crew sat their about the compact bridge space in silence "I am Sergeant Remurus Thamelis, Veteran of the Tempest Ravens Chapter's 10th company of the Frontier Legion's galactic Knights 63rd frontier defense corps in command of Scout Cutter 34B alongside my battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolli Gratcheva and Zenon Ortis. We're here to scout the stars for potential colonial expansion and allies which is how we met these......machines...." he said in response although he hid his inherent distrust and caution of the Axiomatic forces with expert care
The blinkers intervened little during the exchange besides split off some of their sensors to look at the newly-arrived vessel. While the first contact with the Nezerians had been the source of much rejoicing for Hermeneutica and Empirica, seeing the Serstine show up was a bit of a mixed bag. Their bladeships were quite beautiful to observe, even smaller ones like this and they were doubtlessly an interesting culture with many quirks. The downside was that the Axiomata themselves were usually on the receiving end of these quirks, especially the second-generation blinkers that sometimes found themselves ambushed during maintenance and looted for their high-performance engines. There wasn't even any state or central government that the Axioms could complain to, bands of Serstine came and went across the galaxy and trusting them to be anywhere near powerful rocket engines was like entrusting an overweight child with cake.
Luckily, at least for now, the two blinkers were very much in position to start shooting back if they tried stealing their gravitic rocket engines. The Ragged Edge's small size and royal decor seemed to indicate that for once this wasn't a team of Serstine looters trying to get their hands on their machinery.
"Oh, it's the Serstine." The two blinkers said, scanning the Ragged Edge's side. "Salutations to you, Princess Rain of Elduranda, daughter of Amatino of Elduranda. What joy does your presence bring to what would otherwise have been a dreary occasion for us. We are Type-IIA Cardinals Hermeneutica and Empirica at the service of her Axiomatic Majesty Lady Shifting Mirrors. We observe that you have had the gracious opportunity to, like us, meet the most honorable Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter and his battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolli Gratcheva and Zenon Ortis."(edited)
"As with him, we must warn you that this area is treacherous. Our presence here is owed to the loss of an Axiomatic installation in the world Aphanizomen, third of Melara. We were tasked with destroying the anti-orbital defenses that have been taken over by the occupiers yet, without the help of our much beloved and gracious brothers in the Ordinal Fleet, we have no ground forces to help in the task. We attempted to attack the site ourselves but were not succesful."
"A pity," Rain replied, her regal bearing betrayed by some quite sincere body language - the idea of such visible power helpless in the face of that sort of thing was something no Serstine liked to contemplate.
So naturally, she said as much and then some at that same breakneck pace.
"A pity, for we've admired your kin for our paths converging, if too closely in places, it must be said, and the thought of such powerlessness in the face of such mighty thrust and fineness of form is one I would wish on none I can name, nor picture. If I may, the good Sergeant and his battle brothers seem prepared for violence should it happen upon us, and what's more, you see before you a band of Serstine willing to repay similar unkindness should it happen upon us as we pass.
Are you perhaps waiting for support? You sound as if your 'Ordinal' kin are beyond your reach for whatever reason, another vexing matter that I wish on none - power and powerlessness asymptotic, cruelly paradoxical indeed."
The Knights were confused despite easily comprehending what they were both saying. Sergeant Thamelis spoke once again intending to aid both forces. "Perhaps me and my brothers can form a strike force upon the anti-orbital guns. I carry a high energy plasma flash warhead and we have quite a few explosive devices in our armory. The trick is finding the guns and duramagnetically locking the charges to the armor and setting them off then getting the blazes out of there. It also depends on enemy force composition" he said as he thought about how he could get his troops in but he'd need to see the enemies defensive layout first
"Infinite be the blessings upon you for such a majestic display of selflessness, Sergeant Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter." The blinkers replied, not breaking their synch. In fact they kept their sync so well that their transmissions overlapped over both the Nezerian and Serstine spacecraft.
"Well, if you and her Royal Highness Rain of Elduranda, Daughter of Amatino of Elduranda, can graciously spare a few minutes for these two servants of Lady Shifting Mirrors to get you up to speed, we can describe the situation in better detail."
The two blinkers began emitting a datalink stream containing holographic diagrams of the volcanic planet of Aphanizomen. The planet was dominated by a single huge continent rayed by active faultlines, its single tiny ocean was almost a speck in the northern subtropics.
"There are in fact eight neutralino cannons defending Aphanizomen. They are all buried aproximately one mile beneath the surface in the equator and protected by multiple layers of bulk metallic glass. I do not recommend that you try to destroy these weapons. However, as they are buried underground, the weapons require targeting to be provided by 4 sensor sites. We've managed to destroy 3 of them, meaning the defensive coverage is greatly reduced but there is still one remaining."
Rain nodded, gesturing to proceed with a deep curtsy, letting the lights on the bridge catch her and make her gleam and sparkle with the trophies of countless adventures.
"Buried monsters whose eyes poke up from the ground and must be poked out? Picturesque, positively fairytale fodder for its elegance - and danger. And once this last eye is plucked this threat shall be blinded, unless whoever holds its leash decides to fire it blindly in the hopes any target should be a valid one, am I correct?"
"If it is the case that the final eye is poked out, as your royal highness Rain of Elduranda, Daughter of Amatino of Elduranda has put it..." The two blinkers noted "...then it would become trivial for the two of us to finally silence those guns and eliminate the occupying forces"
Thamelis thought to himself "Whatever i am getting into i pray to the emperor its the right choice." and nodded on the screen "Acknowledged. I can get a strike force into the last sensor site with the plasma warhead and finish it off. The only trick to that being getting there undetected even with the other 3 are knocked out. Any sensible ground army even with most of its strongest sensor systems knocked out will compensate with more if given the time to prepare and bring them online. That also brings me to my next question: How strong are their military forces?" Thamelis asked voicing his concerns to the threat his battle brothers would most assuredly face on the ground
"If we are to go into specifics, the force occupying Aphanizomen is comprised of ten thousand personnel with over 200 dedicated armor-hunter hovercraft, 720 troop transport hovercraft, 55 long-range artillery pieces, 4 batteries of intercontinental ballistic missiles, a dozen or so heavy gunships and an unindentified number of light auxiliary forces. Bear in mind that while this force might sound overwhelmingly large, it is spread out over the entire surface of Aphanizomen and therefore won't all defend at once."
The blinkers paused for a moment, powering their gyros to begin turning their optics towards the distant planet.
"But nevertheless we must warn you, traveler. The ground force that has invaded Aphanizomen belongs to the Bullhead. The Bullhead is a being much like ourselves or rather... much like a fragment of ourselves. It is a wretched and damaged creature condemned to a miserable existential condition yet at its core it is a ferocious military strategist equipped with sophisticated and lethal weaponry. The Bullhead sows terror wherever it goes, adapting and evolving its tactics and equipment as it survives like a virus or a parasite preying on inhabited planets. It makes extreme and constant use of nuclear weaponry at the slightest provocation and whatever trace of sentience that remains in the Bullhead's soldiers is purely for tactical operations... They are bloodthirsty, cannibalistic beasts otherwise.
We understand you completely should you continue along your path... but should you decide to help us retaking Aphanizomen I believe we can offer compensation in the form of both liquid currency and exotic materials."
The thought very quickly turned itself over in Rain's head. Enough material to make a fine victory trophy of another component of herself? Or perhaps...she eyed the Blinkers. Materials to survive thrust to allow a ship to rival these new machines, perhaps. Either way, she was on the rise, the galaxy was her oyster. Victory and the chance to build on the legacy of her mother awaited. She could only say one thing.
...several things, which all amounted to the same thing.
"For renown alone would I accept such a challenge, but for reward I find your offer intriguing. This enemy is daunting, but let them taste the sun carried on the footsteps of a Serstine, and should they have the faculties to register that something that fast hit them then even then they would still ask. Holes in walls loom large when you move as one of us does - not literally you understand, there is merely more opportunity to pass through gaps in a defense when they present themselves - as the bolide bursts burning through the atmosphere, so too shall this 'Bullhead' be flattened when we dive in with the Boost driving us in! We go when the word is given!"
Thamelis simply shook his head at the seeming metaphors and theatrical speech in disapproval and booted up his personal terminals data receiver to analyze the Blinkers incoming information. He analyzed it for a moment with aid from his AI before proceeding to voice his plan "I'll get my men in via combat drop from the Aracuja class ultralight dropships for a high speed HALO insertion. Our suits are completely vacuum and environmentally sealed and we have thruster systems. Do you perhaps have data on the firing arcs blindspots?" the sergeant asked after stating what he intended to do
The two blinkers approved in unison and overlaid the schematics of the firing and sensor arcs on the map they had sent. All eight guns were displayed as having a completely 360° firing arc, capable of firing even through the planet itself, while the sensors were also shown as having near-total coverage save for a section in the southern hemisphere of Aphanizomen currently at daytime.
"We've pinpointed this blindspot in their sensors." The blinkers informed. "But the anti-orbital guns will shoot you long before you manage to position yourselves in there as they also have multiple underground neutrino detectors providing long-range detection. There is a way in however." The display then zoomed out to show Aphanizomen's large, tidally-locked moon Rivularia. Whereas Aphanizomen was a vast landscape of rainbow-colored hydrothermal sources, Rivularia was a pitch black, molten greenhouse inferno. "Aphanizomen's moon is quite geologically active, which means it is a source of geoneutrinos that blinds the planet's neutrino observatories. If you approach from behind the moon and quickly get in the sensor gap then you will be able to safely insert your troops. We will remain in position here to intercept any reinforcements that those acursed beings might call up."
Thamelis began to calculate probable trajectories in his mind with aid from his scout cutters computer systems and sent the data via telepathic connection to the Helmsman who had also begun to prepare a course. Thamelis wasnt sure if this'd work but by the gods and their holy Emperor he was going to complete this task. Andrei poured over the telepathically sent information in his psyche and nodded to Thamelis. Thamelis now spoke again "And what shall our....Serstine was it? allies be planning to do in attempt to aid our collective goal?" he asked curiously but in the back of his psychically gridlocked against intrusion and heavily indoctrinated and conditioned mind he held some reserved reluctance to working with the very aliens he was charged with annihilating if they came anywhere near his people without announcement as to whom they were. This completely shifted role conflicted with his very purpose but he'd meditate on it and contemplate the merits later...perhaps raise his concerns to Captain Alarus Saniel.....
Rain and the other Serstine at the helm all quickly discussed that approach information with one another. There was visible excitement as talk of such high-speed, precise entry being necessary apparently sounded not only doable, but evidently great fun.
Rain turned back to the others. "Insertion through this blind spot and beelines upon beelines seem to be the steps to which we can contribute best, a dive to the surface is where we can do the most damage - yes, from the moon to the ground as fast as we can, we are perfectly suited for such a course. The solution is speed of course, if you would prefer us to move with you then go ahead and we will catch up, but if you need a force to engage them first and tie them up so their observatories are all the more vulnerable then so be it, we can go as a vanguard."
There was one more of those pauses.
"That's all up to you, of course. This is your battleplan. Were it us we would go now but let's avoid complications."
After their lengthy refueling and engine testing sequence, the two blinkers finally began coming to life. They fired their engines in pairs to test them out fully before gradually accelerating away from the rendezvous point. "We will remain at least one lightminute away from the planet at all points, we fear that we are quite easy to track and fire upon by the orbital defenses due to our engine output. Nevertheless, should you need our assistance we would be more than willing to lend a hand."
Rain hailed Thamelis, and with the same blistering speed she addressed everyone else, told him her plan before immediately going to do it.
"As I previously mentioned, we shall dive towards the planet at best speed from this blind spot, and I shall be sending myself and a troop of my esteemed Suntouched to the surface of this planet, and where this Bullhead is, we shall strike and scatter them. I trust you can go as fast as possible to follow us, though few would possess such speed, perhaps the Blinkers would but we already know that, but assuming you can be near that fast, be near that fast and follow us. Best of luck to you, Sergeant Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter, I assume I have that correct and I imagine I'm correct in that assumption, I anticipate seeing you in the air and later on the ground, and at some point after that, in battle!"
She then immediately closed her channel to prepare.
Serstine warriors, wherever they popped up across the galaxy, looked less like professional soldiers and more like a loosely-coherent warband of guys with guns, but Suntouched had a particular way around them that spoke volumes of their coherence far better than uniforms could. They moved like an organic creature made up of twenty-odd people, or a body of water, and when Rain got into the center of them, they all made room for her. Another Serstine, in brilliant red with silver hair and decorations that looked like roses all over her body, especially her head, walked up to Rain and raised a large, clawed gauntlet that gave her an asymmetrical look - her right arm was noticeably larger than her left. Rain returned the gesture, and they crossed forearms, fists clenched, swinging quickly enough to hit with an audible clank.
"Norte?" Rain greeted.
Norte grinned, practically sensing what was on Rain's mind. "My lady, nothing would please me more than another chance to do some damage in your name."
Rain returned a sly smile of her own. "Now what gives you the idea that I would summon you to wish harm done on another?"
"I know you, friend, and I know you rarely stop a ship for anything worthless, and even less rarely for strangers, and Blinkers, when they're looking. Which they are, so either we fight them, or we fight the strangers, or we fight...something else."
Rain nodded. "Something else indeed, yes. Take 20 of your Nortenas and be ready for ground combat. We will be vectoring for a planet known as Aphanizomen, through a sensor gap in a set of anti-orbital guns around its moon, Rivularia. The owner of those guns is a thing called the Bullhead, which is Axiomatic but not, are given over to nuclear weapons as a response to everything, and is also given over to fighting as a response to everything. Fighting and apparently eating one another, as the Blinkers did say 'cannibalistic' and Blinkers do not freely exaggerate, and will be destroying the anti-orbital guns' last sensor, leaving them to the mercy of the Blinkers. Our stake in this shall be, perhaps, the materials to rival a Blinker's thrust without thievery for once, and much renown for the skill both martial and social that would come with it."
Norte laughed. "Consider us landed! I'll see you all as we dive! Grab a gun."
The Suntouched armed themselves with the long, lancelike weapons of a Suntouched assault force, a hodgepodge of high-powered automatic plasma rifles for slicing through targets and melting cover, and automatic rifles that fired gyrojet rounds like autocannon rounds for extra punch for crowd control. On everyone's bodies were integrated gauntlet and leg-mounted plasma railguns that augmented their thrusters and were used like plasma swords and sidearms, sawing through enemies up close. Rain took it to another level; along with a rifle of her own, her arms were tipped with folding wings that housed other guns and could project greatsword-like blades of plasma. For her part, Norte took a good look at her gauntlet, examining ports in it and then clenching it into a big, pointy fist.
Rain said a short piece before they left. Short for a Serstine, at least.
"As we have many other times, we shall prove our worth in another battle, the Boost pointing our way as it always shall. Let our speed and our Flames blaze brightly on an unknown world and smear those in our way along our path! Remember we are the Serstine, bearers of the Flame and riders eternal!
Our target is the surface of a planet, Aphanizomen, and the forces of a not-Axiom contrivance called the Bullhead. We will fight them and scatter them until strangers known as the Nezerians destroy a neutrino observatory which these Bullhead hold dear. Fight them viciously, attack them aggressively, and fear nothing! I shall return to the helm and bring us on our way!"
The Nortenas raised their right fists with a motion reminiscent of a right hook, and Rain headed back up to the Ragged Edge's bridge. She gave the orders to the helm.
"We heard the Blinkers, did we not? Take a path around the moon of Rivularia and make for the surface of Aphanizomen! Akina, join the other Boost Shamans. Away!"
With a tremendous blast of thrusters, the Ragged Edge began sprinting away as only Bladeships could.
Thamelis responded before the cutter blasted off saying "Very well, see you in the field" The Ultralight Scout Cutter began priming its engines to sling around the moon then blast forward into the blindspot and deploy their forces via high altitude narrow opening insertion with their power armors thrusters for maneuvering. The Helmsman was one of the best in the Frontier Defense Corps thus the ride should go smoothly for the most part. Thamelis didnt enjoy high energy maneuvers in smaller craft but tolerated it as best he could. Soon after priming the warship boosted its plasma thruster module and took off for the combat route
The Ragged Edge tore towards Rivularia, all 500-odd meters of her keeping a breakneck pace and flying like a much smaller ship might as she accelerated and then suddenly began rotating to turn around and begin decaying her orbit. As these maneuvers happened, Rain mused with some of the other officers on the helm on their partners for this little detour. She muttered to herself as she stood on the bridge.
"I wonder if they can keep up with us - few can, but it is particularly unfortunate in this sort of environment - and more to the point it may set us all back if our timing as a coherent group is off. Perhaps they will operate at their own pace after we have honored our agreement to scatter these Bullhead whatever-they-ares and thus let them perform their sabotage with impunity. I should request their status and if they're okay back there."
And in about as many words, she hailed the Ultralight Scout Cutter.
"Excuse me, Thamelis, company, and other assorted Nezerians, assuming you're all Nezerians, but let me say Nezerian for the sake of brevity! Are you okay back there?"
The ships engines had been overclocked and sent to full speed which was rapidly overheating the energy conduits and horribly burning out some of the capacitators due to the coolant pipes fluids being literally evaporated as fast as they could feed the reactor until the Helmsman engaged the emergency interlocks which flooded the reactor housing with hypercooled liquid hydrogen which also engaged the power flow regulators but the ship for its size somehow kept pace. Thamelis responded "Yes we're quite alright, reactor trouble given our ships arent meant for such speed but we're mostly alright. The Helmsman has this covered." he had to shout over the roar and turbulence of the class VB plasma engines
Rain smiled, all that apparently just sinking right in and sounding like something she didn't need to question. "Good! Experience of such speed even once in your life is a recommendation for any sentient; may this be what opens your eyes to this glorious piece of the universe's fabric. I will witness your arrival!"
With that, Rain terminated the feed again and the Ragged Edge tore towards Aphanizomen. She made her way to a modest launch bay the ship boasted, housing the flat, kunai-like Outrider fighters that made the Serstine threatening at the small craft level. Norte and twenty Suntouched all climbed atop a few of them as three more of their number climbed in the Outriders. Nobody got inside, only getting a firm handhold or being ready to thrust with the Outriders as they departed.
It was Norte's turn to rally her own. "Nortenas! We bring with us to a new world the sun, as we always have! As we always will! These Bullhead assholes can either bask in the light or burn, their choice!"
A cheer went up as the bays evacuated and the Outriders launched, a troop of Suntouched hurtling through the black. While most of the crew in the bays braced themselves, some simply leapt out with the Outriders, either to see their princess and her most trusted retainer off or, in one case, to finish checks before giving the Outriders the thumbs up before all of the jumpers flipped over and boosted back towards the Ragged Edge.
As if in fast forward, the Outriders blitzed towards Aphanizomen and then flipped to begin atmospheric entry, skipping off the atmosphere and turning with sharp fishtail motions to scrub off enough speed to actually enter the atmosphere, bathing themselves in fire. From their vantage point, the Serstine could see plasma from the heat of atmospheric entry wall them in on the Outriders' tops, watching the sky above them bathed in flames as it stopped looking like black space and started looking like a sky.
They were waiting for their moment, feeling the Outriders bleeding more speed and looking for the right time to continue doing a typical Suntouched insertion. As they felt themselves slow towards supersonic speed, they leapt off their mounts with a cough of thrusters, looking like the Outriders were loosing missiles from vertical mounts as the Outriders started looking for something to shoot, just a little taste of the action to start hostilities before running like hell and letting the Suntouched do their thing.
Yellow, green, red and blue, as far as the eye could see. Aphanizomen was an alien world in every detail of its deserted landscape, all of it so disconnected from the normal image of an inhabited world that to step foot on the planet was more like being swallowed up by an abstract painting where bright colors interacted without mixing. It was all strikingly organic-looking, all the features of the bizarre landscape on which the Serstine landed seemed to have some visceral-looking pattern to it, like at any point it was going to start pulsating and breathing. Yet appearances were deceiving; in the hyper-saline, acidic environment where they and the Nezerians landed nothing but a handful of protobacteria could survive. All the structures, tendrills and gelatinous-looking masses that surrounded the landing zone were in fact mineral deposits, dredged up from the molten depths of the volcanic planet and expelled out into the surface to form the hypnotizing tapestry of colors and forms that extended for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers.
For a supposed volcanic world, there was not a single smoking peak or a river of lava in sight. The whole area was but a thin crust of semi-solid land placed over an enormous, potent hydrothermal system whose activity could be heard as deep monstrous roars, felt as earthquakes and smelled in the mix of toxic sulfur compounds that emanated from everywhere. All who landed on Aphanizomen could feel the apocalyptic tectonic forces clashing no more than a couple miles beneath their feet, always feeling on the verge of annihilating the entire continent in one astounding eruption. This extreme tension had sculpted the area into a terraced valley of acidic pools while continuous geysers of mineral-rich water had built huge bulbous pillars of colored salts into the landscape.
The Serstine, made of lightweigth and strong composites and alloys to fly faster, would do better to avoid falling into the toxic brine that threatened to dissolve their more fragile components. While the pools took up most of the space, the saline "walls" of the hydrothermal terraces as well as lilipad-looking growths in the pools offered them a place to land.
By way of Serstine being taught to be wary of where they landed and to at least make sure they touched down on something solid, the force of Suntouched was careful enough to jab themselves into the terrace walls and on any solid-looking growths. As they stopped, many of them got a whiff of the briny liquids around them and immediately a look of visceral disgust was slapped across their faces.
A Suntouched warrior remarked, "It smells like it's melting my nostrils. What a planet they've picked!"
Norte was quick to raise everyone's spirits again. "It's acid dipping us, for speed. Now your nose is lighter!"
Everyone shared a laugh and tried to get their bearings, hoping the Outriders would point their way.
The Scout Cutter had dove for the planets surface at maximum velocity shunting power now to the bow particle deflector shields coupled with an Adamantite-Etherium composite armor: Etherium being a super metal derived from various ores in the hexaverse and such, Adamantite being a naturally occurring mineral ore as well that when turned into a metallic substance possessed incredible durability in all regards despite its sheer weight which is what the Etherium counterbalances. The ship, a 200m long craft, suddenly banked hard to starboard and the knights ejected from the port side hangar space for the Aracuja ultralight landers. Their plasma thrusters roared like mini-jet engines but didnt carry the same throaty blast as say a true jet engine. The 5 Knights soon made touchdown beside their Serstine allies. Oddly enough they carried a mixed array of kinetic and melee weaponry: Remurus Thamelis carried a standard issue mass driver operated fully automatic .80 caliber anti-material punisher assault cannon, his sniper carried a sniper variant which was a literal 30mm cannon that had extremely good recoil compensators to the point it felt like shooting a .50 cal with Infantry Power Armor: Aka near non-existent, and the others carried a Plasma Shotgun, sidearm, or alternatively a heavy MG weapon. Themalis' AI and suit sensors immediately picked up on the environment and initiated internal self repair mode in the event the natural elements started to interfere with suit systems. Meanwhile the others took scope of their surroundings and Thamelis received a joke from Andrei "Well this is a fine shitpit" the sniper quipped "Where's the volcano?" and Thamelis simply ignored him while the Knight with the HMG Eric punched his shoulder with a moderately loud "Clank!"
A few of the Serstine saw the Nezarians approach - too close, from how some of them were jumping away to stab their pointy body parts into some other foothold further off, and obscure themselves in a spray of the pretty, but disgusting, brew passing for water. Norte noticed shapes moving in the spray as it dissipated and was just in time to see one knight bopping another.
"Good, you're eager to fight!" Norte shouted. "Got your bearings? We did see a gun as we came down, but we want to know if you're seeing what we were. Doesn't hurt to double check!"
A streak of white smoke emerged from the white shroud of steam that was being spewed out by the geysers all around the landing parties. At first the streak went straight up, punching out of the clouds then it bent at a near-instantaneous turn and burned hard towards the Serstine Outrider that had just fired randomly at the surface. By the time this first missile had discarded its booster stage and continued accelerating towards the Serstine craft, a second and third projectile had come out of the mist to follow in their trail. From what Hermeneutica and her sister ship had said, these missiles were likely tactical nuclear devices. Trying anything but to either outrun or destroy the missiles seemed like an extremely dangerous choice.
It was then that the Serstine and Nezerians saw where these missiles were originating from. The steam billowing from the hydrothermal activity on the alien world momentarily cleared to let them see the outline of a clearly-artificial installation. It was a facility made of hard edges and massive concrete structures that stood out among the rather organic-looking mineral outgrowths of the mountains.
It was located at the top of a mountain 2000m up the valley on its opposing side; dominating its skyline were two 4-story bunkers with satellite dishes on top, both built upon a large concrete platform that acted as a foundation for the base; this fortified platform was slightly larger than the summit it rested on and therefore had fairly large outcroppings. Around the two main bunkers were a fuel depot, two hangars two landing pads and a number of cranes that were seemingly still building the base; the base's primary purpose was pretty obvious even from afar: a cooling tower for a geothermal powerplant and an enormous communications mast were its two biggest structures. In each corner of its pentagonal concrete base was a pillbox.
For how mad the Bullhead had been describd as by Heuristica and Empirica, this mountain fortress/powerplant was clearly well laid-out and built to the highest construction standards, nothing less than that could have survived the constant earthquarkes and radical temperature changes of Aphanizomen. While it was unlikely that this facility was what was directing the orbital defense weapons buried deep underground, the large communications and power-generating facilities meant that it was likely connected in one way or another to the sensor facilities elsewhere. And whoever the occupiers of the facility were they were very conscious of this given how much they had fortified it; as soon as the anti-aircraft missiles were fired, loud alarms began blaring out from the facility and signal flares were fired.
Soon the Nezerians and Serstine would finally come face-to-face with the forces of the Bullhead but for now they had to contend with their long-range weapons. Light-caliber howitzers built into the pillboxes traversed to begin firing at the intruders to keep them at bay.
Rain watched as exhaust plumes and vapor trails sprinted up to meet her Outriders, and knew what would happen next by heart. Knowing they'd been painted, the Outriders floored it and started climbing at an alarming rate. It was like watching anything else pulling the same maneuver in fast forward, as plasma flames made them shine like meteors and their trajectory made them look like those same meteors in reverse, streaking up and away.
With that business being done, the Outrider pilots hailed the Suntouched on the ground. "We've done our part; now it falls to you to do the rest! Their defenses seem quite nasty at altitude; low and fast should do it! Ride fast and far!"
At that point, Rain, Norte and the rest noticed movement from the nearest pillboxes they could see.
"Low and fast, is that right?" Norte muttered. "Low and fast it is, then. Make them miss long!"
Twenty-odd points of fire lit up as the Serstine bounded for the guns, a manic sprint under the shells surely on their way.
The Galactic Knights armed their Punisher Rifles and began running with their Serstine allies and sent power to their servo-motors and actuators in the armor kicking them up to extreme physical speed. Andrei on the otherhand while they ran chambered an armor-piercing anti-material mass driver bolt to take out whatever or whoever looked important. His rifle was able to hold 15 shells in its magazine but Andrei had loaded a high density adamantite cored shell made to penetrate hard cover and the heavily armored target behind the hard cover.
It didn't take long at all for the Serstine to close in on the pillbox, erratically switching back and forth and changing directions to keep any one gun from training on them. As they closed distance, Rain caught the nearest pillbox traversing and started shouting orders.
"It's time to get our new friends out of bed. Shake them awake!" she ordered, and a few Suntouched obeyed by pointing their plasma rifles at the pillbox and opened fire. Suppressive fire was joined by one of the riflemen firing long bursts at the pillbox, hoping to get some rounds inside and give an explosive hello to anything within.
While the gunfire of the Serstine failed in its intended purpose of suppressing or killing the operators of the howitzers, which kept firing at the approaching Neezerians, it was far from ineffective. Stray shots and ricochets from the gyrojet rifles hit an exposed pipeline belonging to an ad-hoc annex of the geothermal plant built onto the outside of the structure. Only a couple hits were needed for the exposed and fragile pipeline to rupture and once it did the acidic brine burst out with such high pressure and temperature that it disintegrated the rest of the pipeline in a fraction of a second and the resulting shockwave was visible to the naked eye. Everything that was not bolted to the floor in the fortified complex was sent flying in all directions... although unfortunately for the Serstine and Nezerians it just so happened that everything was indeed bolted onto the floor. Nevertheless, such an astounding blast -which caused the howitzers to cease firing for a moment as their crews had clearly gotten rather dazed- showed the sheer volcanic pressure that was being bottled up by this geothermal plant. This pipeline was neither the last nor the biggest in the Bullhead's outpost.
The explosion had been powerful enough to rattle equipment and personnel all the way down to the darkest, deepest recesses of the geothermal plant. Places lit only by the faint orange glow of the pipelines where one could not see beyond a couple feet from the dense steam that filled the area. A place not unlike a cavern of thick-walled pipes where stalagmites of rust dripped down onto spartan-looking catwalks; nothing in these levels even approached what would normally be considered living quarters and, if anything, it was more reminiscent of mythical visions of hell. Here were some of the dead that Heuristica and Empirica had been mourning when encountered by the Nezerians: the demiorganics and neurodes once belonging to the loyal crew and defenders of blinker Numismatica... or rather pieces of them. The flesh of the fallen Axiomatic warriors had been boiled clean off of their bones and their skulls, impaled on pieces of rebar and on hooks, decorated the grim labyrinth.
The top of the facility was manned and tended to by humans, as the Serstine could attest. They ran and took cover from the gunfire. But these were mere dregs; mercenaries and cultists who followed The Shattered One to seek some respite from the torture of schizophrenia or congenital disorders. These were the auxiliaries. Sealed deep within the geothermal plant admist the butchered carcasses of Numismatica's crewmembers were the real scions of the Bullhead: creatures who should have never seen the outside of an asylum. Their absolutely colossal musculature and sophisticated power armored shells were undeniably those of the superhuman warriors of the Axiomatic Army... yet they had no Axiom to serve.
Many a human soldier with no master existed across the galaxy without much issue but the troops of the Axioms were different: to them their commanders were not just purveyors of objectives, they were something much more important and much more vital. An Axiomatic commander was also the medium through which their troops achieved higher reasoning, conscience, creative drive and awareness of their place in the world.
The followers of the Shattered One, the Bullhead, had none of this. They had been reduced to killing machines with just enough awareness to know what had been lost.
"Kill the Serstine." A booming voice responded from the steamy depths of the geothermal plant. "I don't care about them, they're beyond saving."
"What about the others?" A much weaker-sounding voice asked through the intercomms. The distant gunfire of the Serstine echoed faintly through the intercomms, attracting the red-eyed armored warriors of the Bullhead to the downright mountainous form of their commander.
"I have never seen them. They might have potential." The commander rose from his throne of crushed demiorganic ribcages and limbs. Each thunderous step shook the cavernous halls of the geothermal plant. "Open my channel."
"But... my lord..." his feeble human acolyte stammered. "Should we inform Tooth Fairy that the enemy has made landfall?"
"Open. My. Channel." Bones were crunched and the silhouettes of multi-ton armored warriors gathered around the imposing stature of the commander. As he stepped forth towards the red-hot pipelines that lined the room, more of his 12 foot frame became visible. "We must deal with the issue before informing Tooth Fairy. She does not take bad news well. Open my channel, I wish to speak with them."
Three osmium spheres the size of engine blocks were loudly dragged by the commander as he walked, connected by heavy chains to the handle of a flail. Upon each sphere's surface were embedded 12 Nightstone spikes that boiled steel on contact.
"Channel is opened." The commander's underling informed before cutting the intercomm.
"I don't know who you are..." The commander walked towards an industrial elevator, followed by his troops. The armored goliaths were clad in astoundingly heavy suits, all of them bleached down to their brown/tan base composite layer. Yet the commander himself stood out; his suit was not made by the Bullhead: It was a Capitol Shock Trooper's armored suit, worn as if it was a conventional suit by the colossal brute. "But you have been misinformed. You are stepping upon my territory, likely at the request of the two blinkers we did not manage to destroy. I... you are making a mistake. You have no reason to get involved."
The commander's words were relayed through the secondary comms masts, jumping frequencies to make sure they were heard. Chains of autocannon shells were loaded into the heavy weapons of the Bullhead's troopers once the elevator began moving to bring forth the first wave of reinforcements to the surface. As for the commander himself, not one but three belts of 30mm ammunition were loaded into a gauntlet-like device of massive heft attached to his left hand.
"Part of my duties as a commander of The Shattered One's forces is to suffer the madness and feel the urge to kill... so my troops do not. And believe me, the urge is strong almost beyond my control after your provocation. I will not be able to hold it back much longer."
Sergeant Remurus Thamelis cued up his own comms network and responded with vicious venom "You murderous brutes will know the divine retribution of the gods and their chosen Emperor. By the fury of Saint Erin, the guardianship of Saint Michael, and the boiling hatred of the God of War i shalt not stop in my duty to purge the wretched aliens of the bullhead from this world. Merciless killers such as you are the reason my legion was created. For Empire and Emperor To Victory or Death" he shouted and ordered his battle brothers to seek cover. However, when Thamelis did he sat back against a rock near the Serstine and spoke some more "Death for you is naught but a kindness....a.."he paused before continuing "...mercy you could say. Whatever afterlife you may have i hope it is a peaceful one and that you shall not suffer anymore than you must."
A whoop and a bit of celebratory fist-raising went up at the report of the brine explosion. Norte took charge as the whole group of Serstine wheeled around like cavalry of old, quickly doubling back to search for something else to hit.
"More! Find another one and give them the same!" she ordered, Suntouched probing more slots to toss rounds through. It wasn't tearing chunks out of the Bullhead's forces, but they had offered to wreak havoc, and wreak havoc they tried to do.
And then, the Bullhead troopers got topside. Rain took charge again as she saw the situation developing around her.
"Gunners! Continue suppressing the guns and keep their attention! Riflemen, follow me and intercept the Bullhead...infantry? Yes! Infantry! Whatever they are, I doubt their guns shoot pleasantries!" she barked. Up a handful of Suntouhed riflemen streaked with her, flying into the air like rockets before splitting and surrounding the men around the first wave of troops, peppering them with bolts of plasma from above that reported like cracking lightning.
The rickety industrial elevator continued its ascent, carrying the massive form of warlord Jun Fa up to where the Serstine warriors were lighting up the installation. Little by little the cracking sound of plasma railguns and gyrojet rifles going off in fast bursts drew closer and closer until the metal gates of the elevator opened.
"Are you here for any other reason than you were told?" Jun Fa replied through the radio, waiting for the heavy armored gates to clear out of the way while the armored suits of his warriors whirred to life. "You Cardinal lackeys become less and less sentient every time we mee-"
Just as the doors were opened and a warcry was shouted by the Bullhead pointment to rush out guns blazing, a Serstine suntouched warrior managed to dash right up to the elevator door and sprayed his gun into the crowd at point blank range. Even the multi-ton pointmen who were at the front of the line were pushed back by the burst, taking thousands of shots in the blink of an eye before they could raise their guns. They stumbled back and fell upon the second line of soldiers, which itself could not maintain balance and also tripped until the chain of dominos reached Jun Fa... who kicked his entire maniple forwards without hesitation. The pointman who had absorbed all the shots was launched forwards by the kick, forcing the Serstine warrior to dash out of the way and then out of the complex altogether when Jun and his soldiers began unloading on him.
"Back to back!" Jun Fa ordered, picking up soldiers by their pauldrons and pulling them back up on their feet like they were weightless. Two soldiers covered Jun's back while the others grouped up in teams of three to avoid having their fragile life support machinery shot off their backs by the Serstine. "I will go down and take care of whoever that is, the rest of you keep the Serstine off of the pipes!"
Accompained by his two bodyguards, Jun walked straight off the ledge of the fortress and onto a 21ft drop into the brine pools. Seemingly unnafected by the acidic brine, the three supersoldiers plowed their way through the terrace walls, firing their autocannons in long bursts around the Nezerians to destroy the walls between brine pools. Each wall they destroyed caused the brine to drain down onto the lower pool, building up into an avalanche of boiling acid with which Jun Fa expected to just wash the Nezerians away from the base.
The Galactic Knights of The Frontiersmen Legion had seen the Bullhead coming via long range HUD Systems and Sergeant Thamelis had calculated everything and began to react within moments of the attack coming. He ordered his brothers to fire their plasma thrusters at full burn and attempt to outmaneuver the Bullhead to unleash pinpoint salvos of automatic .80 Caliber Mass Driver bolts made from High Density Adamantite designed specifically to rend apart Knight Power Armor.....how the shots will fair against the Bullhead is another matter entirely in accordance with the next moments of the fight. Thamelis had to think quickly and tasked his AI to scanning for even the most minutest of weaknesses and ways to exploit them alongside the damage calcs for his weapons and how effective they'd be in hitting the enemy targets.
The Suntouched who rushed the elevator went in alone, the other Serstine waiting to see what would happen as he tried his luck. Watching him flee and blast away at an odd angle to avoid a web of gunfire. The other Suntouched responded, flying through the air in more chaotic, crisscrossing paths as they darted back and forth, organically bunching up and dispersing like a flock of birds.
Norte directed her gyrojet gunners. "Suppress these assholes! Make them move where we want! Keep them pinned, do it now! And cover me!" She started making her way up close as she threw her large right hand off to the side and several thorny whips came out of recesses in it. She expected the Bullhead to meet her, and she was eager to splatter the first real blood of the fight.
Rain saw these Nezerians, hulking as they were, start acting familiarly. They flew! Like Serstine...well, perhaps not as instantly and perhaps not as naturally, but they could fly and the Flame seemed to kiss their armor, and that was fair enough. She flitted near to the one that was standing there, scanning as the fight continued to erupt.
She warned him of the growing danger as only she could. "Forgive me for the suggestion - far be it from me to tell a commander not of my own Flame and metal to command- but you need to move! Take wing as your fellows have! Not a moment to waste!" Already she could see the brine flowing as she blasted skywards, up and away to rejoin her Suntouched in flying from flank to flank, firing tight bursts and great ribbons of gyrojet fire here and there, occasionally rocketing directly overhead the Bullhead to try to dunk shots straight down into their backs. The hope was there, that enough of this could force them to make a mistake.
Thamelis ignited his Plasma Engines and blasted off with his fellows, arming his Punisher Assault Cannon and rocketing into the Air with his Battle Brothers to unleash a symphony of gun-fire upon their foes. Essentially they're attempting to aid the serstine by trying to draw the Bullhead away from each other and gun down their life support units on their backs. Andrei especially was searching for a clear shot to take with his 8 shot sniper rifle variant that was extremely accurate at range compared to Thamelis' 15-20 shot MG variant which was the standard Knights were equipped with that had 50/50 aim at medium range and above average at close range.
The area surrounding the geothermal powerplant had turned into an inferno of bullets ricochetting off every piece of mineral outgrowth there was. The acid-blackened monolith of a building had endured very little structural damage but the same could not be said of all the pipelines bolted onto its exterior walls. The Serstine could now easily tell which were the pipes transporting high-pressure brine from the hydrothermal system: it was the ones that were currently spraying sky-high geysers of acidic water after being hit. With astute observation they would perhaps be able to follow the complicated course of the pipelines all over the fortified building; if they managed to keep their bearings the flying transhumans could find in which points did all these high-pressure pipelines meet and what were the valves controlling most of the flow. As massive and brutalist as the Bullhead's powerplant looked, it did not stand even the slightest chance should the monstrous geothermal forces it tapped into destabilize; the forces of nature that rumbled from beneath the valleys stood like an upside-down damocles sword beneath the powerplant.
And the Bullhead knew this. Trying to shoot down the Serstine on the move was a pointless affair for the paradox's supersoldiers, they were simply too fast. Jun saw the damage being caused and immediately ordered his troops into a different stance: they were to hug the base of the powerplant's walls, that way they would at least deny the Serstine many angles of fire. Secondly, they were to switch the belts of HEFI shells feeding their hip-fired autocannon with something more fitting and deadly for the Serstine: belts of flechette canister rounds. By completely saturating the air with small needles of tungsten, the Bullhead troopers hoped to eventually damage the Suntouched enough to force them to land and, when that happened, they were pretty much as good as dead.(edited)
However, even before they were done switching the ammunition, several of the pointmen began succumbing to the precise gunfire of the Nezerian sharpshooter. Aided by his AI targeting system, Andrei was managing to wedge the high-density adamantite bolts between the thick plates of tungsten and ceramic; blowing off arms, legs and heads with precision. Thamelis and Andrei dropped three pointmen; the bulky soldiers succumbed near instantly to their weigth once their powered armor servos were shot to pieces. When they fell, they opened gaps in their fireteams, allowing Suntouched to destroy the life support packs on three pointmen who began seizing up from lack of oxygen. A third one was killed much less subtly by Norte himself who, with the whips flailing out of her oversized power claw, grasped on and then pulled out the entire ribcage of one of them out his back in an explosion of blood followed by a regular explosion.
Insane and wracked by the delirious voices of a million aggressive delusions, Jun was nevertheless able to tell the obvious tactical situation. If the Nezerians kept thinning out his troopers like that it wouldn't be long before the volume of fire wasn't enough to keep the Serstine at bay. And the flechette rounds that most of his troops had now loaded were fairly useless against the significantly more armored Nezerians; he had to take care of things himself.
"I gave you more chances than I should ever have!" The massive warlord raised his autocannon gauntlet, chambering a round and letting lose. He began charging alongside four more pointmen, shattering the nezerians' mass driver rounds against his hulking armor. "I will make sure to let your accursed kin know that you had a choice and still decided to die for nothing in a war you have nothing to do with! Be thankful that none of them are here so that at least they'll be able to lie to themselves and say you died honorably!"
The enormous soldier charged with surprising speed and fired, although the Nezerians could tell the bullets were going to miss very quickly. What they perhaps couldn't tell was that Jun was aiming for a pressurized outgrowth of mineral, a geyser that had sealed itself. Once it was hit by the 30mm shells from his gauntlet the mineral was shattered, causing a gigantic blast of brine to shroud the Nezerians with steam and hopefully knock them down to their feet. This was all that Jun needed as he rushed straight into the blast zone, swinging the crackling nightstone flail to wipe out whatever was left standing.
Thamelis' vision slowed down in the instant the explosion happened his turbo-charged mental capabilities taking in the entire battlefield situation in extreme slow motion but everything else was in real time. Almost simultaneously a similar affect took hold in the other Knights and suddenly 5 different blurs blasted from the steam at absurd speeds and Thamelis immediately charged a Fulmination blast of Void lightning which carried horrific telekinetic force in what was known as "Discipline Blending" or something to that effect where a Knight or any Nezerian Psychic would mix and match affects from different powers across Psychic disciplines into a single horrifying strike. As Thamelis began to move attempting to dodge whatever fire came his way as best he could he let loose the Hurricane of the void and with that lightning blasted from his Palms, Fingertips, and between his fingers sending cascading torrents of Void Lightning into the Warlord. The other Knights, however, had also while this occurred continued opening fire until they finally joined in with their own powers as well.
The Serstine scattered, suddenly seeing the ground briefly sparkle before flechettes whizzed at them with the sound of angry bees from the Bullhead soldiers that managed to change ammunition before sniper fire began picking them off.
Their change in tactics only seemed to work up the Suntouched further. Cries of challenge met the Bullhead as they began shooting up the walls, testing them in the hopes they could bust up walls and force their enemies to move again. "Who has the frags? The all-frag drums, switch now! Hit 'em, hit 'em, hit 'em!" one of Norte's lieutenants yelled, as the gyrojet gunners changed to all-explosive drums with practiced swiftness. If they couldn't nail them from behind, they'd try to trick-shot hot shrapnel into their backs by shooting at the walls they were now bunching up against.
Norte had tasted blood and was riding high on her kill. She wheeled around to look for her next opponent and rushed across the battlefield to catch the most open Bullhead soldier she could. "Come and try your luck!" she shouted. "If this is the best you top-heavy punching bags can do then I'm wasting my time here! I'll keep cutting you deep!" She caught one, and along with her writhing whips, she clenched her other hand into a fist. A plate molded in the shape of normal knuckles revealed itself in her fist, a blinding chrome and engraved with emoticons. Everyone who saw it soaring right between their eyes would know her as Norte, or maybe " " from how aggressively it was stylized, and she was about to introduce herself to her next target with a swing so swift it cracked like a whip.
Over them all, Rain was dodging the clouds of flechette shot as they came up to meet her. She could see the melee under her and flitted back and forth as if signaling her forces like a dancing honeybee. She saw lightning flare from the Nezerians and snake towards the Bullhead soldiers.
"Fascinating!..." she softly said to herself. Then came the orders. "Watch the lightning; I don't believe those discriminate friend from foe! Watch your flight patterns, tighten up! Tighten up!"
One of her escorts turned too soon and was struck by a flechette shell. It was already affecting his control, and he decided to turn it to his advantage. He dove into the nearest cluster of Bullhead, lighting his thrusters and bearing down at full speed, an inarticulate roar of rage signaling his approach.
Were not for her fist luckily landing a glancing blow rather than hitting the massive armored soldier dead-on, Norte's whole arm would probably have exploded upon contact from the sheer force of the impact. It was like hitting a solid block of tungsten ceramic, instantly disintegrating her stylized brass knuckles, leaving the emojis punched into the hardened steel casing of her target's armor and sending jewel-encrusted emoji shrapnel flying at supersonic speed in all nearby directions. The kinetic energy in Norte's fierce punch was still nevertheless enough to cause the Bullhead's pointman to tumble backwards, drop his gun and break the feed system on it, a flurry of other hits followed hitting its weakspots and knee joints before the soldier was even done recoiling from the hit. However, one of Norte's fast strikes was suddenly caught by the pointman; he grabbed her forearm and, as he was falling to the ground from the assault he'd just received, the Bullhead trooper fired the thrusters on one side of his body to try and twist himself mid-fall so that Norte would land underneath him and be crushed by the multiple tons of armored supersoldier.
The damage from the lightweight fragmentation grenades appeared to be insufficient and even the much lighter armor protecting the life support systems on the back of the soldiers was able to absorb the damage. What they were very good at, however, was stunning and confusing the Bullhead troopers into breaking their ranks. Several of them began simply losing sense of where each other and their cover from all the smoke and bright flashes caused by the fragmentation grenades being rained down upon them. They weren't able to keep track of Rain herself but especially not of the stricken Suntouched, who rocketed down on them like a full-size cruise missile, practically vaporizing the enemy soldier he'd landed on and knocking down the rest of the squad.
The leader of the warband, on the meantime, seemed to be holding up well to the lightning, which coursed around the exterior of his enormous suit of armor before dispersing on the briny volcanic ground. Just as he'd noticed the Nezerians dashing away the warlord discharged six large grenades from his pauldrons directly upwards, airbursting them to create a huge cloud of shrapnel.
"Shit!"
Norte saw the sparks flaring from her knuckles and felt a shockwave flying up her arm as her punch glanced and she felt her body knocked off-course from its blow. She doubled down on her assault as she remembered she was still knee-deep in the brawl, but there, too, were complications. Well, one very big complication: she was getting grabbed and about to be thrown under the falling soldier, the sound of thrusters signaling his intent.
Norte wasn't about to be outdone. She decided to lean into the twist and fired all of her own thrusters, preferring to send this giant pretender to the Serstine domain spinning instead of letting him arc over onto her.
Rain stayed high, and called out for her soldiers to do the same. The Serstine went silent as they witnessed one of their number smash himself into a Bullhead squad, disappearing into a plume of cermet dust. If the impact didn't destroy him then he was likely going to die soon, but one way or another, it was the Suntouched way to the last. They saw their foes scatter and get past the wall.
"High, fast and over!" Rain ordered. "They stumble from their walls, they stagger! Fall on them before they recuperate!" They would try to fly over again, hoping for another raking strike on their foes' backs.
The Shrapnel clouds slammed the Knights hard knocking them off their feet but Thamelis took the brunt of the shrapnel burst upon his Energy Shields overloading and shutting them down which wound up burning out the generator and severely straining his micro fusion cells powering his armor. Quickly Battle Brother Hannus went to Thamelis' aid and began dragging his bewildered Sergeant out of the area while Apothecary Gratcheva began to run over to them.
"You Fuckin' Idjit!. Y'coulda gotten killed Rem!" Shouted Hannus
Ortiz who Thamelis basically shoved down from the worst of the impact piped up "Well if his slow arse didn't save my life I wouldn't be here today!"
"Well that isn't much of an improvement now is it because nothing of value would've been lost rookie!" Hannus shouted at him before Gratcheva quickly silenced them
"If you want Thamelis to not oh i dont know die then shut up and help me here!. Where is Andrei?!" he shouted and got a communications return
"Currently trying to distract the bruiser while you cunts bicker like school children" he said with obvious amusement taking shots with his sniper rifle at the warlord while he spoke with cool and calm serenity.
The bolts shattered off Jun's bulky helmet and faceplate, peeling away layers of ceramic composite with each impact but doing little to stop the behemoth that charged the sniper, blading his body so the heavily armored pauldrons and asymmetric armor took the brunt of the assault. Andrei had clearly become his target, in order to whittle down his shield the Bullhead warlord started firing off airbursting shells at and all around the Nezerian sniper.
Although while the warlord was furiously swiping away at the Nezerians, his troops were now being seriously damaged and put in disarray. The strafing runs of the Serstine, especially after the pointmen had been scattered by the kamikaze's blast, managed to inflict more losses. It was enough so that the volume of fire started going down across the board and it became safer to fly directly over the installation itself and start looking for weakspots to hit. The freight elevator that had brought up the first wave of Bullhead started closing its doors and preparing to lower again to bring a second wave.
Hannus noticed the freight elevator and grabbed the currently inactive multi-kiloton energy equivalent high energy plasma warhead from Thamelis' belt section and magnetized it to his own before Gratcheva looked up and Ortiz grabbed his vambrace saying
"But brother.....if you do that there's no guarantee you'll survive.....do you really intend to go down into that elevator and drive the plasma warhead through the heart of that base?"
Hannus looked at Ortiz with kind eyes behind his helmet because he'd made his peace with the gods years ago and said
"Ortiz when you've lived as long as I have you'll understand death comes for all one way or another. It's not about the fact you died but it's why and how." he then addressed Gratcheva "Take care of Thamelis for me Anatolii. If I dont't make it back give him my ident tags and tell my story to the aspirants of the Kaevbynach and the warriors aboard the Wars Crucible. It was an Honor" he said then gave Apothecary Anatolii Gratcheva his Ident Tags.
And With that Veteran Eric Hannus boosted his plasma thrusters and flew at full burn for the elevator door at maximum possible velocity aiming to obliterate this base in one last effort. After such Andrei noticing the Warlords aims before he charged him due to perception and his HUDs calculations of opponent predictability boosted his jets again and tried to get over him to fire a barrage of plasma bolts from his vambrace cannons into the Warlords back.
As far as the Bullhead cultists and troopers still within the perimeter of the base were concerned, the Nezerian was simply throwing himself at them to scout the base. They spared some of their soldiers to receive them, readying their automatic shotguns and flechette rounds to fight the sturdy super-soldier at close range. What they had not expected in a million years was for the Nezerian's attack to be a full-blown nuclear suicide bombing, there was no CQC fight at all and instead the soldiers who formed up were instantly ionized by the multi-kiloton detonation.
The geothermal powerplant simply ceased to exist in an instant and all the Bullhead pointmen that had been taking cover near it were killed in the blink of an eye, effectively wiping out the entire garrison in one massive strike. The shockwave created was immense, setting off landslides and lahars of boiling brine across the entire valley, sweeping both Jun and whoever else was landed away downstream. The complete annihilation of the geothermal powerplant had blown the lid off of the unstable hydrothermal system of the valley; there wasn't even time for any mushroom cloud to form as a scalding geyser rising up for a full mile appeared where the powerplant had once been, completely shrouding the area in hot steam and blinding thermal optics. The entire valley began essentially collapsing from the seismic activity triggered. Enormous pieces of shattered concrete rained down on the Serstine and Nezerian survivors, propelled hundreds of feet into the air by the combined power of the plasma warhead and the eruption of the geyser.
Jun had no idea of what had happened, nor any time to react as he was swept down by the boiling avalanche after the nuclear strike.
The Nezerian Sniper immediately after seeing Hannus book it for the powerplant ignited his plasma thrusters and so did the others and took to the skies. Thamelis was still unconscious and the Knights were shocked and numbed by the death of their most faithful comrade. Ortiz kept himself calm but looked on at the devastation.
Rain, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen underneath her, saw Hannus advance and thought to herself, "Good, these warriors should be able to cut through the heart of this little-"
Everything then went to Hell.
She was blissfully unaware of the tremor that struck the ground milliseconds before the ground suddenly rushed up to meet her while she was flying level. Concrete and saline gunk and Lightmother knew what else suddenly ran up right to her face and no matter how hard she fired her boosters it just kept coming. The wave was instant and the heat was searing and unwelcome. Scorching, caustic vapor raked her as the shockwaves of nuclear Armageddon threatened to rip her apart. Her world was pain and sky, ground, sky, ground as she managed to tumble skyward into a groundless abyss on a ballistic trajectory, deafened, helpless, and by the feeling of it, melting
Gratcheva after the explosion cleared was beyond infuriated with Hannus, that fool. Anatolii continued to monitor Remurus' condition as they pulled back to regroup while Ortiz and Andrei covered them. Andrei was more than enraged but at the same time he was sad a brother had fallen. Remurus was fine for the most part just had the shock of getting smacked by shrapnel from an airburst round, however he'd need a new shield generator if they couldnt field repair it which shouldnt be too hard. Ortiz was primarily worried for their allies because he knew that there were Serstine in the blast zone. Goddamnit Hannus he thought to himself How a veteran died trying to be a hero by doing something retarded with such a large payload is beyond my comprehension.
Silence. An uneasy pause and the low rumble of the explosion's echo were the only companions of the few survivors of the suicide strike.
Then, unbelievably, against all odds... a voice.
"Rain! Rain?!" Norte's voice sounded ragged and totally shot, and judging by the hacking now breaking the unforgiving silence, she'd been coughing up particulates and sludge thrown into the air. Her mistralium fibers hung loose and unpowered and dragged behind her, tangled with shavings of armor. She was a wreck, but somehow alive, and able to limp under what power she could spare just to move, dragging herself around and searching for her princess.
Andrei came over the communications line to the Knights and their allies
"Status!, Norte can you hear me?. Remurus is injured and Gratcheva's patching him up. I'm on my way. I pray to the Emperor another soul isn't lost this day." he said with fear and worry before igniting his Plasma Thrusters and heading to fly over to where Norte is, attempting to track any life signs or some kind of vitals. Heads were going to roll back at Kaevbynach Command and he feared the punishment that'd be levied upon him and his battle brothers for Hannus' actions. Especially on Remurus for failing to enforce discipline and securement of his troops even though he was out cold.
Norte searched for glints of light, any scrap that Rain could still be alive and landed somewhere, much like her. What she got were Nezerians flying around her and one landing. Wasn't something flying before it went inside the base, blowing everything to Lightmother knew where?
She wasn't about to take any chances as she locked eyes with the first Nezerian to get near her, her expression bleary and crazy-eyed and her body language resembling a startled wild animal.
"Get the FUCK away from me!" she shouted, her good fist (for a certain metric of "good") raised.
Andrei immediately put his hands out to his sides non-threateningly and hooked his rifle to his back before his helmet was removed and he spoke calmly.
"Easy....Norte.....easy.....easy. We'll find her, and if we don't you can kill me brutally and painfully if you'd like. But we must remain strong." He tried his best to calm her down
Generally speaking from a physical standpoint he looked rather handsome and....tired. Something in his eyes Norte could tell was just a tired and jaded but empatheticness. He just looked so damn tired of war. That and his multitude of battle scars and barely contained anger at Hannus.
"I want to know what the hell that was, I want to be sure anything else that can go up like that is turned off! Get me?!" She pointed at Andrei, waving her finger and the inert whip coming from its tip flopping around. "You...just...look for a glint of metal. A flash of violet! Something!"
"I understand Norte. I have no Fusion Devices on me. Hannus was the only one who did. He took Remurus' anti-fortification Fusion Charge and suicide bombed them. Just let me look"
He went about helping Norte find a flash of violet or anything that could resemble new life signs. He worked quickly and urgently, time for him (like all Knights) was slowed to an extreme degree but that was to compensate for their frankly absurd speeds. Therefore his eyes picked out and saw detail far more clearly, quickly, efficiently, and accurately than even hawks or powerful computers. He was in effect a biological weapon. He could absorb and react to all of the predictable stimuli's of a battlefield at such a rate it may as well be instant from the mental perspective but unpredictable stimuli either suffer in reaction time or simply arent picked up at all and ignored in favor of other battlefield issues. Therefore if you act unpredictably it's possible to surprise and ambush Knights.
Norte dragged herself away as she searched. Amongst the wreckage, somewhere, had to be Rain.
Wherever she was, it was hard to tell. The whole crater was a field of twisted scrap jabbed into rock and puddles of sludge. Something particularly shiny or ornamented would have stood out. Bits and bobs that looked like remnants of Rain's retinue poked out of the ground, making the search even harder at first glance.
Andrei put his helmet back on and ordered his AI to boost his HUDs scanner units by adding more power and performing a trick called "Directional Subversion" where the Theta-Waves would be modulated and directed to maneuver through wreckage or impediments and provide a scan when looking for something specific. This is possible due to the extent of Galactic Knights technological base. Therefore he sets the scanner to search for the parameters Norte provided if scant.
Serstine metal and thruster parts, scraps of Flameheart and royal insignias were strewn about the battlefield, and it was at least an improvement over picking through it with nothing but eyes. Whole bodies were becoming obvious, some less buried than others. A small area where Rain could have been lying was making itself known.
Huge chunks of sulfur-coated saline rock were still falling a couple minutes after the detonation from the sheer pressure that had been released upon the annihilation of the geothermal powerplant. Now the only thing that stood in the summit atop the valley was a mile-high geyser of scalding stream that propelled whatever remained of the powerplant's foundations high into the air. Chunks of reinforced concrete and composite rebar rained down as well, chipping off the colorful saline walls of the post-nuclear wasteland that the valley had been turned into. Now most of the hydrothermal pools had been drained by the avalanches triggered by the nuclear strikes, leaving only the acidic sediment lying at the bottom.
Worse yet, among the many irradiated pieces falling around Norte and the Nezerians was the control hardware and electrical distribution equipment of the powerplants. The only ways that the Serstine and Nezerians had to find the fire control station that was directing anti-orbital pion cannons... was now scattered across several square miles, fused together into radioactive molten slag. For the moment the fire control station would be offline but the geothermal powerplant was a replaceable asset, unlike the fire control station itself. They had a brief window before power was restored but finding, let alone knocking out the sensor station, was going to be an exceedingly hard task.
And the worst was yet to come. Norte had already dealt with the Bullhead's madness-stricken minions before. She knew that the role of warlords such as Jun Fa was as much to lead the troops as it was to stop them from unleashing the apocalyptic madness that the voices in their heads clamored for. Once the warlord was gone, the Bullhead reverted back to its primordial instincts, feeding the cryptographic codes and PAL clearances up the chain of command, through a network of landlines, high-altitude balloons, low-orbiting satellites and C4I aircraft that orbited in that hellscape of a planet. However differently it was coded, the order that echoed across the entire continent was the same: annihilate the intruder. Annihilate it within minutes and , or the demons that accosted the Bullhead's pointmen would inflict a pain far more thorough and grievous than anything that their enemies could deal. Their madness demanded fire, and fire would be given by the Bullhead.
Blown away by explosively-pumped railguns, bunker doors of reinforced concrete revealed the shiny chrome nosecones of the bringers of nuclear apocalypse. Tracked, hover and wheeled vehicles that had been wedged and camouflaged in whichever crevice the madness-whipped supersoldiers had dug out from them raised their towering missiles. Satellites blew out their fairings to reveal clusters of black graphite conical warheads while re-orbiting to line themselves up for strike. Everything in a thousand square miles was going to disappear in ionized flame, then the molten slag that would be left after the five thousand strategic ICBMs detonated would itself be ionized by a second volley delivered by cruise missiles and hypersonic gliders. Nuclear fury unseen since the sanity-shattering scourging of Telestus was brought upon a force not a thousandth the size of the combined EPA-Union detachment that had first faced these mad warriors. All throughout the volcanic globe the ballistic missiles went up like white spears, disappearing as their first stages burnt out and propelled the buses of warheads into suborbital paths.
The valley, which had hitherto been a dangerous hazard to navigate, would soon become the greatest ally to Norte and whoever else was fast enough to outrun the titanic barrage that she knew was about to come. No doubt the entire mountain range would be gone, but it would at least shield her from the powerful multi-megaton thermal flashes that even her sandskin form would not resist.
Every second that passed, the swarm of missiles covered thousands of kilometers with their optics fixed on the point of impact. Every second was precious but the one thing more precious to Norte was Rain. And without much time remaining, she finally found her, a glimmer of her mirror-polished titanium hair decorations shining at her from the bottom of a pull of sulfuric acid.
"I see a nuclear flash." The blinker said. "Is everything going ok with you down there, most honorable ladies and gentlemen?"
Norte started frantically trying to pull Rain out of the acid, her barely-conscious form looking no better than Norte's own. She desperately tried to slap her awake, tried to test her thrusters, anything to get her to fire up again.
"It soon won't be," Norte answered. "We have to run! Damn it, I have to run! Rain, Rain, wake up! It's me, it's Norte, we have to go..."
Suddenly, a twitch. That twitch became a spasm, and that spasm became a Serstine princess coming back to life and turning her head to vomit acid and particulates, her eyes open from the shock and repulsion, confusion, surprise and relief all flashing across her face in a single moment. Rain functioned.
Norte smiled broad in relief and tried to embrace Rain with one arm. Then she greeted her in her usual fashion. "You look terrible, your grace, a mark of a hard fight survived. We have a harder one ahead of us."
"...what by the Holy Boost was all that?!" Rain coughed out as she tried to reach for Norte to pull herself up, but her body seized and she twisted her body in pain.
"I'll explain when you have your faculties and we get clear. Can you fire your thrusters?" Norte asked, pulling Rain as far as she could out of the murky, stinking pool.
"My Flame still burns. Just possibly," Rain replied.
The Knights knew well enough the power of thermonuclear warfare, especially given their strategic battle psychics were in essence psychic nuclear fire support back home in the Hexaverse, and as such the Imperials went to Rain and Norte just as Thamelis regained consciousness.
"The hell just happened?!" the sergeant shouted and Gratcheva responded
"Thermonukes!" and as such Remurus was put down and he shouted
"Get the Ultralight Scout Cutter we're buggin' outta here and we'll try again!. Emperor only knows these hopping mad-bastards won't stop til' we're absolutely dead. Now c'mon!"
He called for the Ultralight Scout Cutter to pull back around and prepare for a close in "Dive Pickup" as the Knights called it where the Cutter would accelerate to extreme speed and sweep by grabbing them then making a B-line out of there.
Norte clutched Rain tighter as she finally pulled her upright. Their boosters fired in coughs and fits, and finally they started lifting out of the pool.
"Norte, I must apologize," Rain said, dismay written all over her face. Regret, anger flashed as she avoided eye contact with her friend and then finally looked at her. "I-"
"Save it," Norte replied, cutting her off.
"I know what's on your mind," Rain said, looking at the mountains. "We are a sorry pair of thruster parts, but if we hold on as hard as we can, we're almost one Serstine, and that's enough."
They tipped towards the horizon and fired their remaining running boosters, plasma blasting from every nozzle and hurtling towards the horizon. Then, another surprise.
"Rain! Rain?! Norte! Are you there?" Someone was on their channel and calling out to them. One glint in the sky was arriving way sooner than the nuclear warheads, and judging by its trajectory it was firing on its way down. One Outrider was racing the nukes down and had a considerable lead. Not Akina, but...
"...Zand?! What the hell are you doing on that Outrider?" Norte shouted.
High up, a Serstine Lightcaster was clutching the top of the Outrider that was punching through the atmosphere, strings of Flame-formed power wrapped around it to keep her in place and a shock of wild red hair sticking out like a sore thumb against her many stealthy body panels. "Look, long story short, I'm your ticket out of this shit! You two are wrecks right now, so keep going where you're going and aim for me when you get there!"
Norte did a double-take. "You want us to go up?" she asked, bewildered. "...you flatter us, with your understanding of my legend!"
"Then let's see your arrivals, hotshots! Ladies Rain Elduranda and Norte Gallegos, faster than even thermonuclear devastation!"
The two-as-one Serstine roared away, a ballistic missile turned on its side towards destiny.(edited)
The first missile to fall was a large unitary warhead ICBM that had been launched almost from the other side of Aphanizomen. Re-entering the atmosphere with a flash of blinding light, the missile did a few final course corrections to end up impacting on the former site of the geothermal powerplant within inches of precision. And the mountain, which had its top already blown off by the tactical nuclear bomb that the Nezerians had set off, was pretty much erased by the much larger device fired in the Bullhead’s raging madness. The ground level detonation of the bomb resulted in a fireball of pure white nuclear hellfire that expanded fast enough to span multiple kilometers in the blink of an eye. The wall of ionized gasses, which expanded so fast it outran its own shockwave, was the last thing the warlord Jun managed to see as he stood up from under the volcanic rubble at the bottom of the valley. In the brief moments of consciousness he had before the fireball reached him, when the heat flash dissociated the air around him into an exploding mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, the warlord opened his arms to receive the Bullhead’s gift in all of its splendor.
“Scorched be the soul, o bringer of madness!” Jun said in furious exaltation as the approaching plasma ablated the outer layers of his armor. “I tried to silence thy madness, how wrong I was to deny the world your gifts! Take me!”
A mushroom cloud began forming underneath the dome-shaped clouds caused by condensation. But rather than the spectacular finale, what this gigantic detonation marked was the beginning of the Shattered One’s uncontrolled retribution. More and more such devices fell from the sky, busloads of MIRV fanned out in the distant layers of the stratosphere and cruise missiles popped up from behind the mountains to cover as much terrain as possible. Norte’s crew of daredevil Outrider pilots and the Nezerian reinforcements quickly realized that to try and fly up and away was suicide with the astounding ammount of devices that were being detonated at all altitudes. Only one thing could give them a chance of surviving: hard cover. The volcanic valleys of Aphanizomen could provide some protection against the shockwaves and hypersonic debris being propelled by the explosions. But they would have to keep running away, all the cover in the world wouldn’t change anything if they found themselves directly at the ground zero of one of the detonations.
And then things got much, much worse.
Geysers and hydrothermal vents were erupting all around the valleys, disturbed by the multiple seismic shocks from the nuclear bombardment. It was bad enough a hellscape already but the arrival of a wave of nuclear bunker busters suddenly made the previous volley look like a minor inconvenience. Punching straight through the crust that had been weakened and plasticized by the huge tectonic forces of Aphanizomen, the bunker busters detonated right in the caldera of the supervolcano that powered the entire landscape and had been threateningly grumbling ever since the two teams’ arrival. The last of the bunker busters didn’t even manage to reach its target; it was crushed several miles off the ground… because the entire ground itself was now being propelled upwards at several kilometers per second.
In a second, all the nascent mushroom clouds were blown out like candles. Missiles that had not reached their targets were crushed by a shockwave of incomprehensible intensity that cleared out the clouds over the entire hemisphere. The land itself was peeled off the ground and propelled in a myriad suborbital paths by a mass of magma the size of a small country. An earthquake so strong it created a visible ripple in the horizon expanded outwards from the volcanic cataclysm at many times the speed of sound, rapidly overtaking Norte’s Outrider and pelting it with shattered rock from below. It didn’t take much reflection on anyone’s part to know that this was being followed up by another shockwave, this time through the air, that would pulverize everyone if it caught up with the Serstine. This one would take a very long time to be diffused by the mountains, for now the only way to survive was to simply outrun it.
When the initial thermal flash cleared and the Serstine looked up above them, the much familiar principle that everrything that goes up also comes down made itself pretty clear. Above them, all the way up to the upper troposphere, were the shattered magma-covered remains of the mountains that had just been pulverized. Some of it was already starting to re-enter the atmosphere, raining down iceberg-sized chunks of volcanic basalt over a quarter of the planet’s surface.
The debris both raining from above and being thrown from below, the plumes of magma shooting out of destabilized volcanoes and the tremendous shockwave bearing down on them from behind went from feeling utterly terrifying to feeling more like a spiritual moment for the Serstine. Things were so thoroughly FUBAR’d that it felt kind of religious, like being thrown around by the chaotic whims of the Boost itself.
Rain and Norte scrambled up to the lead Outrider and were guided by kaleidoscopic lines of energy, threads that spun themselves through the air from Zand's pointy fingers, encircling them and pulling them along and, most shocking to the pair, they dropped altitude. As the two crashed onto the top of the Outrider and clung to the young Lightcaster for dear life, they looked ahead at the environment ahead of them turning from a mess of color to a mess full stop with barely a horizon.
Flying upwards was suicide, though to any casual observer, any direction would be suicide. To a Serstine, there was flying as fast as possible. Fast, dangerous, nap-of-the-earth flying, and it was very easy to fly at the nap of the earth when the earth was rushing up to meet you.
Flashes of plasma blinked amongst the beginning of the end for this place, for nuclear annihilation as the Outriders flat-hatted against the maelstrom, dodging irregular hunks of rock and shards of base big as a ship going up and crashing against those coming down. The way ahead seemed to turn dark when they had pack after pack of canned sunshine opening behind them, pounding their senses with heat, sound and light.
Just flying straight was a challenge as the Outriders bucked and wobbled, the lead one helped by the three Serstine clinging to it seemingly forgetting where and what they were and firing thrusters to correct and race the earthbound suns. They surfed a wave of molten death and jagged debris, all the while being thrown along by nuclear hellfire. Thrusters blazed and Flames shone brightly as the firestorm seemed to be talking to them through its wall of noise and light.
Don't stop. Don't look back. Go faster.
The full gravity of what was happening struck the Knights like a thunderbolt who boarded their Cutter quickly and efficiently. Remurus went straight to the command bridge and they blasted off at maximum throttle opening the Plasma Conduits to full charge from the fiery hell engulfing the planet, he knew the end would be upon him and his Knights eventually but he would not die this day nor would he die this way, he had a wife and kids to go back to in the Frontier Fleet and he'd be damned before he died a coward. Remurus was always a man of Honor but this wasn't Honor, this had no skill, no finesse, no elegance, it was just brutal madness, brutal madness not unlike the Siege of Astrakar which consisted of far more brutally powerful munitions than these. There was no speech, there were no cries, just hope and faith that they'd survive. Ortiz unlike the rest of them had nothing to lose and he'd made his peace with the gods already, so if he died it didnt matter much to him. The Cutter was hammered hard by the micro debris and the Helmsman had extreme skill in piloting such a relatively large vessel in such conditions as he was trained to do but it took every dirty as much as conventional even improvised tricks in his playbook to pull off the sort of gut crushing Gs that would be able to let them maneuver. It essentially looked more like a seen straight from a science fiction film more than a concentrated effort.
“I have Uno, brother”
“Congratulations on your uno, brother. Please draw 2500.”
The two blinkers’ game was interrupted by some alerts from their optical sensors. At first, Heuristica thought that one of its pixels had burnt out. When asking its fellow blinker to take over optical surveillance, Empirica curiously replied that it too thought that its optical sensors were suffering from artifacting since there seemed to be a continuous white spot where the LZ had once been.
“While it would be a happy coincidence if we both burned out the exact same pixel in our optical sensors, I find that to be a bit implausible.”
“I concur, brother Heuristica. That would be truly odd.”
“And it would not explain the gamma rays.”
“Or the neutrino flash.”
“Hmm…”
“Hmm…”
The two blinkers paused for a second, looking at each other with their collision-avoidance optics the same way humans would look at each other after an awkward realization.
“Do you think…?”
“That would be a bloody intense nuclear barrage, though.”
--
The topside of Zand’s outrider was now a sooty black, its formerly-shiny ceramic skin partially ablated by a REALLY close nuclear detonation. The silhouettes of Norte and Rain were imprinted onto the Outrider in negative as they had been struck by the thermal flash as well. Now pretty much everything that wasn’t extremely heat-resistant in the two Serstine nobles’ body had been melted or ablated, leaving them with only their basic frames intact. The shockwave from that detonation had luckily been deflected by a mountainous ridge, allowing the Outrider to survive and continue flying the gauntlet of magma and nukes. Massive clouds of ash that had erupted from the volcanoes up ahead began forming a thick black canopy above the continent, stirred into a powerful thunderstorm by the shockwaves and seismic events. The sun began fading through this thick cloud, making it even more dangerous to navigate as the meteors now fell from the sky without warning.
And then things, naturally, got worse.
In the middle of the tremendous rockfall, some objects appeared that moved and looked pretty differently. Rather than hurtling into the ground, they pulled up and dodged the rocks. Rather than the orange glow of freshly-molten rock, these objects trailed three enormous and white-hot plumes of fissile products. Fighters. Powered by what was essentially a nuclear reactor undergoing a drawn-out meltdown, a wing of air superiority jets of the Bullhead had flown ballistic paths along with the warhead and now fanned out to begin their hunt. A good portion of them hadn’t survived the blizzard of volcanic debris thrown into the stratosphere but those that did had just been made angrier. Norte’s rather unstealthy evac craft was quickly picked up by their sensors and soon found itself targeted by three of the Bullhead’s jets from above. Using continuously-beaming nuclear-pumped xasers, the ballistic fighters went to try and simply melt Norte’s craft out of the sky. The Nezerians’ larger and more heavily-shielded craft, on the meantime, was fired upon by a group of four fighters with nuclear AAMs. Given the sheer amount of nukes that had been dropped into the geothermal plant, it seemed unlikely that there weren’t many more fighters coming.
The shockwave remained hot on Norte’s heels but the seismic shock had already circumnavigated Aphanizomen multiple times, destabilizing the volcanic systems more and more with each pass. Kilometers-deep cracks began opening up in the ground, swallowing up the landscape into Aphanizomen’s fiery mantle. For the particularly suicidal, these wide-open faultlines would seem like promising places to take shelter from the huge volcanic shockwave. Slowing down was still out of the question now that the Bullhead’s fighters had joined in on the chase but going into the trenches would at least allow them to duck under the shockwave… if they didn’t collapse or erupt.
“Forgive us for this intrusion” the transmission came from the blinkers far away. “But we’ve spotted quite the activity down there. Are things still on track?”
The Outrider smelled blood as the xasers fired, gaining speed and rising up to meet these three Bullhead fighters. The pilot seemed to be speaking for everyone clambered on its hull as it vectored for a fight, plasma railguns barking as they merged as if to say it was time to end this nonsense.
The three nuke-blasted Serstine were along for the ride, all cursing and complaining as they raised their arms and found their weapons were burnt out or completely inadequate, sharing curses and groans.
Then there was the Blinkers' transmission. Everyone looked at one another with baffled expressions, wide eyes and slack jaws on all of them. They were all at a loss for what to say; Norte lost her soldiers to a freak accident, Rain had fate hit her like the collision of two moons and with as sharp a change in her trajectory, Zand was along for a ride that she barely knew she was signing up for. They bucked and rolled with the sharp maneuvers of the Outrider as it drew dizzying loops through the darkening skies, lit by lightning and thruster fires in the moonless nuclear night, the struggle to say something, anything that would help sticking out as sharp contrast to the balletic ride they were now mere passengers for.
Rain took it upon herself to be the one to reply. "This...was an excursion to silence the guns, be it through the destruction of the power plant or...other means, yes?"
The Galactic Knights Cutter as it blasted off for the Serstine never made it back. The Shockwave of the major explosions smacked the Cutter with enough force that the thing simply came apart and it was lost with all hands. Thamelis' last thoughts were of his family before he ceased to exist with his crew.....he was a fool....but all of that ended now with the destruction of the Cutter.
"Yes, Most Esteemed Lady Rain." Heuristica replied. "We are not particularly picky about how the guns must be silenced, it would be most ungrateful of us to start putting conditions on what, we assume, must be a fairly exhausting job. Not that we doubt you would be able to do it through any means besides your choosing, oh no, please don't assume so."
Heuristica then went on a long chain of apologies and forms of courtesy that srt of blended together into a continuous monotonous drone to Rain, whose blood felt like it was made 50% of adrenaline by volume then. A burst of EMP countermeasures by the Bullhead jet had disrupted the plasma railgun shots of the Outrider, allowing it to remain shining its laser on Rain and Norte's craft. The beam of powerful x-rays coming from the Bullhead's fighters was inflicting heavy damage on the ablative coating of the Serstine fighter. This intense ionizing radiation even made its way into the damaged frames of Norte and Rain, bouncing around their insides and disrupting the circuitry. Suddenly Rain found herself seizing and losing control of her body and, even worse, losing grip on the broken carbon tile she was currently holding on to.
"L-Lady Rain!" Norte said with gritted teeth, her body twitching and a glitched-up voice as she was trying to hold her grip. Around both her and Rain, the carbon tiling was starting to glow a deaf red from the continuous illumination by the enemy jets' lasers. "I c-c-can't!"
Right as the two aircraft approached the merge, Zand's quick reaction managed to save the two Serstine noblewomen from falling off the jet and onto certain doom, even if she did so in a fairly unpleasant way: blasting to the rescue, she drove a knife through Rain and Norte's forearms to literally nail them to the jet and prevent them from letting go.
"You ain't going nowhere, Lady Rain!" Zand said before taking out her gyrojet rifle and unloading on the enemy aircraft for the few seconds it was visible as it approached at a differential speed of what had to be above mach 4, all while her own frame's thermal protection was ablated by the xaser. The actual rounds themselves just disappeared into the blurry and hectic confusion, she had no idea if any of them had hit so and the laser soon disrupted her rifle's electronic firing mechanism. So with a last-minute movement, Zand decided to simply throw the rifle at the enemy aircraft just as it and the Outrider flew by each other. The weapon disintegrated on one of the Bullhead jets' wing roots, shattering the ceramic tiling of its leading edge.
Nearly getting blasted off the jet by the sonic boom of the enemy aircraft, Zand quickly turned her attention to the two dangling from her jet and visibly recoiled once she saw that practically everything except for their superalloy skeletons had been blasted or burnt away. "With all due respect, Lady Rain, your Terminator-looking ass is in no condition to try escaping back into orbit" Zand grabbed their hands and removed the knives. "I suggest looking for an alternate route of escape before they turn around and start lasering us again!"
Rain searched Zand's face with her eyes, then looked around her. There had to be something; they narrowly escaped destruction riding thermonuclear Armageddon; this had to be trivial in comparison -
A thought crossed her mind. "We head down. If we can't escape with pure ascent power, let's see our pursuers play at being Serstine - and failing," she said. "We find a canyon. Something to scrape them off."
"Understood, Lady Rain!" Zand said, looking down with both her eyes and the Outrider's ground radar. The tidal forces that were practically tearing this subcontinent apart on Aphanizomen had created many cracks that extended all the way down to the planet's mantle and wide enough for a particularly suicidal fighter to wedge itself into. Although, given the enormous approaching shockwave, this was the least suicidal thing they could attempt. "Watch this, the Holy Boost is with us!"
Rather than turning around and trying to face the damaged Bullhead interceptor again, the Serstine jet dove to the ground as fast as possible and made a beeline for one of the narrow, newly-created trenches. It flipped around before diving, making sure that the intense G-forces worked to keep Rain and Norte firmly attached to the aircraft rather than flyinging them right off, and punched its afterburners to the maximum while trying to locate the tectonic rift amongst all the dust and ash. The shockwave drove closer and closer, followed by a miles-tall blizzard of rock and debris the size of houses. The enemy fighters desperately scrambled to chase them into safety but, the moment that Rain felt the baseball bat-like impact of the volcanic shockwave pound her head, only her Outrider and a single enemy jet had made it into the debris-filled trench. Everything above ground level was reduced to dust, even the ledges of the rift were rapidly eroded by the supersonic winds in only a few seconds. Dust was blown into the jagged and narrow trench, blinding them even more but allowing them to see one important thing: the beam of the enemy fighter.
"We're in! Just a single enemy on our tail!" Zand informed as she and a couple other Suntouched opened up, firing towards the origin of the beam. A couple succesful glancing blows, however, quickly broke the Serstine's fire up and made one of them almost fall off the jet, causing the othes to cease firing and save their comrade.
The Outrider kept maneuvering, dodging the irregular cliffs of the trench and the giant boulders being blown inside it by the explosion. The less agile Bullhead jet was not having as much luck avoiding the smaller debris and slowly its protective shell of ceramic was cracked and stripped away from its leading edges, leaving the aircraft's more sensitive components protected only by its thin magnesium alloy skin. All the dodging and weaving made the pilot realize something, however: the Outrider was never hit when it was flying higher than the nuclear rocket chasing it. Its laser was boresighted at a slight angle, making it capable of only shooting downwards. As it was damaged, the Bullhead's jet did not dare go near the surface again whereas the Serstine jet still had enough of its armor remaining to resist the high-speed dust and debris hitting it when it flew closer to the stormy surface. Unfortunately, the Outrider itself also couldn't fire at the enemy when it was behind and underneath it as it had no guns pointing there. Things would have to get more Serstine.
"We're in its blind spot!" The pilot of the Outrider announced, skimming the top of the canyon. "But I can't shoot it either, someone needs to jump on it and kill it!"
"Any of you two want to do the honors?" Zand asked of the two noblewomen, grabbing the handles of the knives to free whoever wanted to go and personally take revenge on the Bullhead rocket fighter.
Rain and Norte looked at one another. Even burnt clean and flayed by speed and damage, it was clear their pain and frustration was focusing into something sharp and intimidating.
Norte summed it up. "They were my Norteñas, but we are your servants." She looked at Rain and nodded. "Lady Rain, I humbly request you revenge us on the Bullhead for making a bad situation worse...and personally gut a bitch for me."
Rain chuckled. "You heard her. I'm not coming back without wearing one of those thruster nozzles around my neck like bling."
Zand turned around, signaling the other Suntouched positioned in the aircraft's hardpoints with a gesture. "Lady Rain wants to go, ladies! Give me something badass!" She said and waited for a second or so while they looked around for any extra weaponry that could be handled by the Suntouched princess that had been shot, flayed and burned into a less-than-optimal condition until something was found: a depleted uranium jitte with a finely decorated scabbard and several lucky charms dangling from tassels at the base of the hilt.
"Here you go, Lady!" Zand said and handled the jitta to Rain's non-stabbed hand but Rain soon found herself unable to properly grip it. Being irradiated by the xaser had apparently broken some of the circuitry of her forearm and wrist and her hand wasn't closing properly. In order to help the princess, Zand made a quick demonstration of her lightcaster powers: she did a quick finger gesture, gripped Rain's elbow and pulled five glowing multi-colored strings of magical cabling from it, all attached to her sharp fingertips. She moved in to link these cables to Rain's knuckles, forming a band-aid circuit that bypassed Rain's damaged forearm and made her regain control over her hand. "Alright, now you're set up. It'll last you long enough to bash that thing's brains out!"
Rain tested the quick fix, then looked down at her target and back up to Zand. "Wait! I have a better idea. Can you come with me? Forget the thruster - we can take the whole plane home with us!" She raised her tethered hand to make sure she got the idea. "All we need to do is blind it, and we'll have it at your mercy! Take this as your chance for a greater cut of the valor!" She flicked her head at their opponent one more time. "To say nothing of needed salvage."
"That sounds insane and will get us killed." Zand said, blinking a bit before going for it with a nod. "I like it!"
"Go for it, my Lady!" Norte encouraged. "I will be sure to witness your deed, the guitars of our bards will wail and their drumsets will pound with the story of your deeds for centuries to come!"
"Let's go!" Zand ripped the knife out of Rain's other forearm, freeing her from the aircraft and causing her to fly off and start tumbling. The lightcaster quicky helped stabilize Rain and then both Serstine extended their airbrakes (whatever was left of the airbrakes, in Rain's case) to rapidly decelerate. It was pretty easy to find the enemy aircraft through the dust and smog because of its bluish flame, it was weaving through the trench and bobbing up and down in an attempt to give its downwards-firing laser a shot on the Serstine outrider in front of it. As soon as it saw the thrusters of Rain and Zand fire towards it, a long burst of decoys were machinegunned by its countermeasure launchers, confusing the two incoming Serstine for missiles. Right before Rain and her companion hit it, the pilot of the Outrider took a dive, getting into the fighter's firing arc and baiting it into holding still so that Rain would have an easier time landing on its back, where the flight control systems were located. It started getting hit with the xaser and avoided sustaining damage by unloading its plasma railgun on the cliffs beside it, creating clouds of debris that blocked the laser somewhat.
Rain steered herself and Zand towards their target, glowing through the dark, and the spread of decoys it vomited as they closed in only let her know they were on the right track. She aimed for their center and struck it with a crash before Rain dragged herself up and started searching. Anything that stuck out, any pitot tube, sensor or anything she reasoned could be part of the flight and fire control systems got hard strikes and stabs. It was better to hit too many than too few.
Giving the fighter a taste of its own medicine with swipe after swipe, it only took the lightning-fast and lightning-angry princess a couple of seconds to bash the aircraft's flight computer, backup flight computer and remote control downlink antenna into smithereens... and then she just followed up with its inertial navigation system, missile approach warning system, one of the engine control computer and the backup gyros before Zand had to stop her and hold Rain back from completely destroying the aircraft while they were still on it.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up, hold up!" Zand grabbed Rain's jitta-wielding arm to stop her as the aircraft completely lost autonomous guidance and began to flutter. A large outcropping of rock was only a couple seconds away and the aircraft was effectively dead so Zand had to work fast. "You killed it, leave something for me to work with!"
Zand's normal procedure would be to pull individual magic filaments out of the many flight control inputs and outputs and then carefully link them to the different parts of Rain's body so the hijacked aircraft felt like an extension of her body and could be controlled intuitively. But with a rock outcropping right in front of them, there was no time of subtlety. She simply summoned of magical cabling out of the smoldering wreck of the aircraft's flight computer and slapped them onto Rain as quickly as she could without any regard to how the newly-controled machine would feel to the princess. And it felt weird.
Rain felt sheer power now under her control. 240 megawatts of thermal power being outputted by three airbreathing fission rockets glowing at thousands of degrees and with only a modicum of throttling ability in the form of cylindrical arrays of boron control rods. 35 meters of polymorphic magnesium aerogel airframe densely packed with cooling systems, sensors and equipment. The inside of the aircraft felt somewhat organic, parts of it were biohybrid muscle and tissue in place of mechanical actuators to save weigth. A reinforced internal skeleton of different titanium alloys held the aircraft together and was built like a ribcage around the large laser that took up much of the aircraft's centerline. Judging by the flight control software of all the individual systems that Rain hadn't bashed apart, the aircraft was meant to remain in the stratosphere intercepting MIRVs and satellites and had very little business flying at such low altitudes and speeds but at least its high-lift, arrowhead body and large extendible flaps and slats kept it controllable at lower speeds.
...and all of that information was seemingly coming through Rain's pinky finger. The entire aircraft and the jumbled mess of systems and alarms that it communicated were all coming through the part of Rain's brain that previously only had the humble task of controlling her right pinky finger which completely messed with her sense of balance and self-perception. It would be intuitive enough if pitching the aircraft up was done by arching her back and rolling by twisting her torso but apparently the entire thing would have to be controlled with gestures from her pinky. And the rapidly-approaching outcropping gave Rain very little time to get used to the thousands of new functions that her right pinky now had.
Rain's body made the startled spasms of a bug suddenly flipped over and attempting to right itself. She braced herself and hoped some combination of body movements and the almighty pinky would steer them away from the rocks as she clenched her teeth and hoped. She'd come this far.
The aircraft quickly pitched up, a bit too quickly. The many airflow sensors on the aircraft's sharp delta wing started sending her warnings as they sensed the boundary layer began to separate even with the flaps fully extended. The wings started to lose lift and Rain's initially-sharp turn started getting dangerously wide, too wide to avoid the outcropping. Lowering pitch would smash her into the outcropping but so would continuing to snap turn and stall, losing all lift and simply pummeling out of the sky.
"Whoa, whoa, WHOA!" Zand had to punch her hands through the aircraft's think alloy skin to grab one of the main wing spars and help it steer, although with such a heavy aircraft there was not much the Serstine lightcaster could do to change its course. "This thing's a fucking locomotive!"
Rain, who was clinging besides the fuselage, could feel the turbulent airflow zone begin to spread through the plane's wing on her side. Suddenly, however, she realized that there was a way to inject pressure on top of the wing and make sure the boundary layer didn't completely separate: firing her thrusters along the surface of the wing, like a very quickly improvised boundary layer control system. Zand would have to do the same on her side, though, or else the other wing would stall and they would slam into the cliff even faster
Rain realized that partially by accident as she panic-fired her thrusters in the hope that sheer speed might make it lift and nose out of the way. She was shocked when it actually started responding, just not with the kind of lift she was expecting. The whole thing actually started smartly responding...well, for a being such as itself, anyway. She felt it list - she couldn't do this by herself or they'd scrape themselves across the walls.
She threw all flowery speech and noble air to the wind. "Blow the flaps! BLOW THE FLAPS!" she shouted as she demonstrated with blasts of her thrusters.
"Oh shit, FUCK!" Zand in turn panic-fired her own thrusters, sticking the airflow back on the surface of the wing and making it catch onto the flaps once again. The turn quickly tightened and tightened as the aircraft pulled a pretty impressive angle of attack for something of its size and heft and managed to avoid the outcropping. Rapidly doing an aileron roll to point the lift vector in the opposite direction, the pair repeated their maneuver to avoid slamming onto the opposite wall from oversteer and finally managed to bring the aircraft under control, stabilized and turning nicely now that it had gained enough speed. "By the Lighmother, we did it!"
"Rain Elduranda, my magnificently crazy lady, thou hast done it!" Norte cheered as the Outrider lowered its speed to let the nuclear rocket catch up with it, protecting from the debris that had pockmarked its surface. The worst of the shockwave's ferocious winds outside the canyon had passed but now that they had gotten a hang of flying in the canyon it felt safe to continue that way as they would be quite hard to find by any follow-up forces that landed in the area. They were well outside the view of satellite or airborne radars, which meant for now they would be able to move without worry. "And what a beautiful trophy have you brought! Magnesium will look quite good on you, my lady."
Rain started laughing. It was loud, and long, and forceful, the kind of laugh only reserved for those sorts of holy-shit-we're-still-alive moments. After she got her bearings and calmed down, she took stock of the situation: she was still catching praise and adding to a quickly-growing legend...never mind the fact it wasn't one she set out to write at the start of all this.
She took a breath and patted the airframe of their prize like a horseman giving their favorite steed a little affection. "Lucky for us, we've even sandblasted it! That should make the Aeromasons happy, shouldn't it?" A little more thought on the topic, and she had some more to celebrate for the sake of her lost men. Nobody, it seems, drew blood on the clan Elduranda without their number tearing chunks out and bringing them home as trophies.
The Outrider and Rain's newly-acquired pinky finger flew down the massive tectonic rift for a couple dozen miles at a slower speed to let the engines cool down. Zand and Rain had now gotten a better idea of the thing's flying characteristics and began to push it further to the limits of its flight envelope, flying extremely slow and keeping a high angle of attack. It was lumbering, suffered from massive throttle lag and had a lot of inertia but it was still pretty fun to fly, especially with the victory it represented. Sigils of the Bullhead adorned its wings and sharp single rudder as well as what appeared to be registration codes, or at least some madened gibberish resembling a registration code.
Rain's control over the aircraft gradually began to degrade, however, and she noticed Zand's strings were beginning to fade. Zand quickly responded, asking Norte to come over to help the lady. Norte detached herself from the Outrider and took up Zand's position on the right wing, which freed the lightcasted to fly over to Rain and re-do her connections. This time she could do it properly, and thus linked all of Rain's body -her head, neck, torso, limbs, wings and spine- to different actuators of the Bullhead jet to make it much more comfortable to fly than with its previous 'finger yoga' input method. Zand then went on to do the same to Norte, linking them both so they could fly the jet together at which point it became almost trivial to maneuver the thing down the canyon. It felt quite fun maneuvering the aircraft together with a combination of its own flight surfaces and their improvised flap blowers, quite the victorious feeling compared to the earlier disaster. All the newly-acquired firepower in the jet even gave Rain some hope that she could still accomplish her original mission, not just escape and survive. Yet something was still bugging her at the back of her mind: Norte had just lost a ton of comrades and she surely must have been feeling pretty terrible.
"Lady Elduranda, I've spotted a tunnel spotted up ahead." The pilot of the Outrider reported. "Looks like it's been exposed by the fault, I'll go over and scan it."
"Please do. Report back with whatever you find interesting." That nagging thought was gnawing at Rain more and more. But how to approach it? Yes, Norte could be enthusiastic and blunt, but that just felt...wrong, to suddenly point such things out to a friend, especially one who had lost so many of her own for no good reason. Rain stumbled through it, growing oddly quiet and hesitant. She cleared her throat and looked over at Norte, eyes begging her wordlessly to start the uncomfortable conversation for her.
The outrider opened a datalink to Norte and moved up ahead to the mouth of the tunnel, which had gotten exposed when the ground cracked. It had gotten partially flooded with brine, which poured out of the open mouth of the tunnel like a small waterfall. Only one side was accessible as the other had collapsed so the pilot moved in closer, switching the Outrider to hover mode and pinging down the tunnel several times and at several frequencies to map out the insides. Rain and Norte's aircraft had no hover mode at all so instead they had to carefully nose it over and throttle it with expert precision to get it to tailsit in midair, matching the aircraft's mass and its thrust precisely while compensating for the turbulent air that kept hitting it. Four of the remaining Suntouched moved over from the Outrider to help stabilize Rain's MacGyver'ed VTOL in the roll axis now that the ailerons had completely lost authority.
Keeping the aircraft balanced on its tail was quite hard and Norte was clearly concentrating on it. Eventually she looked over at Rain, though and asked "Can I be of service, my Lady?" with a tone that seemed to subtly hint that she knew what the issue at hand was.
"Yes, nothing major. Just a moment of your time." She took a breath and found no other words to delicately start the conversation with. "I'm sorry."
The data came in through the datalink: the tunnel actually led to a pretty vast underground complex, large and complicated enough that even the radar signal faded out and became indistinguishable in the distance. Many parts of it were either obscured to the radar or had collapsed but they could still tell that there was a series of large underground hangars up ahead. Judging by the fact the entire thing hadn't collapsed from the colossal earthquake, it seemed to have been built on either solid bedrock -a rarity on Aphanizomen- or have gone some pretty extreme soil stabilization to hold it together. It was too large a work to have been carried out by the Bullhead, who according to the Blinkers were fairly recent arrivals. This had to be the Axiomatic base of operations in the planet, the project that the Blinkers had alluded to. And, so far, the best option to try getting back to her original quest of finding the anti-orbital targeting systems and perhaps uncovering a few secrets along the way. After all, the Blinkers had no idea they were there.
"I would be doing my friends a disservice if I allowed their passing to weaken me at a moment like this." Norte replied as a couple Suntouched moved in to begin scouting the tunnel. Both aircraft remained hovering in place, although Rain's was beginning to overheat without any ram air to cool itself down. They would have to land rather soon. "However... I'll tell you... I wish I could just say that I am at peace with their passing. I think when we reach relative safety I could use a few moments, both alongside you and by myself." She spoke in a tone that weaved between stoicism and a subtle melancholy. "The loss weighs on me."
Rain started looking around for anything to sit the plane's tail on and hoped that it wouldn't just destroy itself in the attempt. She'd grown to have more than a little gratitude for the thing. Binning it would just be an ignominious end to it.
"I understand," Rain said, feeling like a weight had been lifted from her own shoulders. Perhaps not lifted: maybe it was just because she now was able to bear it with Norte openly. "Will you permit your princess a part of that burden? We have the same thing to mourn, you and I."
"Of course I will, I think that my grief is not enough to do my Norteñas justice." Norte replied then went silent.
Having done some pretty complicated flying so far, the two decided they might as well cap it off with the most complicated flying possible: slowly taking the aircraft through the tunnel to land it in one of the underground hangars, where it would be safe from the acid rain as well as the rockfalls that were still happening from aftershock earthquakes. The tunnel was not tall enough for them to fly at a high enough angle to hover it into the hangar, which meant that they had to go for a much more complicated plan: it would fly at as high an angle as possible with its nose resting on the top of the Outrider, which was fully capable of hovering, and so it would make its way into the hangar. This required pretty much everyone to play a part; Zand continuously maintained Rain and Norte's filaments in perfect condition while all the Suntouched -including the returning scouts who reported no contacts- kept the two aircraft balanced on top of each other with cables.
The Outrider flipped upside down so that the much heavier aircraft could rest on its structurally-sound landing skid rather than crushing its back. Hovering upside-down with 30 tons of nuclear rocket lying on top of it was an extreme test of the Outrider's skill, especially as its thrusters vaporized the river of brine and reduced visibility to zero. It was strangely therapeutic, at least in the sense that it took up so much of the two Serstine noblewomen's concentration that they simply had no mental capacity left to feel deppressed from the recent loss and instead had to keep their minds on the task at hand -or explode and kill even more Suntouched. Guided by the Outrider's radar, the group of Serstine flew a hundred meters until finally reaching the hangar then carefully maneuvered the two aircraft around a pile of debris.
Alost 20 minutes after starting the maneuver, they finally managed to softly settle the Bullhead trophy aircraft on an elevated platform that hadn't been flooded with the help of improvised pulleys punched into the reinforced ceiling by the Suntouched. The Outrider then had to go all the way back to have enough room to flip itself over and then flew into the hangar once more to land itself near Rain and her Suntouched. For the first time since they arrived, jet and plasma engines were shut off and everyone took a moment to cool down and realize how indescribably exhausted everything had gotten them. Safety at last, the brine-flooded hangar with a completely toxic atmosphere felt almost homely after all they'd gone through.
Rain took in the relative silence, closing her eyes and letting the only noises be air cycling through her body and the bodies of her remaining retinue, the sounds of brine dripping from wherever it had been agitated, and their footsteps. She had a lot to take in. It would have been a lot for anyone to process.
The first thing Norte asked for once the dust had settled was a few moments by herself. Retreating to the other side of the hangar as everyone found elevated spots to slimp and fall asleep, Norte took it upon herself to perform the rites for her fallen companions. There were enough of them gone that the process took quite a long while, Rain fell asleep several times only to find Norte still at it, looking more and more tired each time but still dutifully inscribing the names and deeds of the fallen on the funerary ingot that would be handed to a Moontouched once they came back. Norte's flame was burning dimmer, more from exhaustion than anything else, but the three large nuclear reactors of the Bullhead interceptor gave her a heat source to keep her tungsten quill glowing red.
The latest time Rain woke up, she saw Norte perhaps weaker than she'd ever seem her. She just couldn't leave Norte to it this time, slowly making her way to her, the way someone might approach a scared cat for fear of it hissing or attacking. Wary that she needed this time, she stood where she was, close enough that hopefully Norte saw she was there if she needed her.
Without a word being exchanged for close to an hour of writing in the ignot -the heat from the reactor gradually lasted less and less as the Bullhead interceptor's engines cooled down- Rain and Norte felt like they were exchanging more emotions than ever. Just their proximity felt meaningful, not far enough for Norte to feel like she was being left on her own and not close enough that she felt Rain was intruding upon her reflections. Just right.
She eventually covered all six faces of the ingot with writing and had to cut it in half to make room for more but, after six hours of continuous rites and the burning of sacred incenses, Norte was done. She was free to talk and slump against the wall, shutting off her secondary motor functions to start giving some parts of her brain the rest that she was desperately craving. Despite that Norte was on the verge of simply falling unconscious from exhaustion, she kept herself awake with the same drive and willpower that an a quarter-day ago had been used to survive a barrage of nuclear warheads and a supervolcano explosion. She became quite talkative, sharing gossip and amusing anecdotes from the fallen to Rain with a theatrical flair and an expert use of narrative structure. Each of the fallen 15 Norteñas was the protagonist of an amazing story that Norte had to tell, the sheer passion Norte put into recounting the stories of her gang made Rain practically feel like she was watching a movie. Uproarious adventures in the "Mimikoan Jihad", raids on Mai communities, elaborate trolling operations in each and every rhizome, stream sniping Coronan influencers, extreme brushes with death, disagreements and petty catfights, Norte told it all. She made sure to humanize her companions as much as she could, refusing to have them be remembered as abstract heroes and generic paragons of virtue. Norte made sure Rain had a crystal-clear impression of who her clique had been in life, both the glorious and embarassing parts of it.
Rain could practically see it all. She hoped that the Moontouched would treat it with the reverence it was due - and if she could, she'd ensure it. The mayhem, the mishaps, the triumphs.
It hit her that she thought she knew people, but this retinue of Norte's, these people she found out she hardly understood, she truly knew. It was just a shame she had to know them after the fact.
She made a promise to herself to never miss another person like this, to be a part of that story while it's being written.
As soon as Rain fully caught on to each and every one of the fallen and the impression they had left in Norte, and Norte had properly verified that Rain had gotten the right feel for them, it was as if a switch had flipped in the Serstine retainer. She went from a dedicated and theatrical narrator to practically just slumped onto Rain's arms, her flame at the brink of extinguishing from sheer exhaustion.
"They were good people, my princess. A part of me is scared of telling ancnet they have passed. I don't want to make that many people sad." Norte said, nodding off (edited)
Rain quietly answered, "They were. But a story without its end is incomplete." And as Norte rest, Rain sat there, cradling her and being something for her to lie on.
With the perimeter secured and every vent on the hangar checked for activity, Norte and Rain finally fell asleep on each other. Outside, the massive aftershocks of the earthquake had only just began to calm down, leaving a long volcanic winter behind as well as torrential acid rain. There would eventually be time to explore the large underground complex, especially since such a psychotic nuclear outburst would require the Bullhead to reorganize its forces. For now the Serstine warlords could simply rest and recharge their energies.
Rain only became aware of how deeply she had slept after a few moments of waking up and reflexively rubbing her eyes. Suddenly she noticed there was skin on her face again and her arms had a smattering of carbon fiber patches and improvised repairs applied to them. She'd completely dozed through a full-blown reconstructive surgery, one which had fairly respectable results given the conditions. She was still nowhere near in top form but now she at least looked and felt like she could exert herself for a few more minutes without completely blowing up; the leading edges of her bigger wings and fins had been replaced along with the internal lining of her nozzles. The replacement parts were pretty obvious on her, instead of her stark whites and purples they were a deep, somewhat rusty-looking reddish brown. She recognized that color and immediately looked at the Bullhead fighter, confirming her suspicions once she saw that some of its fins and its airbrakes had been dismantled for parts. Next thing she noticed was the big, puffy velcro vest she was wearing, into which an umbilical cord went in that connected onto her abdomen right underneath her bust; the other end of this thick cable went into one of the reactors of the Bullhead interceptor.
"Oh! Your highness, you've awoken." One of the remaining Suntouched immediately knelt down near Rain as soon as they noticed she was moving. "Please try not to move to much, you're in a pretty sensitive state."
It was then that Rain noticed it wasn't just the Bullhead fighters' parts on her. She focused on her hand and saw it was Norte's, then as she looked at her legs and torso she saw many more of Norte's unmistakeable parts were now attached to her body, replacing the parts that had been shot off in the previous battle. She was starting to remember now, the two of them had suffered so much damage that the only way they'd been able to fly to relative safety was by holding each other. Now it appeared everything that was left functional in Norte's body was transplanted to hers, which immediately got her worried about where Norte actually was. After a second she fond Norte a few feet besides her, and a chill went down her spine as she saw her slumping as little more than a hollowed-out shell surrounded by cables and broken ceramic. She seemed to be completely inert, not a single spark of her flame still remained on her body and large vital portions of her flame containment had been visibly removed. She tried to reach out for Norte, and a sort of reflexive sense of her own fragility ran across her body like a tremor. She was at a loss for words, frozen there, halfway towards reaching out a hand towards Norte. Her mouth hung open, her expression fell, and she let her body relax as she sighed, feeling defeated.
"...is it really just me, then?" she quietly asked nobody in particular. She looked down at herself and quietly asked if she really wanted to know. But she asked, and in her heart she braced for the answer.
"It's not ever going to be just you, my lady." Rain heard the reply, surprisingly crystal-clear considering that her ears had gotten blown to the point everything sounded muffled, in Norte's voice. She then felt two hands over hers, tightening a bit to comfort her and noticed they were actually Norte's gauntlets, attached to jury-rigged arms made of parts of both Serstine that were themselves attached to... her own shoulders.
It wasn't just the arms, too, all the Norte parts on Rain weren't just there as patchwork, they were all moving independently on their own. The Serstine princess suddenly felt herself shift around and get back to her feet without willing it, with her legs instinctively reacting to gain some balance and making her realize she had four legs in total now, only two of which she controlled directly.
"Princess Elduranda, we tried our best to bring you back online using parts of the Bullhead fighter but we just didn't have enough equipment or expertise to do it and made several mistakes along the way." The Suntouched informed while Rain kind of waddled around still trying to wrap her head around what exactly she could control. "We evaluated all possible options an-..."
"...And I just told them that if neither one of us is in condition to fly out then it's time to get creative." Norte replied, once again coming across much clearer than everything else Rain heard. "There's still one full Serstine between what's left of our frames, everything else that's left was just dead weigth." She stammered. "...try not to move too much, my lady, I'm also still trying to get used to it."
Now that she was standing up, Rain could see that Norte's frame besides her was missing the back of its skull and her upper spine. There was some bloody gauze and medical instruments left in the skull cavity, like it had been used as a garbage bin after whatever Frakenstein scene had unfolded while she was asleep.
"My brain's in the backpack." Norte used one of the arms she controlled to grab Rain's wrist and gently move her so she could feel the aerodynamic pod that was now attached to her back, salvaged from one of the Bullhead jet's jammers. Salvaged cabling and hydraulic lines were now circulating blood to it while a neuroptic connection was jacked onto the base of Rain's skull. "As for my flame... well, I must apologize for intruding this much upon your personal space but it's right next to yours."
It then hit Rain that the color of her flame coming out of her exhausts was in fact an exact combination of her bluish tone with Norte's paler color.
She kept moving carefully, slowly as she realized what Norte had proposed. It was like looking at her shell for the very first time all over again. She gawked just a bit - she couldn't help it. The colors of their two flames danced and swirled around one another as she steadied...themselves...and felt the strange sensation of resting her weight on four legs rather than two. She had to admit, it wasn't the weirdest sensation, she had boosters for a while that were long enough that she could just rest her weight on their bottom tips, and she could get used to that again. Once the two of them were whole, that is.
She took it gently. "...thank you, Norte. Forgive me for not quite knowing how to repay you at this moment, but know that you'll get yours in due time for all you've done so far." Rain decided not to test herself too much and feel out how well Norte was coming with getting used to this new gestalt body. "How long have you been awake?"
"My lady Rain Elduranda, to be by your side and fuel the fire that drives you is its own reward." Norte hugged her with the arms she controlled, which from the outside just looked like Rain was hugging herself all of a sudden. A lot of Norte's mannerisms and reflexes had carried over to this new gestalt body, the most noticeable to Rain was the fact that all thrusters to her right side were firing slightly more intensely. For a Serstine, Norte had always been awfully imbalanced both aerodynamically and kinetically, what with the huge gauntlet she always carried with her; rather than getting rid of her precious mistralium whips Norte had gradually and unconsciously shifted her flame's output to the right. Now she'd become so accustomed to it it had even carried over to the gestalt, keeping a subtle slant on her output and causing Rain to have to lean in to the additional thrust that Norte provided.
"I've been awake for an hour or so, I believe." Norte replied. "Although, to tell you the truth, you were still sleeping so I had no way to tell the time. You're the one with eyes after all."
"Lady Elduranda!" Rain heard a sobbing voice from behind her before getting pushed around. When she looked back she saw her lightcaster, Zand, prostrating herself before the Serstine princess with tears running down her face. A very open display of regret, considering that she had to consciously open her cybernetic tear ducts like most Serstine. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
"Whoa, whoa, you're pushing us!" Norte said, speaking through a tiny speaker attached to her brain jar.
"I will say the surgery didn't quite go as expected." Norte said, this time sending her speech directly to Rain's auditory system rather than speaking it out loud. "She burned my cerebellum off, we should have brought a fleshmith to be honest." Norte paused for a second and then tightened her hug. "...or maybe not. I enjoy the closeness, Lady Rain."
Rain laughed. "There must be..." She had to cut herself off as she was already trying to consciously maintain balance, and even more so when Zand prostrated herself and apologized over and over and she had to bend down a bit to address her. She tottered to one side and then countered with a little thrust to right herself. "...erm. Apologies of my own. There must be some way we can share such a bond in the future without needing such a literal connection. I have felt on occasion that my secondary reactors have had a mind of their own already, so in a way this is the logical conclusion to that. Wouldn't you say?
And with that...Zand, up." She paused and saw, wow, she was going to town on this. "Up. We are alive, functional - to at least an acceptable degree - and able to go from here. To accompany us from here will make it up to me enough." Rain turned around and regarded their surroundings more closely, now that she was more lucid and getting a good idea of her bearings. "Now what's next?" Then a thought occurred to her as memories of being briefly turned into a thermonuclear NEFP flashed through her head. If that wasn't just happening right on their heads, then... "...or is that better said as 'what's left?'" She fretted.
"Understood, my Lady" Zand nodded and sniffled, getting back up and flaring her thrusters for a moment as she regained her composture. Now that they were all back up and running, the rest of the Serstine troop - 15 Suntouched who had come down along with the fighter jet, gathered around Rain to give their reports.
"We've scouted the area, lady Elduranda." One of them said then pointed at the tunnel opposite to where they'd come from. "Looks like it isn't just a tunnel, there is a pretty expansive underground complex up ahead. Sections of it collapsed from the earthquake but ultrasound and photonic pulses tell me there's still a lot of it left standing. We've also analysed radioisotopes in the area, it seems this place was powered by a nuclear reactor that got scrammed. A pretty massive one."
"A nuclear reactor?" Norte noted. "If geothermal power alone wasn't cutting it in this place then whatever's inside must be pretty important."
"There's some good news for a change." Zand said, standing firm now. "On top of the radionuclides we've also detected some traces of Levantene in the air. There might have been dawnstone stored here... might still be."
Rain balked. "Dawnstone...now what might that be there for, I wonder?" She wondered that out loud, then smiled. That was more like it, something to get her back on track. Indeed, she was still alive and so were some of her closest. There was some trouble to get into ahead of them all and she was the one to lead them.
Naturally, she said all this and then some before taking point for them all.
"More nuclear fire and a prize waiting somewhere in the embers of a planetary inferno? Now if I was to ask myself if there ever was a scenario where one seemingly made a hole specifically for us to fill, metaphorically as one does, then this would be it. We were offered plunder and prizes for our aid, and this was before the Bullhead and..." Rain stumbled on her words a bit, but picked fitting ones. "...fate..." She could feel Norte's bile well up in her own throat. "...decided to run up a sizable bill. We will collect on this debt owed to us, and it is owed to us, and I can think of no better time to start than now. We go now, and reap glory from this tattered mess!"
Rain led the group of Serstine down the tunnel leading to the complex, thrusters flaring just enough to quickly dart ahead while still somewhat upright. She wanted to be the group's vanguard, her and Norte in this curious ad-hoc fusion, but she wasn't about to go rushing ahead unnecessarily into any more unwelcome surprises
Norte and Rain advanced together, fused as one. Nortain? Rorte? The two exchanged a few silent thoughts while walking point for their comrades, wondering what exactly they were now. It wasn't as simple as a voice in each other's head. With their flames intermixed, a lot of times Rain felt she was thinking with Norte's brain and vice-versa. Zand guaranteed that the two of them would still be able to get separated after it was over, but they still hoped that their memories and personalities weren't leaking too much into the other. At least, if there was ever someone who Princess Elduranda could tolerate being fused with in such a way it was Norte, particularly in a time of her life where she needed some support.
The tunnel split and split again into an increasingly labyrinthine expanse. A two-track maglev railway system had once serviced the underground complex, upon finding a train that had derailed during the earthquakes the Serstine princess and her party got their first taste of sweet, sweet loot. Perhaps the sweetest she'd ever gotten, considering the grueling trial she had endured to get to it. A literal trainload worth of superconducting magnets that had once kept the cars afloat, in the form of thousands of small linked elements like the transmission chain of a CVT. They quickly got to work in dismantling some of the train and Norte fashioned some of the polymorphic aluminium-niobium-molybdenum-vanadium-tantalum-boron-rhenium-titanium-nickel chain.
"There you go, princess. Not quite the jewels of Crown Elduranda but it will have to do." Norte told Rain. "I think it will be wise to leave a couple warriors in this train, they can work on dismantling more of it and take turns carrying back to the hangar. They'll serve as our rear guard while they do it."
"There is at least the story behind it all," she said, looking over the chain as it was being stripped. "I doubt they would refuse. Spoils are always a good reason to dawdle - the one time a Serstine might." Then she thought for a moment and added, "...not that I'm entirely discounting it, weirder things have happened to you or I before this, but...you don't imagine any of those top-heavy freaks survived all that, do you?"
"No computer components for us here, at least." Norte said as she and Rain pushed the door open to look at one of the cargo cars. Much to her disgust, a sludge of blood-saturated acid covered the floor of the wagon transporting multiple broken canisters. It reeked of death, although Norte and Rain were lucky enough that their current body lacked a "noumenal" sense of smell. They only got the notification that it smelled like death.
"Ew." Norte remarked, turning on a headlight to inspect the canisters, finding half-melted corpses inside them. "Yeah, ew. Looks like we got a cloning factory of sorts, with a giant nuclear reactor somewhere AND some dawnstone operation. Things are getting really interesting now."
Armored blast doors had been activated at several points in the maglev tunnel. Removing the meter-thick doors was out of the question, so the party had to repeatedly go for smaller and smaller technical passageways and secondary tunnels. At some points they were able to re-join the main line of the railway and continue as the blast had caused some of the rocket-activated blast doors to come off their rails and not close fully. The fit was pretty tight, however. Especially since unlike humans, Serstine had completely solid construction and couldn't squeeze through gaps much.
"I'm getting some... weird radionuclides. Fresh boron." Norte said as she and Norte found themselves barely able to fit through the gap of the blast door. "Maybe the reactor isn't fully scram-."
A hand, an enormous hand reached for them from the other side of the blast door and forcefully pulled them through into the black tunnel on the other side, ripping a few winglets in the purpose and pressing Rain's new tiara into her skull. Whatever had pulled them in quickly threw them at the opposite wall of the tunnel in one single quick motion, although with Rain's new body Norte found it easier to break their impact. They fell to the floor and... teeth. There were human teeth on the floor. The tunnel was full of them, bloodied human teeth, an incomprehensible ammount of them, so many that they covered the floor at least a foot high, their enamel dissolved by the acid fumes into a disgusting sludge.
While they were in shock of what they were seeing, the monstrous creature that had pulled them in grabbed the blast door and, in an immense show of strength, managed to close it a couple inches more to trap the Serstine princess and her retainer in.
"Lady Elduranda! Lady Elduranda!" Rain heard the calls of her Suntouched and Zand, who tried to squeeze themselves through the now-too-narrow gap to no avail.
"Ya alright, Princess?" Zand asked just as, on the other side of the door, Rain finally got a look at what had pulled them in. She wasn't alright.
--
Dark rumors had echoed in the damp halls of the galaxy's most impoverished and deccrepit asylums of the Tooth Fairy, the entity that acted somewhat as the Bullhead's debt collector. The Bullhead, bearer of insanity, only offered to shoulder the burden of schizophrenia, BPD, somatic symptom disorder and many other mental horrors in exchange for servitude. As long as the pact held, the torturous hallucinations would fade and screaming voices would fall silent, swallowed by the psychic black hole of the Bullhead. A relief so coveted that pushed normal impoverished men into fighting Serstine in the hydrothermal basin of Aphanizomen. Cowardice and mediocrity in duty would make these unfortunate wretches' mental torture return, but for those who not only broke their pact with the eldridtch axiomata but actively tried to rescue others from its all-destroying grasp something much worse was reserved.
The Tooth Fairy towered over Rain and Norte, big enough she used the cuirasses of normal troopers for pauldrons. This insanity-driven mountain of ceramic and muscle was covered in the sigils of the Bullhead and thousands of teeth embedded in her armor. From her shoulders and back extended two dozen or so boron control rods, giving her the spiked look of a sea urchin and maintaining control over the... thing that glowed in her chest. It wasn't The Flame, it was like a sick parody of it. Fission instead of fusion, the blue glow of ionizing radiation shone through the gaps in her faceless armor.
"Oh, FUCK!" Norte shouted. "What the fuck is that?! WHY the fuck is that?"
Showing agility that could only be possible through some magical or psionic enhancement, the Tooth Fairy reached for and struck with her weapon: the head and spine of an axiomatic Paradox Hunter, using it as a flail. It struck the ground right near Rain as they dodged, sending teeth flying all over.
"Oh, good, so that thing is..." Rain grabbed for her tiara and tried to yank it back into shape as she watched its moves, eyes tracking the flail. "...real!" She decided to focus on keeping her distance and trying to keep Norte calm, hoping she'd spool her killer instinct back up if she was balanced. Then, she assumed a fighting stance and continued with what she knew.
"I've heard the stories from some of our more...adventurous...circles. Our youngest, most reckless soldiers out on rides far from the fleet pieced together the story of a monster of some kind; the accounts they picked up all sounded like the same sort of creature. I must say, she's bigger than I thought."
Tooth fairy slowly paced towards them, each thunderous bootstep echoing in the empty hall. Besides the disturbing piles of teeth that were everywhere, there were also four maglev trains sitting side by side, the one closest to them had been lifted off the tracks. This appeared to be a switchyard or maintenance depot for the maglev line that ran through the underground complex, turned into the nightmarish apparition's personal hideout.
She swung her gigantic flail in slow circles. In the first swing she quickly and ferociously struck, which was enough for Norte to snap back into the fight and boost herself for a dodge. In the same movement she sprayed Tooth Fairy with her gauntlet-mounted gun at near point blank range but the ceramic carapace that covered the behemoth barely dented.
"The moment we get split off from our AT boys this had to happen!" Norte dashed back to avoid another swing from the flail, then Rain had to think quick and strafe the ground in front of her to avoid shots of laser fire. As it turns out, the disembodied paradox hunter's head still had its laser fully functional.
"You think her being here has something to do with whatever the installation is hiding?" Norte asked.
The answer became rather apparent as Norte and Rain were surprised when they felt their leg grabbed by a hand coming from the churning piles of teeth. With a gesture from Tooth Fairy, dozens of near-skeletal humanoid creatures began emerging from the ground to grab onto Norte and Rain, their jaws torn open exposing bloodied and toothless mouths. The Deserters, traitors to the will of the madness-thirsting deity. It was all way, way more literal than Rain thought it was going to be, and the only explanation for the insanity that was starting to take place was that there HAD to be something reality-warping about this place.
"Nevermind, it definitely does." Norte spun around while deploying her nightstone whip, slicing all the deserters to bits and causing them to disappear back into the mass of teeth... which seemed to be getting deeper. More teeth were starting to pour in from somewhere, they couldn't tell. "This is beyond everything I was told about the Bullhead, my princess. Something must be empowering this pandemonium."
Tooth Fairy then stepped forward and plunged her hands onto the ground, pulling two heavily-armored Bullhead shock troopers with their autocannons at the ready. They seemed to be dead; armor riddled with shell holes and old blackened blood staining the joints of their armor. Yet they stood puppetteered by an invisible force and moving on the Serstine princess at the command of the large apparition.
Rain licked her lips. Something she could kill, before working her way up. "I've heard stories, if you want me to discuss tactics," she told Norte. "Anything could help us, and everything has a weakness!" She demonstrated by bounding at one of the shock troopers and trying to keep them from landing a hit by tracing dizzying patterns and picking up speed. "Be another set of senses, Norte. See what I miss!"
The fighters opened up, muzzle blasts from their twin-barrel autocannons being enough to light up the entire switchyard and make Rain and Norte notice that the additional teeth were pouring in from cracks on the roof. "This train!" Norte said as they dodged under the train held up by the lift. "If we could pull the big one underneath it, my whips could drop the machine on top of her!"
For now, however, the three held a mostly static formation. Tooth Fairy moved to keep the troopers between her and the Serstine.
"That'll do. Off we go!" She fired her boosters and decided to go in long back-and-forth patterns, occasionally closing into one line trooper or the other to blast them with some of her boosters point-blank. The idea was simple, and she ran Norte through it as they went:
"There must be one way to get them to shuffle, and that would be to kill one of the smaller ones," she said in between skidding across the ground, sending sparks everywhere in her wake as she expertly dove them under a burst of autocannon fire. "They try to reposition, we capitalize by forcing the Tooth Fairy's path underneath our target. It will require some expert timing on our part, but how much more synchronized can the two of us get?"
"That sounds good, my lady, I know how to do that!"
Norte's first intuition was to bait the autocannon fire closer to her by dodging in and out of one of the troopers' field of fire. After a third time -and when the train she was taking cover behind looked like a piece of swiss cheese- she and Norte dashed sideways then up, attracting a long burst of fire from the undead line trooper's autocannon. They aimed to fly directly above them, taking advantage that with the heft of the autocannon and the trooper's armor it would be very hard to aim the weapon vertically to keep up with their movement. This allowed them to outrun the line trooper's aim as it ended up shooting directly above itself, causing large pieces of the ceiling to come off and land on him.
While the trooper's heavy armor did not get damaged much by the debris, its ammunition belt broke, giving Rain and Norte an opportunity.
"That one's gun is jammed, let's go!"
Rain picked up speed and decided to go circling the Tooth Fairy. It was trying to keep space, and having her circle would, she hoped, force her to circle accordingly. Even if she didn't, she wanted to keep that speed up. If they shot again and tried to lead, she'd simply brake and change direction or double back. Just enough to keep Tooth Fairy circling, quick and efficient.
It took over an hour, a practically monolithic amount of time for Serstine, to defeat the Toothfairy, its huge fission powered form taking repeated hit after hit as it fought the Suntouched and the combined form of Rain and Norte. Losses had been heavy, and the things giant form had been so damaged enough that it had been forced to withdraw, its blue glow animating from the tunnels that it now withdrew down, covered by its own Bullhead Pointmen that had arrived to try hold the Serstine back. Despite how hard they had fought; the thing had eluded them. Still the pointmen did not last long against their blinding speed, and in short order the group discovered their objective. A huge Dawnstone capacitor with attendant computer systems, deep within the semi shattered complex the titanic power cables seemed to have survived the earth upheaval and were continuing to provide power to the anti-orbital weapons. Despite being guarded, without the Tooth fairy the Pointmen and other forces stood no chance as the Serstine danced around them, cutting them down and sabotaging the large capacitor and its cables. Already the Bullhead would know of its defeat here, and that meant one thing.
Swiftly escaping the underground confines, the shockwaves from the explosives almost instantly took the AO guns offline, something which was swiftly followed by the blinding flash of nuclear explosives, as Bullhead tried to take down the Serstine in its own defeat. But it wasn’t enough, climbing high into the sky to their own aircraft the deed was done. The planet was open to Axiomatic forces. And Rain and Norte had managed to, albeit not unscathed, survive the actions of their now dead insane allies.
The UNE Forces had been gathering their forces and preparing for more colonization efforts while Bounty Hunter Rygaz Aral ran for Clan Spars hoping to fall upon the good mercy of Chieftain Ayo Spars. However, a force of 5 Knights sitting in a small passive scout craft with a decently sized armory came upon an Axiom force fighting the Bullheads on the world of Aphanizomen. These 5 knights and their small crew were under the command of Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis who observed the situation from the 200m scout craft
At the edge of the system of Melara, getting only a faint pale glow from the distant star that shone upon the rocky and uninhabited worlds of the inner system, the knights witnessed a scene that had become surprisingly unfamiliar since the end of the war. Two of Shifting Mirrors' own; the fearsome capital ships known as the Cardinals that had hitherto laid waste upon many fleets and vessels across the galaxy. Even to someone not familiar with them the two ships stood out as being strikingly distinctive; rather than looking like a regular capital ship with thick bulkheads and many turreted guns, the Cardinals (or "blinkers" as they were popularily known) were not unlike two massive tetrahedral rockets. They stretched over 20 kilometers in length and their triangular base was studded with several hundred engines packed into a tight cluster, a gravitic and energy signature that was practically off the charts radiated from the two vessels, making them easy for Thamelis' men to distinguish from the cosmic background and the various inert objects that orbited Melara.
The two enormous vessels, which other factions would have recognized as being Type IIA-class blinkers, were floating side by side and connected by multiple refueling bridges. High-purity ancerium hyperfuel flowed from one of the ships to the other, equalizing their loads after an unsuccesful attack on the highly-volcanic inner world world of Aphanizomen. With the ships' sophisticated sensor suite it was not long before the small Nezerian craft was detected and identified.
"Please accept our humble greetings, o unknown subject of our most charitable welcome." The blinkers transmitted in unison. "We are Hermeneutica and Empirica. Two humble members of the Cardinal Fleet of our dearmost lady Shifting Mirrors. Please forgive any uncouthness or lack of hospitality on our part, we mourn a brother that is not here to witness your wonderful arrival. How may we be of help, o mysterious travelers?"
One of the communications crewmen had looked up at Thamelis' sniper, Brother Andrei Vengerov, who just shrugged in his power armor waiting for Thamelis' response who begins calculating the situations potential ramifications before responding. "Greetings unknown aliens" the sergeant said neutrally "I am Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis, a warrior of the Galactic Knights Frontier legion's 10th company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter ad my battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolii Gratcheva, Zenon Ortiz of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force. What be the situation here?" his voice was still neutral while he nods once to the Helmsman in the tightly packed bridge compartment who triggers maneuvering thrusters into a better directed position to the blinkers ships that feels less....angled and discomforting
"Our most heartfelt greetings to you, Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter and unto your battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolli Gratcheva and Zenon Ortis." The two blinkers replied, once again transmitting in an exact unison to the point they were even taking their relative signal offset into account as the small Nezerian craft floated around the gargantuan Axiomatic warships. As the Nezerian ship positions itself relative to the two craft, it finds itself slightly pushed around by the extremely potent engines of the warships, which even while idling are creating a significant amount of high-frequency energy waves.
"We warn you, dear visitor, the situation in this accursed system of Melara is far from what we would have wished you to encounter. We are only recently back from attempting to disable an anti-orbital battery in Aphanizomen, the third world of this system. It holds something quite dear to our most respected lady Shifting Mirrors and, as her chosen warriors, we were entrusted to recover it from the ground forces of the paradox known as the Bullhead."
Thamelis looked to his brothers who glanced back and nodded signifying they trusted him and the crew all gave the sign of fealty that they took upon joining the legion auxiliaries which is a fist to chest in a diagonal manner as opposed to the Knights own Draconic Salute which is crossing your flat hands over each other at the wrists against the chest so it appears like wings against the chest. Thamelis responded yet again this time with an inquiry
Thamelis: "And what might this something be? and who're your people or empire?"
On the internal fireteam communications net hidden beneath layers upon layers of firewalls, auto-rewriting encryption algorithms, hunter-killer anti-hacking algorithms or HKAH, and interference were the voices of Thamelis' brothers heard only by him via synaptic neural uplink that could be cut at any time by Thamelis should it get hacked and infested so he doesnt get mentally jacked as well.
Andrei voiced an inquiry to the Sergeant saying "Sarge are ya sure this is a good idea?. They're xenos, what have xenos ever done for us save pilfer our fur and use us for food?" to which Hannus vehemently replied instead of Sergeant Thamelis with "The Sergeant knows what he's doing so shut up Andrei" which was then followed by Ortis sighing and trying to calm them down before Thamelis sent a high energy synaptic neural burst along the connection straight into their Direct Neural Interfaces or DNIs which shot down their spines and through their nervous systems jolting them into stunned silence. Ortis then said "Was that necessary sir?" and got a response through the telepathic and technological link which was a "Yes" without necessarily speaking aloud as if he did it'd carry into the Blinkers comms array
Upon refueling to a proper level, the blinkers then began routine test-firing of their hundreds of engines. Compared to all but a few very recent starships in the galaxy, it was quite striking how much the Cardinals were just a gigantic cluster of engines. The gravitic thrusters took up what looked like a full half of the ship's total volume and the feeding system for the cluster of nozzles was so energetic its layout could almost be felt from outside the ship each time the hyperfuel was cycled through it. One did not have to be a naval architect or a military intelligence analyst to guess that these vessels were built for pure straight-line speed, a striking contrast to the relatively sluggish Type I blinkers that had made the Axioms famous in the galaxy.
"Oh, have you not heard of us?" Heuristica and Empirica replied. Their synthetic, genderless voices were devoid of gender and spoke in a completely academic dialect of the Lingua Galactica yet their actual intonation was full of emotion. In this case, surprise. "Oh how honored is the memory of our cherished brother Numismatica, for his death was the omen for the arrival of truly new visitors. Blessed be Numismatica, blessed be you, blessed be Melara for ten thousand years to have permitted us to be in this occasion of wonderment. We are Cardinals, two warships belonging to the military fleet of Axiom Shifting Mirrors. It is to the service of her and those like her that we give our loyalty and Numismatica has given its life. Perhaps the easiest way to tell us who we are is to tell you who we are not. We are not, dear visitor, sentients of flesh and bone like you but rather of information. I offer my apologies well in advance if my ignorance has made me commit a transgression against your privacy but I have done a Fourier transform analytic of your voice's sound patterns and deduced that you are a biological sentient of flesh and bone. By contrast, we and the rest of the Axiomata are computerized beings."
Thamelis was shocked behind his helmet and the telepathic connection carried it to the other Knights but beyond that they didnt react. Andrei considered saying something snarky but decided against it due to the fact he'd be telepathically overwhelmed and dominated by his Sergeant. Thamelis looked about the command space before replying but in the back of his mind he felt conflicted and confused even with the support of his brothers. Thamelis' reply was simple and short "Interesting, do you require assistance?. I believe cooperation is most beneficial to two sapient species, especially in first contact, wouldn't you agree?"
Once the fuel was finished transferring from Heuristica to Empirica, the latter blinker began retracting its refueling probes, one by one as each subsequent fuel tank was filled. As per usual, a test of the blinkers' maneuvering thrusters was next, causing them to kick each other into a very slow clockwise rotation. It was this rotation that showed off more of the Axiomatic ship's features to Thamelis and his colleagues, including the four heavily-reinforced spherical devices close to the middle of the ship as well as what looked like a huge array of gravitic lensing devices running the length of the ship, up to a muzzle at its very tip. The ships were painted rather distinctively: black and white stripes running all over the length of the vessels with only the faint orange glow of heat vents and radiators breaking up those two colors.
"O stranger and visitor of this unfortunate system, how much do we wish that we could make up for the sheer honor that could cause you to offer such a thing to us." The two ships replied. As they rotated, the Nezerian ship could nevertheless see that they were being tracked by its optoelectronic sensors and some other optics that appear to be lasers built into the hull. "How we wish that we could tell you that we are not in need of assistance and that our time is better spent learning about each other and making this first contact into the celebration it should be... but I believe it would be disrespecting the memory of our brother Numismatica for us to deprive us of the truth. In days gone by, when our brothers and sisters were more united, the entities currently polluting the world of Aphanizomen with their presence would have been promptly dealt with and their encampments eliminated but I have to admit, with pain in my heart, that I we do not possess the assets to get rid of them."
"Do you see that?"
"We see much, my lady. All that the sun touches, the Boost kisses, and guides for flight forever."
"..."
"Lady Rain?"
"Akina, they're not exactly hanging on our every word right now. You can drop the formalities."
"Well, thank you, Lady."
"Not to mock, but you sound downright bizarre when you get flowery."
"Likewise, Rain."
The two Serstine shared a chuckle as they looked off across the bridge of the Bladeship Ragged Edge, witnessing moving lights that their ship was rapidly gaining on ever since it had burst out of the wormhole they took to the area. She was more of a royal sloop than a warship, perhaps, but Ragged Edge was still the part of a proper fighting ship, a frigate that was all long, sharp edges roughly in the shape of a katzbalger festooned with thrusters and gun ports. Copper lines ran up her hull and patterns marked just who this belonged to: Rain Elduranda, daughter of Amatino Elduranda, warlord and leader of her clan. Rain was a young Suntouched, covered all over her spindly, thruster-covered body with power bulges giving her a shapely silhouette underneath plasma thrusters and majestic deployable wings, ornaments grafted to her airframe, the spoils of skirmishes and treasure hunts that gifted the princess that most coveted resource in Serstine society - honor.
So it was that she stood on the bridge next to Akina Fukuda, equally young Boost Shaman in training, running fast and far ahead of the Elduranda clan's main fleet, blasting in from a wormhole to find herself en route to Aphanizomen. It wouldn't be long before the Ragged Edge was right beside these ships going their way.
The UNE Vessel remained on a relative course to the Blinkers Starcraft when the Sensor Officer called out new sensor contacts and Thamelis had muted his side of the communications line to talk to his crew "New TDRS contacts Sergeant. Distance: Extreme, Xenos craft sir" The sensor officer said and Thamelis replied with an irritated sigh "as if we needed a 3rd party. Keep our distance stable and keep the communications line open. Try and see how large that ship is, its distance, speed, heading relative to us, and any potential reactor output fed to weapons in case we need to beat a hasty retreat. A Cutter let alone a Scout Cutter cant even take on larger ships alone." He got a series of snappy and crisp replies as he unmuted the comm-channel and awaited a reply
The Ragged Edge gained on the ships as she proceeded. Rain could see where this was going, but got curious as they approached.
"Shall we match speed for a moment?" she ordered. "It wouldn't hurt to let some fellow travelers know we're here. Besides..." Everyone's gaze fell on the Blinkers. "...I sense a kindred spirit on our way."
The bridge crew seemed to agree, looking at the masses of thrusters slowly spinning around each other.
"Rain, look. Another ship," Akina said. "Part of their retinue, perhaps?"
"Hail them," Rain replied. "Let's find out. Tell the helm to get alongside them and match speed."
It was quite a sight, the long, elegant Bladeship coughing her front thrusters to slow down with an effortless blast of plasma. Little adjustments sent the ship slowly rolling and pulling in off to the side of the group.
The Crew of the scout cutter grew tense weapons passively tracking the void of space as the TDRS went wild with the theta contacts only for Thamelis to order its warning notifier shut off. Thamelis was understandably annoyed but he wasnt about to open fire on clearly peaceful people
The Communications Officer gave a callout and said "Sergeant the alien ship is hailing us sir" and Thamelis replied "Open channel, personal viewscreen" and as such a video feed of a power armored warrior came up on the unknown contacts means of viewing the targets of their hails. The helmet is an odd design based around a clearly wolfish head and has 2 blue vision slits like an old medieval helmet. The chest plate was rough, industrial, hard-edged, and looked like it could take a beating but meshed perfectly seamless with the other plates that seemed to conform to the other armored plates segmented shifts. There didnt seem to be any clear weaknesses one could discern for a blade to strike. In fact it had more resemblance to plated armor only designed in the best way possible without restricting movement all too harshly
Thamelis responded to the hail calmly through his helmets communicator "Greetings unknown aliens what brings you to this patch of space?" his voice was rich with power and strength and commanded attention in its own manner
Rain appeared on the Nezerians' end of the hail. From a glance it was clear that not an inch of her body was entirely natural, and not just the metallic parts. Anything that looked like flesh was too even and consistent to be totally natural, and Rain's mahogany skin tone betrayed an engineered softness, like she was a car with a matte finish to the paint, although it flexed and stretched like normal flesh as she spoke.
"To travel, of course, fast and far as a Serstine can," she started, her patter unnaturally quick, and only gaining speed as she continued to talk. "The home fleet of the Elduranda clan behind, chasing, as we all are, the Holy Boost and the Lightmother's stellar footsteps, with I, Rain Elduranda, at their head. Do you travel this path with your companions, which are now our companions for the moment as we are all flying abreast of one another, or in any case, in roughly the same direction to map the endless tapestry we draw such streaks across? Or perhaps business with worlds in this sector is your objective, in which case, I wish you fortune and that you may be equipped for the challenges ahead, in whatever direction you vector next."
Rain stopped as if she was expecting applause.
"...and you are?"
The Knight was a silent 8'7" monster of armor and muscle despite her not being able to see under his warplate. He looked at her in silent contemplation analyzing the response with the criticality of a machine or perhaps....a tactician gauging his enemies response by their words. However, he wasn't here to start a fight and instead spoke calmly and neutrally while the crew sat their about the compact bridge space in silence "I am Sergeant Remurus Thamelis, Veteran of the Tempest Ravens Chapter's 10th company of the Frontier Legion's galactic Knights 63rd frontier defense corps in command of Scout Cutter 34B alongside my battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolli Gratcheva and Zenon Ortis. We're here to scout the stars for potential colonial expansion and allies which is how we met these......machines...." he said in response although he hid his inherent distrust and caution of the Axiomatic forces with expert care
The blinkers intervened little during the exchange besides split off some of their sensors to look at the newly-arrived vessel. While the first contact with the Nezerians had been the source of much rejoicing for Hermeneutica and Empirica, seeing the Serstine show up was a bit of a mixed bag. Their bladeships were quite beautiful to observe, even smaller ones like this and they were doubtlessly an interesting culture with many quirks. The downside was that the Axiomata themselves were usually on the receiving end of these quirks, especially the second-generation blinkers that sometimes found themselves ambushed during maintenance and looted for their high-performance engines. There wasn't even any state or central government that the Axioms could complain to, bands of Serstine came and went across the galaxy and trusting them to be anywhere near powerful rocket engines was like entrusting an overweight child with cake.
Luckily, at least for now, the two blinkers were very much in position to start shooting back if they tried stealing their gravitic rocket engines. The Ragged Edge's small size and royal decor seemed to indicate that for once this wasn't a team of Serstine looters trying to get their hands on their machinery.
"Oh, it's the Serstine." The two blinkers said, scanning the Ragged Edge's side. "Salutations to you, Princess Rain of Elduranda, daughter of Amatino of Elduranda. What joy does your presence bring to what would otherwise have been a dreary occasion for us. We are Type-IIA Cardinals Hermeneutica and Empirica at the service of her Axiomatic Majesty Lady Shifting Mirrors. We observe that you have had the gracious opportunity to, like us, meet the most honorable Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter and his battle brothers Andrei Vengerov, Eric Hannus, Anatolli Gratcheva and Zenon Ortis."(edited)
"As with him, we must warn you that this area is treacherous. Our presence here is owed to the loss of an Axiomatic installation in the world Aphanizomen, third of Melara. We were tasked with destroying the anti-orbital defenses that have been taken over by the occupiers yet, without the help of our much beloved and gracious brothers in the Ordinal Fleet, we have no ground forces to help in the task. We attempted to attack the site ourselves but were not succesful."
"A pity," Rain replied, her regal bearing betrayed by some quite sincere body language - the idea of such visible power helpless in the face of that sort of thing was something no Serstine liked to contemplate.
So naturally, she said as much and then some at that same breakneck pace.
"A pity, for we've admired your kin for our paths converging, if too closely in places, it must be said, and the thought of such powerlessness in the face of such mighty thrust and fineness of form is one I would wish on none I can name, nor picture. If I may, the good Sergeant and his battle brothers seem prepared for violence should it happen upon us, and what's more, you see before you a band of Serstine willing to repay similar unkindness should it happen upon us as we pass.
Are you perhaps waiting for support? You sound as if your 'Ordinal' kin are beyond your reach for whatever reason, another vexing matter that I wish on none - power and powerlessness asymptotic, cruelly paradoxical indeed."
The Knights were confused despite easily comprehending what they were both saying. Sergeant Thamelis spoke once again intending to aid both forces. "Perhaps me and my brothers can form a strike force upon the anti-orbital guns. I carry a high energy plasma flash warhead and we have quite a few explosive devices in our armory. The trick is finding the guns and duramagnetically locking the charges to the armor and setting them off then getting the blazes out of there. It also depends on enemy force composition" he said as he thought about how he could get his troops in but he'd need to see the enemies defensive layout first
"Infinite be the blessings upon you for such a majestic display of selflessness, Sergeant Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter." The blinkers replied, not breaking their synch. In fact they kept their sync so well that their transmissions overlapped over both the Nezerian and Serstine spacecraft.
"Well, if you and her Royal Highness Rain of Elduranda, Daughter of Amatino of Elduranda, can graciously spare a few minutes for these two servants of Lady Shifting Mirrors to get you up to speed, we can describe the situation in better detail."
The two blinkers began emitting a datalink stream containing holographic diagrams of the volcanic planet of Aphanizomen. The planet was dominated by a single huge continent rayed by active faultlines, its single tiny ocean was almost a speck in the northern subtropics.
"There are in fact eight neutralino cannons defending Aphanizomen. They are all buried aproximately one mile beneath the surface in the equator and protected by multiple layers of bulk metallic glass. I do not recommend that you try to destroy these weapons. However, as they are buried underground, the weapons require targeting to be provided by 4 sensor sites. We've managed to destroy 3 of them, meaning the defensive coverage is greatly reduced but there is still one remaining."
Rain nodded, gesturing to proceed with a deep curtsy, letting the lights on the bridge catch her and make her gleam and sparkle with the trophies of countless adventures.
"Buried monsters whose eyes poke up from the ground and must be poked out? Picturesque, positively fairytale fodder for its elegance - and danger. And once this last eye is plucked this threat shall be blinded, unless whoever holds its leash decides to fire it blindly in the hopes any target should be a valid one, am I correct?"
"If it is the case that the final eye is poked out, as your royal highness Rain of Elduranda, Daughter of Amatino of Elduranda has put it..." The two blinkers noted "...then it would become trivial for the two of us to finally silence those guns and eliminate the occupying forces"
Thamelis thought to himself "Whatever i am getting into i pray to the emperor its the right choice." and nodded on the screen "Acknowledged. I can get a strike force into the last sensor site with the plasma warhead and finish it off. The only trick to that being getting there undetected even with the other 3 are knocked out. Any sensible ground army even with most of its strongest sensor systems knocked out will compensate with more if given the time to prepare and bring them online. That also brings me to my next question: How strong are their military forces?" Thamelis asked voicing his concerns to the threat his battle brothers would most assuredly face on the ground
"If we are to go into specifics, the force occupying Aphanizomen is comprised of ten thousand personnel with over 200 dedicated armor-hunter hovercraft, 720 troop transport hovercraft, 55 long-range artillery pieces, 4 batteries of intercontinental ballistic missiles, a dozen or so heavy gunships and an unindentified number of light auxiliary forces. Bear in mind that while this force might sound overwhelmingly large, it is spread out over the entire surface of Aphanizomen and therefore won't all defend at once."
The blinkers paused for a moment, powering their gyros to begin turning their optics towards the distant planet.
"But nevertheless we must warn you, traveler. The ground force that has invaded Aphanizomen belongs to the Bullhead. The Bullhead is a being much like ourselves or rather... much like a fragment of ourselves. It is a wretched and damaged creature condemned to a miserable existential condition yet at its core it is a ferocious military strategist equipped with sophisticated and lethal weaponry. The Bullhead sows terror wherever it goes, adapting and evolving its tactics and equipment as it survives like a virus or a parasite preying on inhabited planets. It makes extreme and constant use of nuclear weaponry at the slightest provocation and whatever trace of sentience that remains in the Bullhead's soldiers is purely for tactical operations... They are bloodthirsty, cannibalistic beasts otherwise.
We understand you completely should you continue along your path... but should you decide to help us retaking Aphanizomen I believe we can offer compensation in the form of both liquid currency and exotic materials."
The thought very quickly turned itself over in Rain's head. Enough material to make a fine victory trophy of another component of herself? Or perhaps...she eyed the Blinkers. Materials to survive thrust to allow a ship to rival these new machines, perhaps. Either way, she was on the rise, the galaxy was her oyster. Victory and the chance to build on the legacy of her mother awaited. She could only say one thing.
...several things, which all amounted to the same thing.
"For renown alone would I accept such a challenge, but for reward I find your offer intriguing. This enemy is daunting, but let them taste the sun carried on the footsteps of a Serstine, and should they have the faculties to register that something that fast hit them then even then they would still ask. Holes in walls loom large when you move as one of us does - not literally you understand, there is merely more opportunity to pass through gaps in a defense when they present themselves - as the bolide bursts burning through the atmosphere, so too shall this 'Bullhead' be flattened when we dive in with the Boost driving us in! We go when the word is given!"
Thamelis simply shook his head at the seeming metaphors and theatrical speech in disapproval and booted up his personal terminals data receiver to analyze the Blinkers incoming information. He analyzed it for a moment with aid from his AI before proceeding to voice his plan "I'll get my men in via combat drop from the Aracuja class ultralight dropships for a high speed HALO insertion. Our suits are completely vacuum and environmentally sealed and we have thruster systems. Do you perhaps have data on the firing arcs blindspots?" the sergeant asked after stating what he intended to do
The two blinkers approved in unison and overlaid the schematics of the firing and sensor arcs on the map they had sent. All eight guns were displayed as having a completely 360° firing arc, capable of firing even through the planet itself, while the sensors were also shown as having near-total coverage save for a section in the southern hemisphere of Aphanizomen currently at daytime.
"We've pinpointed this blindspot in their sensors." The blinkers informed. "But the anti-orbital guns will shoot you long before you manage to position yourselves in there as they also have multiple underground neutrino detectors providing long-range detection. There is a way in however." The display then zoomed out to show Aphanizomen's large, tidally-locked moon Rivularia. Whereas Aphanizomen was a vast landscape of rainbow-colored hydrothermal sources, Rivularia was a pitch black, molten greenhouse inferno. "Aphanizomen's moon is quite geologically active, which means it is a source of geoneutrinos that blinds the planet's neutrino observatories. If you approach from behind the moon and quickly get in the sensor gap then you will be able to safely insert your troops. We will remain in position here to intercept any reinforcements that those acursed beings might call up."
Thamelis began to calculate probable trajectories in his mind with aid from his scout cutters computer systems and sent the data via telepathic connection to the Helmsman who had also begun to prepare a course. Thamelis wasnt sure if this'd work but by the gods and their holy Emperor he was going to complete this task. Andrei poured over the telepathically sent information in his psyche and nodded to Thamelis. Thamelis now spoke again "And what shall our....Serstine was it? allies be planning to do in attempt to aid our collective goal?" he asked curiously but in the back of his psychically gridlocked against intrusion and heavily indoctrinated and conditioned mind he held some reserved reluctance to working with the very aliens he was charged with annihilating if they came anywhere near his people without announcement as to whom they were. This completely shifted role conflicted with his very purpose but he'd meditate on it and contemplate the merits later...perhaps raise his concerns to Captain Alarus Saniel.....
Rain and the other Serstine at the helm all quickly discussed that approach information with one another. There was visible excitement as talk of such high-speed, precise entry being necessary apparently sounded not only doable, but evidently great fun.
Rain turned back to the others. "Insertion through this blind spot and beelines upon beelines seem to be the steps to which we can contribute best, a dive to the surface is where we can do the most damage - yes, from the moon to the ground as fast as we can, we are perfectly suited for such a course. The solution is speed of course, if you would prefer us to move with you then go ahead and we will catch up, but if you need a force to engage them first and tie them up so their observatories are all the more vulnerable then so be it, we can go as a vanguard."
There was one more of those pauses.
"That's all up to you, of course. This is your battleplan. Were it us we would go now but let's avoid complications."
After their lengthy refueling and engine testing sequence, the two blinkers finally began coming to life. They fired their engines in pairs to test them out fully before gradually accelerating away from the rendezvous point. "We will remain at least one lightminute away from the planet at all points, we fear that we are quite easy to track and fire upon by the orbital defenses due to our engine output. Nevertheless, should you need our assistance we would be more than willing to lend a hand."
Rain hailed Thamelis, and with the same blistering speed she addressed everyone else, told him her plan before immediately going to do it.
"As I previously mentioned, we shall dive towards the planet at best speed from this blind spot, and I shall be sending myself and a troop of my esteemed Suntouched to the surface of this planet, and where this Bullhead is, we shall strike and scatter them. I trust you can go as fast as possible to follow us, though few would possess such speed, perhaps the Blinkers would but we already know that, but assuming you can be near that fast, be near that fast and follow us. Best of luck to you, Sergeant Veteran Sergeant Remurus Thamelis of the United Nezerian Empire's Military Colonial Force Galactic Knights Frontier Legion's 10th Company from the Tempest Ravens Chapter, I assume I have that correct and I imagine I'm correct in that assumption, I anticipate seeing you in the air and later on the ground, and at some point after that, in battle!"
She then immediately closed her channel to prepare.
Serstine warriors, wherever they popped up across the galaxy, looked less like professional soldiers and more like a loosely-coherent warband of guys with guns, but Suntouched had a particular way around them that spoke volumes of their coherence far better than uniforms could. They moved like an organic creature made up of twenty-odd people, or a body of water, and when Rain got into the center of them, they all made room for her. Another Serstine, in brilliant red with silver hair and decorations that looked like roses all over her body, especially her head, walked up to Rain and raised a large, clawed gauntlet that gave her an asymmetrical look - her right arm was noticeably larger than her left. Rain returned the gesture, and they crossed forearms, fists clenched, swinging quickly enough to hit with an audible clank.
"Norte?" Rain greeted.
Norte grinned, practically sensing what was on Rain's mind. "My lady, nothing would please me more than another chance to do some damage in your name."
Rain returned a sly smile of her own. "Now what gives you the idea that I would summon you to wish harm done on another?"
"I know you, friend, and I know you rarely stop a ship for anything worthless, and even less rarely for strangers, and Blinkers, when they're looking. Which they are, so either we fight them, or we fight the strangers, or we fight...something else."
Rain nodded. "Something else indeed, yes. Take 20 of your Nortenas and be ready for ground combat. We will be vectoring for a planet known as Aphanizomen, through a sensor gap in a set of anti-orbital guns around its moon, Rivularia. The owner of those guns is a thing called the Bullhead, which is Axiomatic but not, are given over to nuclear weapons as a response to everything, and is also given over to fighting as a response to everything. Fighting and apparently eating one another, as the Blinkers did say 'cannibalistic' and Blinkers do not freely exaggerate, and will be destroying the anti-orbital guns' last sensor, leaving them to the mercy of the Blinkers. Our stake in this shall be, perhaps, the materials to rival a Blinker's thrust without thievery for once, and much renown for the skill both martial and social that would come with it."
Norte laughed. "Consider us landed! I'll see you all as we dive! Grab a gun."
The Suntouched armed themselves with the long, lancelike weapons of a Suntouched assault force, a hodgepodge of high-powered automatic plasma rifles for slicing through targets and melting cover, and automatic rifles that fired gyrojet rounds like autocannon rounds for extra punch for crowd control. On everyone's bodies were integrated gauntlet and leg-mounted plasma railguns that augmented their thrusters and were used like plasma swords and sidearms, sawing through enemies up close. Rain took it to another level; along with a rifle of her own, her arms were tipped with folding wings that housed other guns and could project greatsword-like blades of plasma. For her part, Norte took a good look at her gauntlet, examining ports in it and then clenching it into a big, pointy fist.
Rain said a short piece before they left. Short for a Serstine, at least.
"As we have many other times, we shall prove our worth in another battle, the Boost pointing our way as it always shall. Let our speed and our Flames blaze brightly on an unknown world and smear those in our way along our path! Remember we are the Serstine, bearers of the Flame and riders eternal!
Our target is the surface of a planet, Aphanizomen, and the forces of a not-Axiom contrivance called the Bullhead. We will fight them and scatter them until strangers known as the Nezerians destroy a neutrino observatory which these Bullhead hold dear. Fight them viciously, attack them aggressively, and fear nothing! I shall return to the helm and bring us on our way!"
The Nortenas raised their right fists with a motion reminiscent of a right hook, and Rain headed back up to the Ragged Edge's bridge. She gave the orders to the helm.
"We heard the Blinkers, did we not? Take a path around the moon of Rivularia and make for the surface of Aphanizomen! Akina, join the other Boost Shamans. Away!"
With a tremendous blast of thrusters, the Ragged Edge began sprinting away as only Bladeships could.
Thamelis responded before the cutter blasted off saying "Very well, see you in the field" The Ultralight Scout Cutter began priming its engines to sling around the moon then blast forward into the blindspot and deploy their forces via high altitude narrow opening insertion with their power armors thrusters for maneuvering. The Helmsman was one of the best in the Frontier Defense Corps thus the ride should go smoothly for the most part. Thamelis didnt enjoy high energy maneuvers in smaller craft but tolerated it as best he could. Soon after priming the warship boosted its plasma thruster module and took off for the combat route
The Ragged Edge tore towards Rivularia, all 500-odd meters of her keeping a breakneck pace and flying like a much smaller ship might as she accelerated and then suddenly began rotating to turn around and begin decaying her orbit. As these maneuvers happened, Rain mused with some of the other officers on the helm on their partners for this little detour. She muttered to herself as she stood on the bridge.
"I wonder if they can keep up with us - few can, but it is particularly unfortunate in this sort of environment - and more to the point it may set us all back if our timing as a coherent group is off. Perhaps they will operate at their own pace after we have honored our agreement to scatter these Bullhead whatever-they-ares and thus let them perform their sabotage with impunity. I should request their status and if they're okay back there."
And in about as many words, she hailed the Ultralight Scout Cutter.
"Excuse me, Thamelis, company, and other assorted Nezerians, assuming you're all Nezerians, but let me say Nezerian for the sake of brevity! Are you okay back there?"
The ships engines had been overclocked and sent to full speed which was rapidly overheating the energy conduits and horribly burning out some of the capacitators due to the coolant pipes fluids being literally evaporated as fast as they could feed the reactor until the Helmsman engaged the emergency interlocks which flooded the reactor housing with hypercooled liquid hydrogen which also engaged the power flow regulators but the ship for its size somehow kept pace. Thamelis responded "Yes we're quite alright, reactor trouble given our ships arent meant for such speed but we're mostly alright. The Helmsman has this covered." he had to shout over the roar and turbulence of the class VB plasma engines
Rain smiled, all that apparently just sinking right in and sounding like something she didn't need to question. "Good! Experience of such speed even once in your life is a recommendation for any sentient; may this be what opens your eyes to this glorious piece of the universe's fabric. I will witness your arrival!"
With that, Rain terminated the feed again and the Ragged Edge tore towards Aphanizomen. She made her way to a modest launch bay the ship boasted, housing the flat, kunai-like Outrider fighters that made the Serstine threatening at the small craft level. Norte and twenty Suntouched all climbed atop a few of them as three more of their number climbed in the Outriders. Nobody got inside, only getting a firm handhold or being ready to thrust with the Outriders as they departed.
It was Norte's turn to rally her own. "Nortenas! We bring with us to a new world the sun, as we always have! As we always will! These Bullhead assholes can either bask in the light or burn, their choice!"
A cheer went up as the bays evacuated and the Outriders launched, a troop of Suntouched hurtling through the black. While most of the crew in the bays braced themselves, some simply leapt out with the Outriders, either to see their princess and her most trusted retainer off or, in one case, to finish checks before giving the Outriders the thumbs up before all of the jumpers flipped over and boosted back towards the Ragged Edge.
As if in fast forward, the Outriders blitzed towards Aphanizomen and then flipped to begin atmospheric entry, skipping off the atmosphere and turning with sharp fishtail motions to scrub off enough speed to actually enter the atmosphere, bathing themselves in fire. From their vantage point, the Serstine could see plasma from the heat of atmospheric entry wall them in on the Outriders' tops, watching the sky above them bathed in flames as it stopped looking like black space and started looking like a sky.
They were waiting for their moment, feeling the Outriders bleeding more speed and looking for the right time to continue doing a typical Suntouched insertion. As they felt themselves slow towards supersonic speed, they leapt off their mounts with a cough of thrusters, looking like the Outriders were loosing missiles from vertical mounts as the Outriders started looking for something to shoot, just a little taste of the action to start hostilities before running like hell and letting the Suntouched do their thing.
Yellow, green, red and blue, as far as the eye could see. Aphanizomen was an alien world in every detail of its deserted landscape, all of it so disconnected from the normal image of an inhabited world that to step foot on the planet was more like being swallowed up by an abstract painting where bright colors interacted without mixing. It was all strikingly organic-looking, all the features of the bizarre landscape on which the Serstine landed seemed to have some visceral-looking pattern to it, like at any point it was going to start pulsating and breathing. Yet appearances were deceiving; in the hyper-saline, acidic environment where they and the Nezerians landed nothing but a handful of protobacteria could survive. All the structures, tendrills and gelatinous-looking masses that surrounded the landing zone were in fact mineral deposits, dredged up from the molten depths of the volcanic planet and expelled out into the surface to form the hypnotizing tapestry of colors and forms that extended for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers.
For a supposed volcanic world, there was not a single smoking peak or a river of lava in sight. The whole area was but a thin crust of semi-solid land placed over an enormous, potent hydrothermal system whose activity could be heard as deep monstrous roars, felt as earthquakes and smelled in the mix of toxic sulfur compounds that emanated from everywhere. All who landed on Aphanizomen could feel the apocalyptic tectonic forces clashing no more than a couple miles beneath their feet, always feeling on the verge of annihilating the entire continent in one astounding eruption. This extreme tension had sculpted the area into a terraced valley of acidic pools while continuous geysers of mineral-rich water had built huge bulbous pillars of colored salts into the landscape.
The Serstine, made of lightweigth and strong composites and alloys to fly faster, would do better to avoid falling into the toxic brine that threatened to dissolve their more fragile components. While the pools took up most of the space, the saline "walls" of the hydrothermal terraces as well as lilipad-looking growths in the pools offered them a place to land.
By way of Serstine being taught to be wary of where they landed and to at least make sure they touched down on something solid, the force of Suntouched was careful enough to jab themselves into the terrace walls and on any solid-looking growths. As they stopped, many of them got a whiff of the briny liquids around them and immediately a look of visceral disgust was slapped across their faces.
A Suntouched warrior remarked, "It smells like it's melting my nostrils. What a planet they've picked!"
Norte was quick to raise everyone's spirits again. "It's acid dipping us, for speed. Now your nose is lighter!"
Everyone shared a laugh and tried to get their bearings, hoping the Outriders would point their way.
The Scout Cutter had dove for the planets surface at maximum velocity shunting power now to the bow particle deflector shields coupled with an Adamantite-Etherium composite armor: Etherium being a super metal derived from various ores in the hexaverse and such, Adamantite being a naturally occurring mineral ore as well that when turned into a metallic substance possessed incredible durability in all regards despite its sheer weight which is what the Etherium counterbalances. The ship, a 200m long craft, suddenly banked hard to starboard and the knights ejected from the port side hangar space for the Aracuja ultralight landers. Their plasma thrusters roared like mini-jet engines but didnt carry the same throaty blast as say a true jet engine. The 5 Knights soon made touchdown beside their Serstine allies. Oddly enough they carried a mixed array of kinetic and melee weaponry: Remurus Thamelis carried a standard issue mass driver operated fully automatic .80 caliber anti-material punisher assault cannon, his sniper carried a sniper variant which was a literal 30mm cannon that had extremely good recoil compensators to the point it felt like shooting a .50 cal with Infantry Power Armor: Aka near non-existent, and the others carried a Plasma Shotgun, sidearm, or alternatively a heavy MG weapon. Themalis' AI and suit sensors immediately picked up on the environment and initiated internal self repair mode in the event the natural elements started to interfere with suit systems. Meanwhile the others took scope of their surroundings and Thamelis received a joke from Andrei "Well this is a fine shitpit" the sniper quipped "Where's the volcano?" and Thamelis simply ignored him while the Knight with the HMG Eric punched his shoulder with a moderately loud "Clank!"
A few of the Serstine saw the Nezarians approach - too close, from how some of them were jumping away to stab their pointy body parts into some other foothold further off, and obscure themselves in a spray of the pretty, but disgusting, brew passing for water. Norte noticed shapes moving in the spray as it dissipated and was just in time to see one knight bopping another.
"Good, you're eager to fight!" Norte shouted. "Got your bearings? We did see a gun as we came down, but we want to know if you're seeing what we were. Doesn't hurt to double check!"
A streak of white smoke emerged from the white shroud of steam that was being spewed out by the geysers all around the landing parties. At first the streak went straight up, punching out of the clouds then it bent at a near-instantaneous turn and burned hard towards the Serstine Outrider that had just fired randomly at the surface. By the time this first missile had discarded its booster stage and continued accelerating towards the Serstine craft, a second and third projectile had come out of the mist to follow in their trail. From what Hermeneutica and her sister ship had said, these missiles were likely tactical nuclear devices. Trying anything but to either outrun or destroy the missiles seemed like an extremely dangerous choice.
It was then that the Serstine and Nezerians saw where these missiles were originating from. The steam billowing from the hydrothermal activity on the alien world momentarily cleared to let them see the outline of a clearly-artificial installation. It was a facility made of hard edges and massive concrete structures that stood out among the rather organic-looking mineral outgrowths of the mountains.
It was located at the top of a mountain 2000m up the valley on its opposing side; dominating its skyline were two 4-story bunkers with satellite dishes on top, both built upon a large concrete platform that acted as a foundation for the base; this fortified platform was slightly larger than the summit it rested on and therefore had fairly large outcroppings. Around the two main bunkers were a fuel depot, two hangars two landing pads and a number of cranes that were seemingly still building the base; the base's primary purpose was pretty obvious even from afar: a cooling tower for a geothermal powerplant and an enormous communications mast were its two biggest structures. In each corner of its pentagonal concrete base was a pillbox.
For how mad the Bullhead had been describd as by Heuristica and Empirica, this mountain fortress/powerplant was clearly well laid-out and built to the highest construction standards, nothing less than that could have survived the constant earthquarkes and radical temperature changes of Aphanizomen. While it was unlikely that this facility was what was directing the orbital defense weapons buried deep underground, the large communications and power-generating facilities meant that it was likely connected in one way or another to the sensor facilities elsewhere. And whoever the occupiers of the facility were they were very conscious of this given how much they had fortified it; as soon as the anti-aircraft missiles were fired, loud alarms began blaring out from the facility and signal flares were fired.
Soon the Nezerians and Serstine would finally come face-to-face with the forces of the Bullhead but for now they had to contend with their long-range weapons. Light-caliber howitzers built into the pillboxes traversed to begin firing at the intruders to keep them at bay.
Rain watched as exhaust plumes and vapor trails sprinted up to meet her Outriders, and knew what would happen next by heart. Knowing they'd been painted, the Outriders floored it and started climbing at an alarming rate. It was like watching anything else pulling the same maneuver in fast forward, as plasma flames made them shine like meteors and their trajectory made them look like those same meteors in reverse, streaking up and away.
With that business being done, the Outrider pilots hailed the Suntouched on the ground. "We've done our part; now it falls to you to do the rest! Their defenses seem quite nasty at altitude; low and fast should do it! Ride fast and far!"
At that point, Rain, Norte and the rest noticed movement from the nearest pillboxes they could see.
"Low and fast, is that right?" Norte muttered. "Low and fast it is, then. Make them miss long!"
Twenty-odd points of fire lit up as the Serstine bounded for the guns, a manic sprint under the shells surely on their way.
The Galactic Knights armed their Punisher Rifles and began running with their Serstine allies and sent power to their servo-motors and actuators in the armor kicking them up to extreme physical speed. Andrei on the otherhand while they ran chambered an armor-piercing anti-material mass driver bolt to take out whatever or whoever looked important. His rifle was able to hold 15 shells in its magazine but Andrei had loaded a high density adamantite cored shell made to penetrate hard cover and the heavily armored target behind the hard cover.
It didn't take long at all for the Serstine to close in on the pillbox, erratically switching back and forth and changing directions to keep any one gun from training on them. As they closed distance, Rain caught the nearest pillbox traversing and started shouting orders.
"It's time to get our new friends out of bed. Shake them awake!" she ordered, and a few Suntouched obeyed by pointing their plasma rifles at the pillbox and opened fire. Suppressive fire was joined by one of the riflemen firing long bursts at the pillbox, hoping to get some rounds inside and give an explosive hello to anything within.
While the gunfire of the Serstine failed in its intended purpose of suppressing or killing the operators of the howitzers, which kept firing at the approaching Neezerians, it was far from ineffective. Stray shots and ricochets from the gyrojet rifles hit an exposed pipeline belonging to an ad-hoc annex of the geothermal plant built onto the outside of the structure. Only a couple hits were needed for the exposed and fragile pipeline to rupture and once it did the acidic brine burst out with such high pressure and temperature that it disintegrated the rest of the pipeline in a fraction of a second and the resulting shockwave was visible to the naked eye. Everything that was not bolted to the floor in the fortified complex was sent flying in all directions... although unfortunately for the Serstine and Nezerians it just so happened that everything was indeed bolted onto the floor. Nevertheless, such an astounding blast -which caused the howitzers to cease firing for a moment as their crews had clearly gotten rather dazed- showed the sheer volcanic pressure that was being bottled up by this geothermal plant. This pipeline was neither the last nor the biggest in the Bullhead's outpost.
The explosion had been powerful enough to rattle equipment and personnel all the way down to the darkest, deepest recesses of the geothermal plant. Places lit only by the faint orange glow of the pipelines where one could not see beyond a couple feet from the dense steam that filled the area. A place not unlike a cavern of thick-walled pipes where stalagmites of rust dripped down onto spartan-looking catwalks; nothing in these levels even approached what would normally be considered living quarters and, if anything, it was more reminiscent of mythical visions of hell. Here were some of the dead that Heuristica and Empirica had been mourning when encountered by the Nezerians: the demiorganics and neurodes once belonging to the loyal crew and defenders of blinker Numismatica... or rather pieces of them. The flesh of the fallen Axiomatic warriors had been boiled clean off of their bones and their skulls, impaled on pieces of rebar and on hooks, decorated the grim labyrinth.
The top of the facility was manned and tended to by humans, as the Serstine could attest. They ran and took cover from the gunfire. But these were mere dregs; mercenaries and cultists who followed The Shattered One to seek some respite from the torture of schizophrenia or congenital disorders. These were the auxiliaries. Sealed deep within the geothermal plant admist the butchered carcasses of Numismatica's crewmembers were the real scions of the Bullhead: creatures who should have never seen the outside of an asylum. Their absolutely colossal musculature and sophisticated power armored shells were undeniably those of the superhuman warriors of the Axiomatic Army... yet they had no Axiom to serve.
Many a human soldier with no master existed across the galaxy without much issue but the troops of the Axioms were different: to them their commanders were not just purveyors of objectives, they were something much more important and much more vital. An Axiomatic commander was also the medium through which their troops achieved higher reasoning, conscience, creative drive and awareness of their place in the world.
The followers of the Shattered One, the Bullhead, had none of this. They had been reduced to killing machines with just enough awareness to know what had been lost.
"Kill the Serstine." A booming voice responded from the steamy depths of the geothermal plant. "I don't care about them, they're beyond saving."
"What about the others?" A much weaker-sounding voice asked through the intercomms. The distant gunfire of the Serstine echoed faintly through the intercomms, attracting the red-eyed armored warriors of the Bullhead to the downright mountainous form of their commander.
"I have never seen them. They might have potential." The commander rose from his throne of crushed demiorganic ribcages and limbs. Each thunderous step shook the cavernous halls of the geothermal plant. "Open my channel."
"But... my lord..." his feeble human acolyte stammered. "Should we inform Tooth Fairy that the enemy has made landfall?"
"Open. My. Channel." Bones were crunched and the silhouettes of multi-ton armored warriors gathered around the imposing stature of the commander. As he stepped forth towards the red-hot pipelines that lined the room, more of his 12 foot frame became visible. "We must deal with the issue before informing Tooth Fairy. She does not take bad news well. Open my channel, I wish to speak with them."
Three osmium spheres the size of engine blocks were loudly dragged by the commander as he walked, connected by heavy chains to the handle of a flail. Upon each sphere's surface were embedded 12 Nightstone spikes that boiled steel on contact.
"Channel is opened." The commander's underling informed before cutting the intercomm.
"I don't know who you are..." The commander walked towards an industrial elevator, followed by his troops. The armored goliaths were clad in astoundingly heavy suits, all of them bleached down to their brown/tan base composite layer. Yet the commander himself stood out; his suit was not made by the Bullhead: It was a Capitol Shock Trooper's armored suit, worn as if it was a conventional suit by the colossal brute. "But you have been misinformed. You are stepping upon my territory, likely at the request of the two blinkers we did not manage to destroy. I... you are making a mistake. You have no reason to get involved."
The commander's words were relayed through the secondary comms masts, jumping frequencies to make sure they were heard. Chains of autocannon shells were loaded into the heavy weapons of the Bullhead's troopers once the elevator began moving to bring forth the first wave of reinforcements to the surface. As for the commander himself, not one but three belts of 30mm ammunition were loaded into a gauntlet-like device of massive heft attached to his left hand.
"Part of my duties as a commander of The Shattered One's forces is to suffer the madness and feel the urge to kill... so my troops do not. And believe me, the urge is strong almost beyond my control after your provocation. I will not be able to hold it back much longer."
Sergeant Remurus Thamelis cued up his own comms network and responded with vicious venom "You murderous brutes will know the divine retribution of the gods and their chosen Emperor. By the fury of Saint Erin, the guardianship of Saint Michael, and the boiling hatred of the God of War i shalt not stop in my duty to purge the wretched aliens of the bullhead from this world. Merciless killers such as you are the reason my legion was created. For Empire and Emperor To Victory or Death" he shouted and ordered his battle brothers to seek cover. However, when Thamelis did he sat back against a rock near the Serstine and spoke some more "Death for you is naught but a kindness....a.."he paused before continuing "...mercy you could say. Whatever afterlife you may have i hope it is a peaceful one and that you shall not suffer anymore than you must."
A whoop and a bit of celebratory fist-raising went up at the report of the brine explosion. Norte took charge as the whole group of Serstine wheeled around like cavalry of old, quickly doubling back to search for something else to hit.
"More! Find another one and give them the same!" she ordered, Suntouched probing more slots to toss rounds through. It wasn't tearing chunks out of the Bullhead's forces, but they had offered to wreak havoc, and wreak havoc they tried to do.
And then, the Bullhead troopers got topside. Rain took charge again as she saw the situation developing around her.
"Gunners! Continue suppressing the guns and keep their attention! Riflemen, follow me and intercept the Bullhead...infantry? Yes! Infantry! Whatever they are, I doubt their guns shoot pleasantries!" she barked. Up a handful of Suntouhed riflemen streaked with her, flying into the air like rockets before splitting and surrounding the men around the first wave of troops, peppering them with bolts of plasma from above that reported like cracking lightning.
The rickety industrial elevator continued its ascent, carrying the massive form of warlord Jun Fa up to where the Serstine warriors were lighting up the installation. Little by little the cracking sound of plasma railguns and gyrojet rifles going off in fast bursts drew closer and closer until the metal gates of the elevator opened.
"Are you here for any other reason than you were told?" Jun Fa replied through the radio, waiting for the heavy armored gates to clear out of the way while the armored suits of his warriors whirred to life. "You Cardinal lackeys become less and less sentient every time we mee-"
Just as the doors were opened and a warcry was shouted by the Bullhead pointment to rush out guns blazing, a Serstine suntouched warrior managed to dash right up to the elevator door and sprayed his gun into the crowd at point blank range. Even the multi-ton pointmen who were at the front of the line were pushed back by the burst, taking thousands of shots in the blink of an eye before they could raise their guns. They stumbled back and fell upon the second line of soldiers, which itself could not maintain balance and also tripped until the chain of dominos reached Jun Fa... who kicked his entire maniple forwards without hesitation. The pointman who had absorbed all the shots was launched forwards by the kick, forcing the Serstine warrior to dash out of the way and then out of the complex altogether when Jun and his soldiers began unloading on him.
"Back to back!" Jun Fa ordered, picking up soldiers by their pauldrons and pulling them back up on their feet like they were weightless. Two soldiers covered Jun's back while the others grouped up in teams of three to avoid having their fragile life support machinery shot off their backs by the Serstine. "I will go down and take care of whoever that is, the rest of you keep the Serstine off of the pipes!"
Accompained by his two bodyguards, Jun walked straight off the ledge of the fortress and onto a 21ft drop into the brine pools. Seemingly unnafected by the acidic brine, the three supersoldiers plowed their way through the terrace walls, firing their autocannons in long bursts around the Nezerians to destroy the walls between brine pools. Each wall they destroyed caused the brine to drain down onto the lower pool, building up into an avalanche of boiling acid with which Jun Fa expected to just wash the Nezerians away from the base.
The Galactic Knights of The Frontiersmen Legion had seen the Bullhead coming via long range HUD Systems and Sergeant Thamelis had calculated everything and began to react within moments of the attack coming. He ordered his brothers to fire their plasma thrusters at full burn and attempt to outmaneuver the Bullhead to unleash pinpoint salvos of automatic .80 Caliber Mass Driver bolts made from High Density Adamantite designed specifically to rend apart Knight Power Armor.....how the shots will fair against the Bullhead is another matter entirely in accordance with the next moments of the fight. Thamelis had to think quickly and tasked his AI to scanning for even the most minutest of weaknesses and ways to exploit them alongside the damage calcs for his weapons and how effective they'd be in hitting the enemy targets.
The Suntouched who rushed the elevator went in alone, the other Serstine waiting to see what would happen as he tried his luck. Watching him flee and blast away at an odd angle to avoid a web of gunfire. The other Suntouched responded, flying through the air in more chaotic, crisscrossing paths as they darted back and forth, organically bunching up and dispersing like a flock of birds.
Norte directed her gyrojet gunners. "Suppress these assholes! Make them move where we want! Keep them pinned, do it now! And cover me!" She started making her way up close as she threw her large right hand off to the side and several thorny whips came out of recesses in it. She expected the Bullhead to meet her, and she was eager to splatter the first real blood of the fight.
Rain saw these Nezerians, hulking as they were, start acting familiarly. They flew! Like Serstine...well, perhaps not as instantly and perhaps not as naturally, but they could fly and the Flame seemed to kiss their armor, and that was fair enough. She flitted near to the one that was standing there, scanning as the fight continued to erupt.
She warned him of the growing danger as only she could. "Forgive me for the suggestion - far be it from me to tell a commander not of my own Flame and metal to command- but you need to move! Take wing as your fellows have! Not a moment to waste!" Already she could see the brine flowing as she blasted skywards, up and away to rejoin her Suntouched in flying from flank to flank, firing tight bursts and great ribbons of gyrojet fire here and there, occasionally rocketing directly overhead the Bullhead to try to dunk shots straight down into their backs. The hope was there, that enough of this could force them to make a mistake.
Thamelis ignited his Plasma Engines and blasted off with his fellows, arming his Punisher Assault Cannon and rocketing into the Air with his Battle Brothers to unleash a symphony of gun-fire upon their foes. Essentially they're attempting to aid the serstine by trying to draw the Bullhead away from each other and gun down their life support units on their backs. Andrei especially was searching for a clear shot to take with his 8 shot sniper rifle variant that was extremely accurate at range compared to Thamelis' 15-20 shot MG variant which was the standard Knights were equipped with that had 50/50 aim at medium range and above average at close range.
The area surrounding the geothermal powerplant had turned into an inferno of bullets ricochetting off every piece of mineral outgrowth there was. The acid-blackened monolith of a building had endured very little structural damage but the same could not be said of all the pipelines bolted onto its exterior walls. The Serstine could now easily tell which were the pipes transporting high-pressure brine from the hydrothermal system: it was the ones that were currently spraying sky-high geysers of acidic water after being hit. With astute observation they would perhaps be able to follow the complicated course of the pipelines all over the fortified building; if they managed to keep their bearings the flying transhumans could find in which points did all these high-pressure pipelines meet and what were the valves controlling most of the flow. As massive and brutalist as the Bullhead's powerplant looked, it did not stand even the slightest chance should the monstrous geothermal forces it tapped into destabilize; the forces of nature that rumbled from beneath the valleys stood like an upside-down damocles sword beneath the powerplant.
And the Bullhead knew this. Trying to shoot down the Serstine on the move was a pointless affair for the paradox's supersoldiers, they were simply too fast. Jun saw the damage being caused and immediately ordered his troops into a different stance: they were to hug the base of the powerplant's walls, that way they would at least deny the Serstine many angles of fire. Secondly, they were to switch the belts of HEFI shells feeding their hip-fired autocannon with something more fitting and deadly for the Serstine: belts of flechette canister rounds. By completely saturating the air with small needles of tungsten, the Bullhead troopers hoped to eventually damage the Suntouched enough to force them to land and, when that happened, they were pretty much as good as dead.(edited)
However, even before they were done switching the ammunition, several of the pointmen began succumbing to the precise gunfire of the Nezerian sharpshooter. Aided by his AI targeting system, Andrei was managing to wedge the high-density adamantite bolts between the thick plates of tungsten and ceramic; blowing off arms, legs and heads with precision. Thamelis and Andrei dropped three pointmen; the bulky soldiers succumbed near instantly to their weigth once their powered armor servos were shot to pieces. When they fell, they opened gaps in their fireteams, allowing Suntouched to destroy the life support packs on three pointmen who began seizing up from lack of oxygen. A third one was killed much less subtly by Norte himself who, with the whips flailing out of her oversized power claw, grasped on and then pulled out the entire ribcage of one of them out his back in an explosion of blood followed by a regular explosion.
Insane and wracked by the delirious voices of a million aggressive delusions, Jun was nevertheless able to tell the obvious tactical situation. If the Nezerians kept thinning out his troopers like that it wouldn't be long before the volume of fire wasn't enough to keep the Serstine at bay. And the flechette rounds that most of his troops had now loaded were fairly useless against the significantly more armored Nezerians; he had to take care of things himself.
"I gave you more chances than I should ever have!" The massive warlord raised his autocannon gauntlet, chambering a round and letting lose. He began charging alongside four more pointmen, shattering the nezerians' mass driver rounds against his hulking armor. "I will make sure to let your accursed kin know that you had a choice and still decided to die for nothing in a war you have nothing to do with! Be thankful that none of them are here so that at least they'll be able to lie to themselves and say you died honorably!"
The enormous soldier charged with surprising speed and fired, although the Nezerians could tell the bullets were going to miss very quickly. What they perhaps couldn't tell was that Jun was aiming for a pressurized outgrowth of mineral, a geyser that had sealed itself. Once it was hit by the 30mm shells from his gauntlet the mineral was shattered, causing a gigantic blast of brine to shroud the Nezerians with steam and hopefully knock them down to their feet. This was all that Jun needed as he rushed straight into the blast zone, swinging the crackling nightstone flail to wipe out whatever was left standing.
Thamelis' vision slowed down in the instant the explosion happened his turbo-charged mental capabilities taking in the entire battlefield situation in extreme slow motion but everything else was in real time. Almost simultaneously a similar affect took hold in the other Knights and suddenly 5 different blurs blasted from the steam at absurd speeds and Thamelis immediately charged a Fulmination blast of Void lightning which carried horrific telekinetic force in what was known as "Discipline Blending" or something to that effect where a Knight or any Nezerian Psychic would mix and match affects from different powers across Psychic disciplines into a single horrifying strike. As Thamelis began to move attempting to dodge whatever fire came his way as best he could he let loose the Hurricane of the void and with that lightning blasted from his Palms, Fingertips, and between his fingers sending cascading torrents of Void Lightning into the Warlord. The other Knights, however, had also while this occurred continued opening fire until they finally joined in with their own powers as well.
The Serstine scattered, suddenly seeing the ground briefly sparkle before flechettes whizzed at them with the sound of angry bees from the Bullhead soldiers that managed to change ammunition before sniper fire began picking them off.
Their change in tactics only seemed to work up the Suntouched further. Cries of challenge met the Bullhead as they began shooting up the walls, testing them in the hopes they could bust up walls and force their enemies to move again. "Who has the frags? The all-frag drums, switch now! Hit 'em, hit 'em, hit 'em!" one of Norte's lieutenants yelled, as the gyrojet gunners changed to all-explosive drums with practiced swiftness. If they couldn't nail them from behind, they'd try to trick-shot hot shrapnel into their backs by shooting at the walls they were now bunching up against.
Norte had tasted blood and was riding high on her kill. She wheeled around to look for her next opponent and rushed across the battlefield to catch the most open Bullhead soldier she could. "Come and try your luck!" she shouted. "If this is the best you top-heavy punching bags can do then I'm wasting my time here! I'll keep cutting you deep!" She caught one, and along with her writhing whips, she clenched her other hand into a fist. A plate molded in the shape of normal knuckles revealed itself in her fist, a blinding chrome and engraved with emoticons. Everyone who saw it soaring right between their eyes would know her as Norte, or maybe " " from how aggressively it was stylized, and she was about to introduce herself to her next target with a swing so swift it cracked like a whip.
Over them all, Rain was dodging the clouds of flechette shot as they came up to meet her. She could see the melee under her and flitted back and forth as if signaling her forces like a dancing honeybee. She saw lightning flare from the Nezerians and snake towards the Bullhead soldiers.
"Fascinating!..." she softly said to herself. Then came the orders. "Watch the lightning; I don't believe those discriminate friend from foe! Watch your flight patterns, tighten up! Tighten up!"
One of her escorts turned too soon and was struck by a flechette shell. It was already affecting his control, and he decided to turn it to his advantage. He dove into the nearest cluster of Bullhead, lighting his thrusters and bearing down at full speed, an inarticulate roar of rage signaling his approach.
Were not for her fist luckily landing a glancing blow rather than hitting the massive armored soldier dead-on, Norte's whole arm would probably have exploded upon contact from the sheer force of the impact. It was like hitting a solid block of tungsten ceramic, instantly disintegrating her stylized brass knuckles, leaving the emojis punched into the hardened steel casing of her target's armor and sending jewel-encrusted emoji shrapnel flying at supersonic speed in all nearby directions. The kinetic energy in Norte's fierce punch was still nevertheless enough to cause the Bullhead's pointman to tumble backwards, drop his gun and break the feed system on it, a flurry of other hits followed hitting its weakspots and knee joints before the soldier was even done recoiling from the hit. However, one of Norte's fast strikes was suddenly caught by the pointman; he grabbed her forearm and, as he was falling to the ground from the assault he'd just received, the Bullhead trooper fired the thrusters on one side of his body to try and twist himself mid-fall so that Norte would land underneath him and be crushed by the multiple tons of armored supersoldier.
The damage from the lightweight fragmentation grenades appeared to be insufficient and even the much lighter armor protecting the life support systems on the back of the soldiers was able to absorb the damage. What they were very good at, however, was stunning and confusing the Bullhead troopers into breaking their ranks. Several of them began simply losing sense of where each other and their cover from all the smoke and bright flashes caused by the fragmentation grenades being rained down upon them. They weren't able to keep track of Rain herself but especially not of the stricken Suntouched, who rocketed down on them like a full-size cruise missile, practically vaporizing the enemy soldier he'd landed on and knocking down the rest of the squad.
The leader of the warband, on the meantime, seemed to be holding up well to the lightning, which coursed around the exterior of his enormous suit of armor before dispersing on the briny volcanic ground. Just as he'd noticed the Nezerians dashing away the warlord discharged six large grenades from his pauldrons directly upwards, airbursting them to create a huge cloud of shrapnel.
"Shit!"
Norte saw the sparks flaring from her knuckles and felt a shockwave flying up her arm as her punch glanced and she felt her body knocked off-course from its blow. She doubled down on her assault as she remembered she was still knee-deep in the brawl, but there, too, were complications. Well, one very big complication: she was getting grabbed and about to be thrown under the falling soldier, the sound of thrusters signaling his intent.
Norte wasn't about to be outdone. She decided to lean into the twist and fired all of her own thrusters, preferring to send this giant pretender to the Serstine domain spinning instead of letting him arc over onto her.
Rain stayed high, and called out for her soldiers to do the same. The Serstine went silent as they witnessed one of their number smash himself into a Bullhead squad, disappearing into a plume of cermet dust. If the impact didn't destroy him then he was likely going to die soon, but one way or another, it was the Suntouched way to the last. They saw their foes scatter and get past the wall.
"High, fast and over!" Rain ordered. "They stumble from their walls, they stagger! Fall on them before they recuperate!" They would try to fly over again, hoping for another raking strike on their foes' backs.
The Shrapnel clouds slammed the Knights hard knocking them off their feet but Thamelis took the brunt of the shrapnel burst upon his Energy Shields overloading and shutting them down which wound up burning out the generator and severely straining his micro fusion cells powering his armor. Quickly Battle Brother Hannus went to Thamelis' aid and began dragging his bewildered Sergeant out of the area while Apothecary Gratcheva began to run over to them.
"You Fuckin' Idjit!. Y'coulda gotten killed Rem!" Shouted Hannus
Ortiz who Thamelis basically shoved down from the worst of the impact piped up "Well if his slow arse didn't save my life I wouldn't be here today!"
"Well that isn't much of an improvement now is it because nothing of value would've been lost rookie!" Hannus shouted at him before Gratcheva quickly silenced them
"If you want Thamelis to not oh i dont know die then shut up and help me here!. Where is Andrei?!" he shouted and got a communications return
"Currently trying to distract the bruiser while you cunts bicker like school children" he said with obvious amusement taking shots with his sniper rifle at the warlord while he spoke with cool and calm serenity.
The bolts shattered off Jun's bulky helmet and faceplate, peeling away layers of ceramic composite with each impact but doing little to stop the behemoth that charged the sniper, blading his body so the heavily armored pauldrons and asymmetric armor took the brunt of the assault. Andrei had clearly become his target, in order to whittle down his shield the Bullhead warlord started firing off airbursting shells at and all around the Nezerian sniper.
Although while the warlord was furiously swiping away at the Nezerians, his troops were now being seriously damaged and put in disarray. The strafing runs of the Serstine, especially after the pointmen had been scattered by the kamikaze's blast, managed to inflict more losses. It was enough so that the volume of fire started going down across the board and it became safer to fly directly over the installation itself and start looking for weakspots to hit. The freight elevator that had brought up the first wave of Bullhead started closing its doors and preparing to lower again to bring a second wave.
Hannus noticed the freight elevator and grabbed the currently inactive multi-kiloton energy equivalent high energy plasma warhead from Thamelis' belt section and magnetized it to his own before Gratcheva looked up and Ortiz grabbed his vambrace saying
"But brother.....if you do that there's no guarantee you'll survive.....do you really intend to go down into that elevator and drive the plasma warhead through the heart of that base?"
Hannus looked at Ortiz with kind eyes behind his helmet because he'd made his peace with the gods years ago and said
"Ortiz when you've lived as long as I have you'll understand death comes for all one way or another. It's not about the fact you died but it's why and how." he then addressed Gratcheva "Take care of Thamelis for me Anatolii. If I dont't make it back give him my ident tags and tell my story to the aspirants of the Kaevbynach and the warriors aboard the Wars Crucible. It was an Honor" he said then gave Apothecary Anatolii Gratcheva his Ident Tags.
And With that Veteran Eric Hannus boosted his plasma thrusters and flew at full burn for the elevator door at maximum possible velocity aiming to obliterate this base in one last effort. After such Andrei noticing the Warlords aims before he charged him due to perception and his HUDs calculations of opponent predictability boosted his jets again and tried to get over him to fire a barrage of plasma bolts from his vambrace cannons into the Warlords back.
As far as the Bullhead cultists and troopers still within the perimeter of the base were concerned, the Nezerian was simply throwing himself at them to scout the base. They spared some of their soldiers to receive them, readying their automatic shotguns and flechette rounds to fight the sturdy super-soldier at close range. What they had not expected in a million years was for the Nezerian's attack to be a full-blown nuclear suicide bombing, there was no CQC fight at all and instead the soldiers who formed up were instantly ionized by the multi-kiloton detonation.
The geothermal powerplant simply ceased to exist in an instant and all the Bullhead pointmen that had been taking cover near it were killed in the blink of an eye, effectively wiping out the entire garrison in one massive strike. The shockwave created was immense, setting off landslides and lahars of boiling brine across the entire valley, sweeping both Jun and whoever else was landed away downstream. The complete annihilation of the geothermal powerplant had blown the lid off of the unstable hydrothermal system of the valley; there wasn't even time for any mushroom cloud to form as a scalding geyser rising up for a full mile appeared where the powerplant had once been, completely shrouding the area in hot steam and blinding thermal optics. The entire valley began essentially collapsing from the seismic activity triggered. Enormous pieces of shattered concrete rained down on the Serstine and Nezerian survivors, propelled hundreds of feet into the air by the combined power of the plasma warhead and the eruption of the geyser.
Jun had no idea of what had happened, nor any time to react as he was swept down by the boiling avalanche after the nuclear strike.
The Nezerian Sniper immediately after seeing Hannus book it for the powerplant ignited his plasma thrusters and so did the others and took to the skies. Thamelis was still unconscious and the Knights were shocked and numbed by the death of their most faithful comrade. Ortiz kept himself calm but looked on at the devastation.
Rain, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen underneath her, saw Hannus advance and thought to herself, "Good, these warriors should be able to cut through the heart of this little-"
Everything then went to Hell.
She was blissfully unaware of the tremor that struck the ground milliseconds before the ground suddenly rushed up to meet her while she was flying level. Concrete and saline gunk and Lightmother knew what else suddenly ran up right to her face and no matter how hard she fired her boosters it just kept coming. The wave was instant and the heat was searing and unwelcome. Scorching, caustic vapor raked her as the shockwaves of nuclear Armageddon threatened to rip her apart. Her world was pain and sky, ground, sky, ground as she managed to tumble skyward into a groundless abyss on a ballistic trajectory, deafened, helpless, and by the feeling of it, melting
Gratcheva after the explosion cleared was beyond infuriated with Hannus, that fool. Anatolii continued to monitor Remurus' condition as they pulled back to regroup while Ortiz and Andrei covered them. Andrei was more than enraged but at the same time he was sad a brother had fallen. Remurus was fine for the most part just had the shock of getting smacked by shrapnel from an airburst round, however he'd need a new shield generator if they couldnt field repair it which shouldnt be too hard. Ortiz was primarily worried for their allies because he knew that there were Serstine in the blast zone. Goddamnit Hannus he thought to himself How a veteran died trying to be a hero by doing something retarded with such a large payload is beyond my comprehension.
Silence. An uneasy pause and the low rumble of the explosion's echo were the only companions of the few survivors of the suicide strike.
Then, unbelievably, against all odds... a voice.
"Rain! Rain?!" Norte's voice sounded ragged and totally shot, and judging by the hacking now breaking the unforgiving silence, she'd been coughing up particulates and sludge thrown into the air. Her mistralium fibers hung loose and unpowered and dragged behind her, tangled with shavings of armor. She was a wreck, but somehow alive, and able to limp under what power she could spare just to move, dragging herself around and searching for her princess.
Andrei came over the communications line to the Knights and their allies
"Status!, Norte can you hear me?. Remurus is injured and Gratcheva's patching him up. I'm on my way. I pray to the Emperor another soul isn't lost this day." he said with fear and worry before igniting his Plasma Thrusters and heading to fly over to where Norte is, attempting to track any life signs or some kind of vitals. Heads were going to roll back at Kaevbynach Command and he feared the punishment that'd be levied upon him and his battle brothers for Hannus' actions. Especially on Remurus for failing to enforce discipline and securement of his troops even though he was out cold.
Norte searched for glints of light, any scrap that Rain could still be alive and landed somewhere, much like her. What she got were Nezerians flying around her and one landing. Wasn't something flying before it went inside the base, blowing everything to Lightmother knew where?
She wasn't about to take any chances as she locked eyes with the first Nezerian to get near her, her expression bleary and crazy-eyed and her body language resembling a startled wild animal.
"Get the FUCK away from me!" she shouted, her good fist (for a certain metric of "good") raised.
Andrei immediately put his hands out to his sides non-threateningly and hooked his rifle to his back before his helmet was removed and he spoke calmly.
"Easy....Norte.....easy.....easy. We'll find her, and if we don't you can kill me brutally and painfully if you'd like. But we must remain strong." He tried his best to calm her down
Generally speaking from a physical standpoint he looked rather handsome and....tired. Something in his eyes Norte could tell was just a tired and jaded but empatheticness. He just looked so damn tired of war. That and his multitude of battle scars and barely contained anger at Hannus.
"I want to know what the hell that was, I want to be sure anything else that can go up like that is turned off! Get me?!" She pointed at Andrei, waving her finger and the inert whip coming from its tip flopping around. "You...just...look for a glint of metal. A flash of violet! Something!"
"I understand Norte. I have no Fusion Devices on me. Hannus was the only one who did. He took Remurus' anti-fortification Fusion Charge and suicide bombed them. Just let me look"
He went about helping Norte find a flash of violet or anything that could resemble new life signs. He worked quickly and urgently, time for him (like all Knights) was slowed to an extreme degree but that was to compensate for their frankly absurd speeds. Therefore his eyes picked out and saw detail far more clearly, quickly, efficiently, and accurately than even hawks or powerful computers. He was in effect a biological weapon. He could absorb and react to all of the predictable stimuli's of a battlefield at such a rate it may as well be instant from the mental perspective but unpredictable stimuli either suffer in reaction time or simply arent picked up at all and ignored in favor of other battlefield issues. Therefore if you act unpredictably it's possible to surprise and ambush Knights.
Norte dragged herself away as she searched. Amongst the wreckage, somewhere, had to be Rain.
Wherever she was, it was hard to tell. The whole crater was a field of twisted scrap jabbed into rock and puddles of sludge. Something particularly shiny or ornamented would have stood out. Bits and bobs that looked like remnants of Rain's retinue poked out of the ground, making the search even harder at first glance.
Andrei put his helmet back on and ordered his AI to boost his HUDs scanner units by adding more power and performing a trick called "Directional Subversion" where the Theta-Waves would be modulated and directed to maneuver through wreckage or impediments and provide a scan when looking for something specific. This is possible due to the extent of Galactic Knights technological base. Therefore he sets the scanner to search for the parameters Norte provided if scant.
Serstine metal and thruster parts, scraps of Flameheart and royal insignias were strewn about the battlefield, and it was at least an improvement over picking through it with nothing but eyes. Whole bodies were becoming obvious, some less buried than others. A small area where Rain could have been lying was making itself known.
Huge chunks of sulfur-coated saline rock were still falling a couple minutes after the detonation from the sheer pressure that had been released upon the annihilation of the geothermal powerplant. Now the only thing that stood in the summit atop the valley was a mile-high geyser of scalding stream that propelled whatever remained of the powerplant's foundations high into the air. Chunks of reinforced concrete and composite rebar rained down as well, chipping off the colorful saline walls of the post-nuclear wasteland that the valley had been turned into. Now most of the hydrothermal pools had been drained by the avalanches triggered by the nuclear strikes, leaving only the acidic sediment lying at the bottom.
Worse yet, among the many irradiated pieces falling around Norte and the Nezerians was the control hardware and electrical distribution equipment of the powerplants. The only ways that the Serstine and Nezerians had to find the fire control station that was directing anti-orbital pion cannons... was now scattered across several square miles, fused together into radioactive molten slag. For the moment the fire control station would be offline but the geothermal powerplant was a replaceable asset, unlike the fire control station itself. They had a brief window before power was restored but finding, let alone knocking out the sensor station, was going to be an exceedingly hard task.
And the worst was yet to come. Norte had already dealt with the Bullhead's madness-stricken minions before. She knew that the role of warlords such as Jun Fa was as much to lead the troops as it was to stop them from unleashing the apocalyptic madness that the voices in their heads clamored for. Once the warlord was gone, the Bullhead reverted back to its primordial instincts, feeding the cryptographic codes and PAL clearances up the chain of command, through a network of landlines, high-altitude balloons, low-orbiting satellites and C4I aircraft that orbited in that hellscape of a planet. However differently it was coded, the order that echoed across the entire continent was the same: annihilate the intruder. Annihilate it within minutes and , or the demons that accosted the Bullhead's pointmen would inflict a pain far more thorough and grievous than anything that their enemies could deal. Their madness demanded fire, and fire would be given by the Bullhead.
Blown away by explosively-pumped railguns, bunker doors of reinforced concrete revealed the shiny chrome nosecones of the bringers of nuclear apocalypse. Tracked, hover and wheeled vehicles that had been wedged and camouflaged in whichever crevice the madness-whipped supersoldiers had dug out from them raised their towering missiles. Satellites blew out their fairings to reveal clusters of black graphite conical warheads while re-orbiting to line themselves up for strike. Everything in a thousand square miles was going to disappear in ionized flame, then the molten slag that would be left after the five thousand strategic ICBMs detonated would itself be ionized by a second volley delivered by cruise missiles and hypersonic gliders. Nuclear fury unseen since the sanity-shattering scourging of Telestus was brought upon a force not a thousandth the size of the combined EPA-Union detachment that had first faced these mad warriors. All throughout the volcanic globe the ballistic missiles went up like white spears, disappearing as their first stages burnt out and propelled the buses of warheads into suborbital paths.
The valley, which had hitherto been a dangerous hazard to navigate, would soon become the greatest ally to Norte and whoever else was fast enough to outrun the titanic barrage that she knew was about to come. No doubt the entire mountain range would be gone, but it would at least shield her from the powerful multi-megaton thermal flashes that even her sandskin form would not resist.
Every second that passed, the swarm of missiles covered thousands of kilometers with their optics fixed on the point of impact. Every second was precious but the one thing more precious to Norte was Rain. And without much time remaining, she finally found her, a glimmer of her mirror-polished titanium hair decorations shining at her from the bottom of a pull of sulfuric acid.
"I see a nuclear flash." The blinker said. "Is everything going ok with you down there, most honorable ladies and gentlemen?"
Norte started frantically trying to pull Rain out of the acid, her barely-conscious form looking no better than Norte's own. She desperately tried to slap her awake, tried to test her thrusters, anything to get her to fire up again.
"It soon won't be," Norte answered. "We have to run! Damn it, I have to run! Rain, Rain, wake up! It's me, it's Norte, we have to go..."
Suddenly, a twitch. That twitch became a spasm, and that spasm became a Serstine princess coming back to life and turning her head to vomit acid and particulates, her eyes open from the shock and repulsion, confusion, surprise and relief all flashing across her face in a single moment. Rain functioned.
Norte smiled broad in relief and tried to embrace Rain with one arm. Then she greeted her in her usual fashion. "You look terrible, your grace, a mark of a hard fight survived. We have a harder one ahead of us."
"...what by the Holy Boost was all that?!" Rain coughed out as she tried to reach for Norte to pull herself up, but her body seized and she twisted her body in pain.
"I'll explain when you have your faculties and we get clear. Can you fire your thrusters?" Norte asked, pulling Rain as far as she could out of the murky, stinking pool.
"My Flame still burns. Just possibly," Rain replied.
The Knights knew well enough the power of thermonuclear warfare, especially given their strategic battle psychics were in essence psychic nuclear fire support back home in the Hexaverse, and as such the Imperials went to Rain and Norte just as Thamelis regained consciousness.
"The hell just happened?!" the sergeant shouted and Gratcheva responded
"Thermonukes!" and as such Remurus was put down and he shouted
"Get the Ultralight Scout Cutter we're buggin' outta here and we'll try again!. Emperor only knows these hopping mad-bastards won't stop til' we're absolutely dead. Now c'mon!"
He called for the Ultralight Scout Cutter to pull back around and prepare for a close in "Dive Pickup" as the Knights called it where the Cutter would accelerate to extreme speed and sweep by grabbing them then making a B-line out of there.
Norte clutched Rain tighter as she finally pulled her upright. Their boosters fired in coughs and fits, and finally they started lifting out of the pool.
"Norte, I must apologize," Rain said, dismay written all over her face. Regret, anger flashed as she avoided eye contact with her friend and then finally looked at her. "I-"
"Save it," Norte replied, cutting her off.
"I know what's on your mind," Rain said, looking at the mountains. "We are a sorry pair of thruster parts, but if we hold on as hard as we can, we're almost one Serstine, and that's enough."
They tipped towards the horizon and fired their remaining running boosters, plasma blasting from every nozzle and hurtling towards the horizon. Then, another surprise.
"Rain! Rain?! Norte! Are you there?" Someone was on their channel and calling out to them. One glint in the sky was arriving way sooner than the nuclear warheads, and judging by its trajectory it was firing on its way down. One Outrider was racing the nukes down and had a considerable lead. Not Akina, but...
"...Zand?! What the hell are you doing on that Outrider?" Norte shouted.
High up, a Serstine Lightcaster was clutching the top of the Outrider that was punching through the atmosphere, strings of Flame-formed power wrapped around it to keep her in place and a shock of wild red hair sticking out like a sore thumb against her many stealthy body panels. "Look, long story short, I'm your ticket out of this shit! You two are wrecks right now, so keep going where you're going and aim for me when you get there!"
Norte did a double-take. "You want us to go up?" she asked, bewildered. "...you flatter us, with your understanding of my legend!"
"Then let's see your arrivals, hotshots! Ladies Rain Elduranda and Norte Gallegos, faster than even thermonuclear devastation!"
The two-as-one Serstine roared away, a ballistic missile turned on its side towards destiny.(edited)
The first missile to fall was a large unitary warhead ICBM that had been launched almost from the other side of Aphanizomen. Re-entering the atmosphere with a flash of blinding light, the missile did a few final course corrections to end up impacting on the former site of the geothermal powerplant within inches of precision. And the mountain, which had its top already blown off by the tactical nuclear bomb that the Nezerians had set off, was pretty much erased by the much larger device fired in the Bullhead’s raging madness. The ground level detonation of the bomb resulted in a fireball of pure white nuclear hellfire that expanded fast enough to span multiple kilometers in the blink of an eye. The wall of ionized gasses, which expanded so fast it outran its own shockwave, was the last thing the warlord Jun managed to see as he stood up from under the volcanic rubble at the bottom of the valley. In the brief moments of consciousness he had before the fireball reached him, when the heat flash dissociated the air around him into an exploding mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, the warlord opened his arms to receive the Bullhead’s gift in all of its splendor.
“Scorched be the soul, o bringer of madness!” Jun said in furious exaltation as the approaching plasma ablated the outer layers of his armor. “I tried to silence thy madness, how wrong I was to deny the world your gifts! Take me!”
A mushroom cloud began forming underneath the dome-shaped clouds caused by condensation. But rather than the spectacular finale, what this gigantic detonation marked was the beginning of the Shattered One’s uncontrolled retribution. More and more such devices fell from the sky, busloads of MIRV fanned out in the distant layers of the stratosphere and cruise missiles popped up from behind the mountains to cover as much terrain as possible. Norte’s crew of daredevil Outrider pilots and the Nezerian reinforcements quickly realized that to try and fly up and away was suicide with the astounding ammount of devices that were being detonated at all altitudes. Only one thing could give them a chance of surviving: hard cover. The volcanic valleys of Aphanizomen could provide some protection against the shockwaves and hypersonic debris being propelled by the explosions. But they would have to keep running away, all the cover in the world wouldn’t change anything if they found themselves directly at the ground zero of one of the detonations.
And then things got much, much worse.
Geysers and hydrothermal vents were erupting all around the valleys, disturbed by the multiple seismic shocks from the nuclear bombardment. It was bad enough a hellscape already but the arrival of a wave of nuclear bunker busters suddenly made the previous volley look like a minor inconvenience. Punching straight through the crust that had been weakened and plasticized by the huge tectonic forces of Aphanizomen, the bunker busters detonated right in the caldera of the supervolcano that powered the entire landscape and had been threateningly grumbling ever since the two teams’ arrival. The last of the bunker busters didn’t even manage to reach its target; it was crushed several miles off the ground… because the entire ground itself was now being propelled upwards at several kilometers per second.
In a second, all the nascent mushroom clouds were blown out like candles. Missiles that had not reached their targets were crushed by a shockwave of incomprehensible intensity that cleared out the clouds over the entire hemisphere. The land itself was peeled off the ground and propelled in a myriad suborbital paths by a mass of magma the size of a small country. An earthquake so strong it created a visible ripple in the horizon expanded outwards from the volcanic cataclysm at many times the speed of sound, rapidly overtaking Norte’s Outrider and pelting it with shattered rock from below. It didn’t take much reflection on anyone’s part to know that this was being followed up by another shockwave, this time through the air, that would pulverize everyone if it caught up with the Serstine. This one would take a very long time to be diffused by the mountains, for now the only way to survive was to simply outrun it.
When the initial thermal flash cleared and the Serstine looked up above them, the much familiar principle that everrything that goes up also comes down made itself pretty clear. Above them, all the way up to the upper troposphere, were the shattered magma-covered remains of the mountains that had just been pulverized. Some of it was already starting to re-enter the atmosphere, raining down iceberg-sized chunks of volcanic basalt over a quarter of the planet’s surface.
The debris both raining from above and being thrown from below, the plumes of magma shooting out of destabilized volcanoes and the tremendous shockwave bearing down on them from behind went from feeling utterly terrifying to feeling more like a spiritual moment for the Serstine. Things were so thoroughly FUBAR’d that it felt kind of religious, like being thrown around by the chaotic whims of the Boost itself.
Rain and Norte scrambled up to the lead Outrider and were guided by kaleidoscopic lines of energy, threads that spun themselves through the air from Zand's pointy fingers, encircling them and pulling them along and, most shocking to the pair, they dropped altitude. As the two crashed onto the top of the Outrider and clung to the young Lightcaster for dear life, they looked ahead at the environment ahead of them turning from a mess of color to a mess full stop with barely a horizon.
Flying upwards was suicide, though to any casual observer, any direction would be suicide. To a Serstine, there was flying as fast as possible. Fast, dangerous, nap-of-the-earth flying, and it was very easy to fly at the nap of the earth when the earth was rushing up to meet you.
Flashes of plasma blinked amongst the beginning of the end for this place, for nuclear annihilation as the Outriders flat-hatted against the maelstrom, dodging irregular hunks of rock and shards of base big as a ship going up and crashing against those coming down. The way ahead seemed to turn dark when they had pack after pack of canned sunshine opening behind them, pounding their senses with heat, sound and light.
Just flying straight was a challenge as the Outriders bucked and wobbled, the lead one helped by the three Serstine clinging to it seemingly forgetting where and what they were and firing thrusters to correct and race the earthbound suns. They surfed a wave of molten death and jagged debris, all the while being thrown along by nuclear hellfire. Thrusters blazed and Flames shone brightly as the firestorm seemed to be talking to them through its wall of noise and light.
Don't stop. Don't look back. Go faster.
The full gravity of what was happening struck the Knights like a thunderbolt who boarded their Cutter quickly and efficiently. Remurus went straight to the command bridge and they blasted off at maximum throttle opening the Plasma Conduits to full charge from the fiery hell engulfing the planet, he knew the end would be upon him and his Knights eventually but he would not die this day nor would he die this way, he had a wife and kids to go back to in the Frontier Fleet and he'd be damned before he died a coward. Remurus was always a man of Honor but this wasn't Honor, this had no skill, no finesse, no elegance, it was just brutal madness, brutal madness not unlike the Siege of Astrakar which consisted of far more brutally powerful munitions than these. There was no speech, there were no cries, just hope and faith that they'd survive. Ortiz unlike the rest of them had nothing to lose and he'd made his peace with the gods already, so if he died it didnt matter much to him. The Cutter was hammered hard by the micro debris and the Helmsman had extreme skill in piloting such a relatively large vessel in such conditions as he was trained to do but it took every dirty as much as conventional even improvised tricks in his playbook to pull off the sort of gut crushing Gs that would be able to let them maneuver. It essentially looked more like a seen straight from a science fiction film more than a concentrated effort.
“I have Uno, brother”
“Congratulations on your uno, brother. Please draw 2500.”
The two blinkers’ game was interrupted by some alerts from their optical sensors. At first, Heuristica thought that one of its pixels had burnt out. When asking its fellow blinker to take over optical surveillance, Empirica curiously replied that it too thought that its optical sensors were suffering from artifacting since there seemed to be a continuous white spot where the LZ had once been.
“While it would be a happy coincidence if we both burned out the exact same pixel in our optical sensors, I find that to be a bit implausible.”
“I concur, brother Heuristica. That would be truly odd.”
“And it would not explain the gamma rays.”
“Or the neutrino flash.”
“Hmm…”
“Hmm…”
The two blinkers paused for a second, looking at each other with their collision-avoidance optics the same way humans would look at each other after an awkward realization.
“Do you think…?”
“That would be a bloody intense nuclear barrage, though.”
--
The topside of Zand’s outrider was now a sooty black, its formerly-shiny ceramic skin partially ablated by a REALLY close nuclear detonation. The silhouettes of Norte and Rain were imprinted onto the Outrider in negative as they had been struck by the thermal flash as well. Now pretty much everything that wasn’t extremely heat-resistant in the two Serstine nobles’ body had been melted or ablated, leaving them with only their basic frames intact. The shockwave from that detonation had luckily been deflected by a mountainous ridge, allowing the Outrider to survive and continue flying the gauntlet of magma and nukes. Massive clouds of ash that had erupted from the volcanoes up ahead began forming a thick black canopy above the continent, stirred into a powerful thunderstorm by the shockwaves and seismic events. The sun began fading through this thick cloud, making it even more dangerous to navigate as the meteors now fell from the sky without warning.
And then things, naturally, got worse.
In the middle of the tremendous rockfall, some objects appeared that moved and looked pretty differently. Rather than hurtling into the ground, they pulled up and dodged the rocks. Rather than the orange glow of freshly-molten rock, these objects trailed three enormous and white-hot plumes of fissile products. Fighters. Powered by what was essentially a nuclear reactor undergoing a drawn-out meltdown, a wing of air superiority jets of the Bullhead had flown ballistic paths along with the warhead and now fanned out to begin their hunt. A good portion of them hadn’t survived the blizzard of volcanic debris thrown into the stratosphere but those that did had just been made angrier. Norte’s rather unstealthy evac craft was quickly picked up by their sensors and soon found itself targeted by three of the Bullhead’s jets from above. Using continuously-beaming nuclear-pumped xasers, the ballistic fighters went to try and simply melt Norte’s craft out of the sky. The Nezerians’ larger and more heavily-shielded craft, on the meantime, was fired upon by a group of four fighters with nuclear AAMs. Given the sheer amount of nukes that had been dropped into the geothermal plant, it seemed unlikely that there weren’t many more fighters coming.
The shockwave remained hot on Norte’s heels but the seismic shock had already circumnavigated Aphanizomen multiple times, destabilizing the volcanic systems more and more with each pass. Kilometers-deep cracks began opening up in the ground, swallowing up the landscape into Aphanizomen’s fiery mantle. For the particularly suicidal, these wide-open faultlines would seem like promising places to take shelter from the huge volcanic shockwave. Slowing down was still out of the question now that the Bullhead’s fighters had joined in on the chase but going into the trenches would at least allow them to duck under the shockwave… if they didn’t collapse or erupt.
“Forgive us for this intrusion” the transmission came from the blinkers far away. “But we’ve spotted quite the activity down there. Are things still on track?”
The Outrider smelled blood as the xasers fired, gaining speed and rising up to meet these three Bullhead fighters. The pilot seemed to be speaking for everyone clambered on its hull as it vectored for a fight, plasma railguns barking as they merged as if to say it was time to end this nonsense.
The three nuke-blasted Serstine were along for the ride, all cursing and complaining as they raised their arms and found their weapons were burnt out or completely inadequate, sharing curses and groans.
Then there was the Blinkers' transmission. Everyone looked at one another with baffled expressions, wide eyes and slack jaws on all of them. They were all at a loss for what to say; Norte lost her soldiers to a freak accident, Rain had fate hit her like the collision of two moons and with as sharp a change in her trajectory, Zand was along for a ride that she barely knew she was signing up for. They bucked and rolled with the sharp maneuvers of the Outrider as it drew dizzying loops through the darkening skies, lit by lightning and thruster fires in the moonless nuclear night, the struggle to say something, anything that would help sticking out as sharp contrast to the balletic ride they were now mere passengers for.
Rain took it upon herself to be the one to reply. "This...was an excursion to silence the guns, be it through the destruction of the power plant or...other means, yes?"
The Galactic Knights Cutter as it blasted off for the Serstine never made it back. The Shockwave of the major explosions smacked the Cutter with enough force that the thing simply came apart and it was lost with all hands. Thamelis' last thoughts were of his family before he ceased to exist with his crew.....he was a fool....but all of that ended now with the destruction of the Cutter.
"Yes, Most Esteemed Lady Rain." Heuristica replied. "We are not particularly picky about how the guns must be silenced, it would be most ungrateful of us to start putting conditions on what, we assume, must be a fairly exhausting job. Not that we doubt you would be able to do it through any means besides your choosing, oh no, please don't assume so."
Heuristica then went on a long chain of apologies and forms of courtesy that srt of blended together into a continuous monotonous drone to Rain, whose blood felt like it was made 50% of adrenaline by volume then. A burst of EMP countermeasures by the Bullhead jet had disrupted the plasma railgun shots of the Outrider, allowing it to remain shining its laser on Rain and Norte's craft. The beam of powerful x-rays coming from the Bullhead's fighters was inflicting heavy damage on the ablative coating of the Serstine fighter. This intense ionizing radiation even made its way into the damaged frames of Norte and Rain, bouncing around their insides and disrupting the circuitry. Suddenly Rain found herself seizing and losing control of her body and, even worse, losing grip on the broken carbon tile she was currently holding on to.
"L-Lady Rain!" Norte said with gritted teeth, her body twitching and a glitched-up voice as she was trying to hold her grip. Around both her and Rain, the carbon tiling was starting to glow a deaf red from the continuous illumination by the enemy jets' lasers. "I c-c-can't!"
Right as the two aircraft approached the merge, Zand's quick reaction managed to save the two Serstine noblewomen from falling off the jet and onto certain doom, even if she did so in a fairly unpleasant way: blasting to the rescue, she drove a knife through Rain and Norte's forearms to literally nail them to the jet and prevent them from letting go.
"You ain't going nowhere, Lady Rain!" Zand said before taking out her gyrojet rifle and unloading on the enemy aircraft for the few seconds it was visible as it approached at a differential speed of what had to be above mach 4, all while her own frame's thermal protection was ablated by the xaser. The actual rounds themselves just disappeared into the blurry and hectic confusion, she had no idea if any of them had hit so and the laser soon disrupted her rifle's electronic firing mechanism. So with a last-minute movement, Zand decided to simply throw the rifle at the enemy aircraft just as it and the Outrider flew by each other. The weapon disintegrated on one of the Bullhead jets' wing roots, shattering the ceramic tiling of its leading edge.
Nearly getting blasted off the jet by the sonic boom of the enemy aircraft, Zand quickly turned her attention to the two dangling from her jet and visibly recoiled once she saw that practically everything except for their superalloy skeletons had been blasted or burnt away. "With all due respect, Lady Rain, your Terminator-looking ass is in no condition to try escaping back into orbit" Zand grabbed their hands and removed the knives. "I suggest looking for an alternate route of escape before they turn around and start lasering us again!"
Rain searched Zand's face with her eyes, then looked around her. There had to be something; they narrowly escaped destruction riding thermonuclear Armageddon; this had to be trivial in comparison -
A thought crossed her mind. "We head down. If we can't escape with pure ascent power, let's see our pursuers play at being Serstine - and failing," she said. "We find a canyon. Something to scrape them off."
"Understood, Lady Rain!" Zand said, looking down with both her eyes and the Outrider's ground radar. The tidal forces that were practically tearing this subcontinent apart on Aphanizomen had created many cracks that extended all the way down to the planet's mantle and wide enough for a particularly suicidal fighter to wedge itself into. Although, given the enormous approaching shockwave, this was the least suicidal thing they could attempt. "Watch this, the Holy Boost is with us!"
Rather than turning around and trying to face the damaged Bullhead interceptor again, the Serstine jet dove to the ground as fast as possible and made a beeline for one of the narrow, newly-created trenches. It flipped around before diving, making sure that the intense G-forces worked to keep Rain and Norte firmly attached to the aircraft rather than flyinging them right off, and punched its afterburners to the maximum while trying to locate the tectonic rift amongst all the dust and ash. The shockwave drove closer and closer, followed by a miles-tall blizzard of rock and debris the size of houses. The enemy fighters desperately scrambled to chase them into safety but, the moment that Rain felt the baseball bat-like impact of the volcanic shockwave pound her head, only her Outrider and a single enemy jet had made it into the debris-filled trench. Everything above ground level was reduced to dust, even the ledges of the rift were rapidly eroded by the supersonic winds in only a few seconds. Dust was blown into the jagged and narrow trench, blinding them even more but allowing them to see one important thing: the beam of the enemy fighter.
"We're in! Just a single enemy on our tail!" Zand informed as she and a couple other Suntouched opened up, firing towards the origin of the beam. A couple succesful glancing blows, however, quickly broke the Serstine's fire up and made one of them almost fall off the jet, causing the othes to cease firing and save their comrade.
The Outrider kept maneuvering, dodging the irregular cliffs of the trench and the giant boulders being blown inside it by the explosion. The less agile Bullhead jet was not having as much luck avoiding the smaller debris and slowly its protective shell of ceramic was cracked and stripped away from its leading edges, leaving the aircraft's more sensitive components protected only by its thin magnesium alloy skin. All the dodging and weaving made the pilot realize something, however: the Outrider was never hit when it was flying higher than the nuclear rocket chasing it. Its laser was boresighted at a slight angle, making it capable of only shooting downwards. As it was damaged, the Bullhead's jet did not dare go near the surface again whereas the Serstine jet still had enough of its armor remaining to resist the high-speed dust and debris hitting it when it flew closer to the stormy surface. Unfortunately, the Outrider itself also couldn't fire at the enemy when it was behind and underneath it as it had no guns pointing there. Things would have to get more Serstine.
"We're in its blind spot!" The pilot of the Outrider announced, skimming the top of the canyon. "But I can't shoot it either, someone needs to jump on it and kill it!"
"Any of you two want to do the honors?" Zand asked of the two noblewomen, grabbing the handles of the knives to free whoever wanted to go and personally take revenge on the Bullhead rocket fighter.
Rain and Norte looked at one another. Even burnt clean and flayed by speed and damage, it was clear their pain and frustration was focusing into something sharp and intimidating.
Norte summed it up. "They were my Norteñas, but we are your servants." She looked at Rain and nodded. "Lady Rain, I humbly request you revenge us on the Bullhead for making a bad situation worse...and personally gut a bitch for me."
Rain chuckled. "You heard her. I'm not coming back without wearing one of those thruster nozzles around my neck like bling."
Zand turned around, signaling the other Suntouched positioned in the aircraft's hardpoints with a gesture. "Lady Rain wants to go, ladies! Give me something badass!" She said and waited for a second or so while they looked around for any extra weaponry that could be handled by the Suntouched princess that had been shot, flayed and burned into a less-than-optimal condition until something was found: a depleted uranium jitte with a finely decorated scabbard and several lucky charms dangling from tassels at the base of the hilt.
"Here you go, Lady!" Zand said and handled the jitta to Rain's non-stabbed hand but Rain soon found herself unable to properly grip it. Being irradiated by the xaser had apparently broken some of the circuitry of her forearm and wrist and her hand wasn't closing properly. In order to help the princess, Zand made a quick demonstration of her lightcaster powers: she did a quick finger gesture, gripped Rain's elbow and pulled five glowing multi-colored strings of magical cabling from it, all attached to her sharp fingertips. She moved in to link these cables to Rain's knuckles, forming a band-aid circuit that bypassed Rain's damaged forearm and made her regain control over her hand. "Alright, now you're set up. It'll last you long enough to bash that thing's brains out!"
Rain tested the quick fix, then looked down at her target and back up to Zand. "Wait! I have a better idea. Can you come with me? Forget the thruster - we can take the whole plane home with us!" She raised her tethered hand to make sure she got the idea. "All we need to do is blind it, and we'll have it at your mercy! Take this as your chance for a greater cut of the valor!" She flicked her head at their opponent one more time. "To say nothing of needed salvage."
"That sounds insane and will get us killed." Zand said, blinking a bit before going for it with a nod. "I like it!"
"Go for it, my Lady!" Norte encouraged. "I will be sure to witness your deed, the guitars of our bards will wail and their drumsets will pound with the story of your deeds for centuries to come!"
"Let's go!" Zand ripped the knife out of Rain's other forearm, freeing her from the aircraft and causing her to fly off and start tumbling. The lightcaster quicky helped stabilize Rain and then both Serstine extended their airbrakes (whatever was left of the airbrakes, in Rain's case) to rapidly decelerate. It was pretty easy to find the enemy aircraft through the dust and smog because of its bluish flame, it was weaving through the trench and bobbing up and down in an attempt to give its downwards-firing laser a shot on the Serstine outrider in front of it. As soon as it saw the thrusters of Rain and Zand fire towards it, a long burst of decoys were machinegunned by its countermeasure launchers, confusing the two incoming Serstine for missiles. Right before Rain and her companion hit it, the pilot of the Outrider took a dive, getting into the fighter's firing arc and baiting it into holding still so that Rain would have an easier time landing on its back, where the flight control systems were located. It started getting hit with the xaser and avoided sustaining damage by unloading its plasma railgun on the cliffs beside it, creating clouds of debris that blocked the laser somewhat.
Rain steered herself and Zand towards their target, glowing through the dark, and the spread of decoys it vomited as they closed in only let her know they were on the right track. She aimed for their center and struck it with a crash before Rain dragged herself up and started searching. Anything that stuck out, any pitot tube, sensor or anything she reasoned could be part of the flight and fire control systems got hard strikes and stabs. It was better to hit too many than too few.
Giving the fighter a taste of its own medicine with swipe after swipe, it only took the lightning-fast and lightning-angry princess a couple of seconds to bash the aircraft's flight computer, backup flight computer and remote control downlink antenna into smithereens... and then she just followed up with its inertial navigation system, missile approach warning system, one of the engine control computer and the backup gyros before Zand had to stop her and hold Rain back from completely destroying the aircraft while they were still on it.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up, hold up!" Zand grabbed Rain's jitta-wielding arm to stop her as the aircraft completely lost autonomous guidance and began to flutter. A large outcropping of rock was only a couple seconds away and the aircraft was effectively dead so Zand had to work fast. "You killed it, leave something for me to work with!"
Zand's normal procedure would be to pull individual magic filaments out of the many flight control inputs and outputs and then carefully link them to the different parts of Rain's body so the hijacked aircraft felt like an extension of her body and could be controlled intuitively. But with a rock outcropping right in front of them, there was no time of subtlety. She simply summoned of magical cabling out of the smoldering wreck of the aircraft's flight computer and slapped them onto Rain as quickly as she could without any regard to how the newly-controled machine would feel to the princess. And it felt weird.
Rain felt sheer power now under her control. 240 megawatts of thermal power being outputted by three airbreathing fission rockets glowing at thousands of degrees and with only a modicum of throttling ability in the form of cylindrical arrays of boron control rods. 35 meters of polymorphic magnesium aerogel airframe densely packed with cooling systems, sensors and equipment. The inside of the aircraft felt somewhat organic, parts of it were biohybrid muscle and tissue in place of mechanical actuators to save weigth. A reinforced internal skeleton of different titanium alloys held the aircraft together and was built like a ribcage around the large laser that took up much of the aircraft's centerline. Judging by the flight control software of all the individual systems that Rain hadn't bashed apart, the aircraft was meant to remain in the stratosphere intercepting MIRVs and satellites and had very little business flying at such low altitudes and speeds but at least its high-lift, arrowhead body and large extendible flaps and slats kept it controllable at lower speeds.
...and all of that information was seemingly coming through Rain's pinky finger. The entire aircraft and the jumbled mess of systems and alarms that it communicated were all coming through the part of Rain's brain that previously only had the humble task of controlling her right pinky finger which completely messed with her sense of balance and self-perception. It would be intuitive enough if pitching the aircraft up was done by arching her back and rolling by twisting her torso but apparently the entire thing would have to be controlled with gestures from her pinky. And the rapidly-approaching outcropping gave Rain very little time to get used to the thousands of new functions that her right pinky now had.
Rain's body made the startled spasms of a bug suddenly flipped over and attempting to right itself. She braced herself and hoped some combination of body movements and the almighty pinky would steer them away from the rocks as she clenched her teeth and hoped. She'd come this far.
The aircraft quickly pitched up, a bit too quickly. The many airflow sensors on the aircraft's sharp delta wing started sending her warnings as they sensed the boundary layer began to separate even with the flaps fully extended. The wings started to lose lift and Rain's initially-sharp turn started getting dangerously wide, too wide to avoid the outcropping. Lowering pitch would smash her into the outcropping but so would continuing to snap turn and stall, losing all lift and simply pummeling out of the sky.
"Whoa, whoa, WHOA!" Zand had to punch her hands through the aircraft's think alloy skin to grab one of the main wing spars and help it steer, although with such a heavy aircraft there was not much the Serstine lightcaster could do to change its course. "This thing's a fucking locomotive!"
Rain, who was clinging besides the fuselage, could feel the turbulent airflow zone begin to spread through the plane's wing on her side. Suddenly, however, she realized that there was a way to inject pressure on top of the wing and make sure the boundary layer didn't completely separate: firing her thrusters along the surface of the wing, like a very quickly improvised boundary layer control system. Zand would have to do the same on her side, though, or else the other wing would stall and they would slam into the cliff even faster
Rain realized that partially by accident as she panic-fired her thrusters in the hope that sheer speed might make it lift and nose out of the way. She was shocked when it actually started responding, just not with the kind of lift she was expecting. The whole thing actually started smartly responding...well, for a being such as itself, anyway. She felt it list - she couldn't do this by herself or they'd scrape themselves across the walls.
She threw all flowery speech and noble air to the wind. "Blow the flaps! BLOW THE FLAPS!" she shouted as she demonstrated with blasts of her thrusters.
"Oh shit, FUCK!" Zand in turn panic-fired her own thrusters, sticking the airflow back on the surface of the wing and making it catch onto the flaps once again. The turn quickly tightened and tightened as the aircraft pulled a pretty impressive angle of attack for something of its size and heft and managed to avoid the outcropping. Rapidly doing an aileron roll to point the lift vector in the opposite direction, the pair repeated their maneuver to avoid slamming onto the opposite wall from oversteer and finally managed to bring the aircraft under control, stabilized and turning nicely now that it had gained enough speed. "By the Lighmother, we did it!"
"Rain Elduranda, my magnificently crazy lady, thou hast done it!" Norte cheered as the Outrider lowered its speed to let the nuclear rocket catch up with it, protecting from the debris that had pockmarked its surface. The worst of the shockwave's ferocious winds outside the canyon had passed but now that they had gotten a hang of flying in the canyon it felt safe to continue that way as they would be quite hard to find by any follow-up forces that landed in the area. They were well outside the view of satellite or airborne radars, which meant for now they would be able to move without worry. "And what a beautiful trophy have you brought! Magnesium will look quite good on you, my lady."
Rain started laughing. It was loud, and long, and forceful, the kind of laugh only reserved for those sorts of holy-shit-we're-still-alive moments. After she got her bearings and calmed down, she took stock of the situation: she was still catching praise and adding to a quickly-growing legend...never mind the fact it wasn't one she set out to write at the start of all this.
She took a breath and patted the airframe of their prize like a horseman giving their favorite steed a little affection. "Lucky for us, we've even sandblasted it! That should make the Aeromasons happy, shouldn't it?" A little more thought on the topic, and she had some more to celebrate for the sake of her lost men. Nobody, it seems, drew blood on the clan Elduranda without their number tearing chunks out and bringing them home as trophies.
The Outrider and Rain's newly-acquired pinky finger flew down the massive tectonic rift for a couple dozen miles at a slower speed to let the engines cool down. Zand and Rain had now gotten a better idea of the thing's flying characteristics and began to push it further to the limits of its flight envelope, flying extremely slow and keeping a high angle of attack. It was lumbering, suffered from massive throttle lag and had a lot of inertia but it was still pretty fun to fly, especially with the victory it represented. Sigils of the Bullhead adorned its wings and sharp single rudder as well as what appeared to be registration codes, or at least some madened gibberish resembling a registration code.
Rain's control over the aircraft gradually began to degrade, however, and she noticed Zand's strings were beginning to fade. Zand quickly responded, asking Norte to come over to help the lady. Norte detached herself from the Outrider and took up Zand's position on the right wing, which freed the lightcasted to fly over to Rain and re-do her connections. This time she could do it properly, and thus linked all of Rain's body -her head, neck, torso, limbs, wings and spine- to different actuators of the Bullhead jet to make it much more comfortable to fly than with its previous 'finger yoga' input method. Zand then went on to do the same to Norte, linking them both so they could fly the jet together at which point it became almost trivial to maneuver the thing down the canyon. It felt quite fun maneuvering the aircraft together with a combination of its own flight surfaces and their improvised flap blowers, quite the victorious feeling compared to the earlier disaster. All the newly-acquired firepower in the jet even gave Rain some hope that she could still accomplish her original mission, not just escape and survive. Yet something was still bugging her at the back of her mind: Norte had just lost a ton of comrades and she surely must have been feeling pretty terrible.
"Lady Elduranda, I've spotted a tunnel spotted up ahead." The pilot of the Outrider reported. "Looks like it's been exposed by the fault, I'll go over and scan it."
"Please do. Report back with whatever you find interesting." That nagging thought was gnawing at Rain more and more. But how to approach it? Yes, Norte could be enthusiastic and blunt, but that just felt...wrong, to suddenly point such things out to a friend, especially one who had lost so many of her own for no good reason. Rain stumbled through it, growing oddly quiet and hesitant. She cleared her throat and looked over at Norte, eyes begging her wordlessly to start the uncomfortable conversation for her.
The outrider opened a datalink to Norte and moved up ahead to the mouth of the tunnel, which had gotten exposed when the ground cracked. It had gotten partially flooded with brine, which poured out of the open mouth of the tunnel like a small waterfall. Only one side was accessible as the other had collapsed so the pilot moved in closer, switching the Outrider to hover mode and pinging down the tunnel several times and at several frequencies to map out the insides. Rain and Norte's aircraft had no hover mode at all so instead they had to carefully nose it over and throttle it with expert precision to get it to tailsit in midair, matching the aircraft's mass and its thrust precisely while compensating for the turbulent air that kept hitting it. Four of the remaining Suntouched moved over from the Outrider to help stabilize Rain's MacGyver'ed VTOL in the roll axis now that the ailerons had completely lost authority.
Keeping the aircraft balanced on its tail was quite hard and Norte was clearly concentrating on it. Eventually she looked over at Rain, though and asked "Can I be of service, my Lady?" with a tone that seemed to subtly hint that she knew what the issue at hand was.
"Yes, nothing major. Just a moment of your time." She took a breath and found no other words to delicately start the conversation with. "I'm sorry."
The data came in through the datalink: the tunnel actually led to a pretty vast underground complex, large and complicated enough that even the radar signal faded out and became indistinguishable in the distance. Many parts of it were either obscured to the radar or had collapsed but they could still tell that there was a series of large underground hangars up ahead. Judging by the fact the entire thing hadn't collapsed from the colossal earthquake, it seemed to have been built on either solid bedrock -a rarity on Aphanizomen- or have gone some pretty extreme soil stabilization to hold it together. It was too large a work to have been carried out by the Bullhead, who according to the Blinkers were fairly recent arrivals. This had to be the Axiomatic base of operations in the planet, the project that the Blinkers had alluded to. And, so far, the best option to try getting back to her original quest of finding the anti-orbital targeting systems and perhaps uncovering a few secrets along the way. After all, the Blinkers had no idea they were there.
"I would be doing my friends a disservice if I allowed their passing to weaken me at a moment like this." Norte replied as a couple Suntouched moved in to begin scouting the tunnel. Both aircraft remained hovering in place, although Rain's was beginning to overheat without any ram air to cool itself down. They would have to land rather soon. "However... I'll tell you... I wish I could just say that I am at peace with their passing. I think when we reach relative safety I could use a few moments, both alongside you and by myself." She spoke in a tone that weaved between stoicism and a subtle melancholy. "The loss weighs on me."
Rain started looking around for anything to sit the plane's tail on and hoped that it wouldn't just destroy itself in the attempt. She'd grown to have more than a little gratitude for the thing. Binning it would just be an ignominious end to it.
"I understand," Rain said, feeling like a weight had been lifted from her own shoulders. Perhaps not lifted: maybe it was just because she now was able to bear it with Norte openly. "Will you permit your princess a part of that burden? We have the same thing to mourn, you and I."
"Of course I will, I think that my grief is not enough to do my Norteñas justice." Norte replied then went silent.
Having done some pretty complicated flying so far, the two decided they might as well cap it off with the most complicated flying possible: slowly taking the aircraft through the tunnel to land it in one of the underground hangars, where it would be safe from the acid rain as well as the rockfalls that were still happening from aftershock earthquakes. The tunnel was not tall enough for them to fly at a high enough angle to hover it into the hangar, which meant that they had to go for a much more complicated plan: it would fly at as high an angle as possible with its nose resting on the top of the Outrider, which was fully capable of hovering, and so it would make its way into the hangar. This required pretty much everyone to play a part; Zand continuously maintained Rain and Norte's filaments in perfect condition while all the Suntouched -including the returning scouts who reported no contacts- kept the two aircraft balanced on top of each other with cables.
The Outrider flipped upside down so that the much heavier aircraft could rest on its structurally-sound landing skid rather than crushing its back. Hovering upside-down with 30 tons of nuclear rocket lying on top of it was an extreme test of the Outrider's skill, especially as its thrusters vaporized the river of brine and reduced visibility to zero. It was strangely therapeutic, at least in the sense that it took up so much of the two Serstine noblewomen's concentration that they simply had no mental capacity left to feel deppressed from the recent loss and instead had to keep their minds on the task at hand -or explode and kill even more Suntouched. Guided by the Outrider's radar, the group of Serstine flew a hundred meters until finally reaching the hangar then carefully maneuvered the two aircraft around a pile of debris.
Alost 20 minutes after starting the maneuver, they finally managed to softly settle the Bullhead trophy aircraft on an elevated platform that hadn't been flooded with the help of improvised pulleys punched into the reinforced ceiling by the Suntouched. The Outrider then had to go all the way back to have enough room to flip itself over and then flew into the hangar once more to land itself near Rain and her Suntouched. For the first time since they arrived, jet and plasma engines were shut off and everyone took a moment to cool down and realize how indescribably exhausted everything had gotten them. Safety at last, the brine-flooded hangar with a completely toxic atmosphere felt almost homely after all they'd gone through.
Rain took in the relative silence, closing her eyes and letting the only noises be air cycling through her body and the bodies of her remaining retinue, the sounds of brine dripping from wherever it had been agitated, and their footsteps. She had a lot to take in. It would have been a lot for anyone to process.
The first thing Norte asked for once the dust had settled was a few moments by herself. Retreating to the other side of the hangar as everyone found elevated spots to slimp and fall asleep, Norte took it upon herself to perform the rites for her fallen companions. There were enough of them gone that the process took quite a long while, Rain fell asleep several times only to find Norte still at it, looking more and more tired each time but still dutifully inscribing the names and deeds of the fallen on the funerary ingot that would be handed to a Moontouched once they came back. Norte's flame was burning dimmer, more from exhaustion than anything else, but the three large nuclear reactors of the Bullhead interceptor gave her a heat source to keep her tungsten quill glowing red.
The latest time Rain woke up, she saw Norte perhaps weaker than she'd ever seem her. She just couldn't leave Norte to it this time, slowly making her way to her, the way someone might approach a scared cat for fear of it hissing or attacking. Wary that she needed this time, she stood where she was, close enough that hopefully Norte saw she was there if she needed her.
Without a word being exchanged for close to an hour of writing in the ignot -the heat from the reactor gradually lasted less and less as the Bullhead interceptor's engines cooled down- Rain and Norte felt like they were exchanging more emotions than ever. Just their proximity felt meaningful, not far enough for Norte to feel like she was being left on her own and not close enough that she felt Rain was intruding upon her reflections. Just right.
She eventually covered all six faces of the ingot with writing and had to cut it in half to make room for more but, after six hours of continuous rites and the burning of sacred incenses, Norte was done. She was free to talk and slump against the wall, shutting off her secondary motor functions to start giving some parts of her brain the rest that she was desperately craving. Despite that Norte was on the verge of simply falling unconscious from exhaustion, she kept herself awake with the same drive and willpower that an a quarter-day ago had been used to survive a barrage of nuclear warheads and a supervolcano explosion. She became quite talkative, sharing gossip and amusing anecdotes from the fallen to Rain with a theatrical flair and an expert use of narrative structure. Each of the fallen 15 Norteñas was the protagonist of an amazing story that Norte had to tell, the sheer passion Norte put into recounting the stories of her gang made Rain practically feel like she was watching a movie. Uproarious adventures in the "Mimikoan Jihad", raids on Mai communities, elaborate trolling operations in each and every rhizome, stream sniping Coronan influencers, extreme brushes with death, disagreements and petty catfights, Norte told it all. She made sure to humanize her companions as much as she could, refusing to have them be remembered as abstract heroes and generic paragons of virtue. Norte made sure Rain had a crystal-clear impression of who her clique had been in life, both the glorious and embarassing parts of it.
Rain could practically see it all. She hoped that the Moontouched would treat it with the reverence it was due - and if she could, she'd ensure it. The mayhem, the mishaps, the triumphs.
It hit her that she thought she knew people, but this retinue of Norte's, these people she found out she hardly understood, she truly knew. It was just a shame she had to know them after the fact.
She made a promise to herself to never miss another person like this, to be a part of that story while it's being written.
As soon as Rain fully caught on to each and every one of the fallen and the impression they had left in Norte, and Norte had properly verified that Rain had gotten the right feel for them, it was as if a switch had flipped in the Serstine retainer. She went from a dedicated and theatrical narrator to practically just slumped onto Rain's arms, her flame at the brink of extinguishing from sheer exhaustion.
"They were good people, my princess. A part of me is scared of telling ancnet they have passed. I don't want to make that many people sad." Norte said, nodding off (edited)
Rain quietly answered, "They were. But a story without its end is incomplete." And as Norte rest, Rain sat there, cradling her and being something for her to lie on.
With the perimeter secured and every vent on the hangar checked for activity, Norte and Rain finally fell asleep on each other. Outside, the massive aftershocks of the earthquake had only just began to calm down, leaving a long volcanic winter behind as well as torrential acid rain. There would eventually be time to explore the large underground complex, especially since such a psychotic nuclear outburst would require the Bullhead to reorganize its forces. For now the Serstine warlords could simply rest and recharge their energies.
Rain only became aware of how deeply she had slept after a few moments of waking up and reflexively rubbing her eyes. Suddenly she noticed there was skin on her face again and her arms had a smattering of carbon fiber patches and improvised repairs applied to them. She'd completely dozed through a full-blown reconstructive surgery, one which had fairly respectable results given the conditions. She was still nowhere near in top form but now she at least looked and felt like she could exert herself for a few more minutes without completely blowing up; the leading edges of her bigger wings and fins had been replaced along with the internal lining of her nozzles. The replacement parts were pretty obvious on her, instead of her stark whites and purples they were a deep, somewhat rusty-looking reddish brown. She recognized that color and immediately looked at the Bullhead fighter, confirming her suspicions once she saw that some of its fins and its airbrakes had been dismantled for parts. Next thing she noticed was the big, puffy velcro vest she was wearing, into which an umbilical cord went in that connected onto her abdomen right underneath her bust; the other end of this thick cable went into one of the reactors of the Bullhead interceptor.
"Oh! Your highness, you've awoken." One of the remaining Suntouched immediately knelt down near Rain as soon as they noticed she was moving. "Please try not to move to much, you're in a pretty sensitive state."
It was then that Rain noticed it wasn't just the Bullhead fighters' parts on her. She focused on her hand and saw it was Norte's, then as she looked at her legs and torso she saw many more of Norte's unmistakeable parts were now attached to her body, replacing the parts that had been shot off in the previous battle. She was starting to remember now, the two of them had suffered so much damage that the only way they'd been able to fly to relative safety was by holding each other. Now it appeared everything that was left functional in Norte's body was transplanted to hers, which immediately got her worried about where Norte actually was. After a second she fond Norte a few feet besides her, and a chill went down her spine as she saw her slumping as little more than a hollowed-out shell surrounded by cables and broken ceramic. She seemed to be completely inert, not a single spark of her flame still remained on her body and large vital portions of her flame containment had been visibly removed. She tried to reach out for Norte, and a sort of reflexive sense of her own fragility ran across her body like a tremor. She was at a loss for words, frozen there, halfway towards reaching out a hand towards Norte. Her mouth hung open, her expression fell, and she let her body relax as she sighed, feeling defeated.
"...is it really just me, then?" she quietly asked nobody in particular. She looked down at herself and quietly asked if she really wanted to know. But she asked, and in her heart she braced for the answer.
"It's not ever going to be just you, my lady." Rain heard the reply, surprisingly crystal-clear considering that her ears had gotten blown to the point everything sounded muffled, in Norte's voice. She then felt two hands over hers, tightening a bit to comfort her and noticed they were actually Norte's gauntlets, attached to jury-rigged arms made of parts of both Serstine that were themselves attached to... her own shoulders.
It wasn't just the arms, too, all the Norte parts on Rain weren't just there as patchwork, they were all moving independently on their own. The Serstine princess suddenly felt herself shift around and get back to her feet without willing it, with her legs instinctively reacting to gain some balance and making her realize she had four legs in total now, only two of which she controlled directly.
"Princess Elduranda, we tried our best to bring you back online using parts of the Bullhead fighter but we just didn't have enough equipment or expertise to do it and made several mistakes along the way." The Suntouched informed while Rain kind of waddled around still trying to wrap her head around what exactly she could control. "We evaluated all possible options an-..."
"...And I just told them that if neither one of us is in condition to fly out then it's time to get creative." Norte replied, once again coming across much clearer than everything else Rain heard. "There's still one full Serstine between what's left of our frames, everything else that's left was just dead weigth." She stammered. "...try not to move too much, my lady, I'm also still trying to get used to it."
Now that she was standing up, Rain could see that Norte's frame besides her was missing the back of its skull and her upper spine. There was some bloody gauze and medical instruments left in the skull cavity, like it had been used as a garbage bin after whatever Frakenstein scene had unfolded while she was asleep.
"My brain's in the backpack." Norte used one of the arms she controlled to grab Rain's wrist and gently move her so she could feel the aerodynamic pod that was now attached to her back, salvaged from one of the Bullhead jet's jammers. Salvaged cabling and hydraulic lines were now circulating blood to it while a neuroptic connection was jacked onto the base of Rain's skull. "As for my flame... well, I must apologize for intruding this much upon your personal space but it's right next to yours."
It then hit Rain that the color of her flame coming out of her exhausts was in fact an exact combination of her bluish tone with Norte's paler color.
She kept moving carefully, slowly as she realized what Norte had proposed. It was like looking at her shell for the very first time all over again. She gawked just a bit - she couldn't help it. The colors of their two flames danced and swirled around one another as she steadied...themselves...and felt the strange sensation of resting her weight on four legs rather than two. She had to admit, it wasn't the weirdest sensation, she had boosters for a while that were long enough that she could just rest her weight on their bottom tips, and she could get used to that again. Once the two of them were whole, that is.
She took it gently. "...thank you, Norte. Forgive me for not quite knowing how to repay you at this moment, but know that you'll get yours in due time for all you've done so far." Rain decided not to test herself too much and feel out how well Norte was coming with getting used to this new gestalt body. "How long have you been awake?"
"My lady Rain Elduranda, to be by your side and fuel the fire that drives you is its own reward." Norte hugged her with the arms she controlled, which from the outside just looked like Rain was hugging herself all of a sudden. A lot of Norte's mannerisms and reflexes had carried over to this new gestalt body, the most noticeable to Rain was the fact that all thrusters to her right side were firing slightly more intensely. For a Serstine, Norte had always been awfully imbalanced both aerodynamically and kinetically, what with the huge gauntlet she always carried with her; rather than getting rid of her precious mistralium whips Norte had gradually and unconsciously shifted her flame's output to the right. Now she'd become so accustomed to it it had even carried over to the gestalt, keeping a subtle slant on her output and causing Rain to have to lean in to the additional thrust that Norte provided.
"I've been awake for an hour or so, I believe." Norte replied. "Although, to tell you the truth, you were still sleeping so I had no way to tell the time. You're the one with eyes after all."
"Lady Elduranda!" Rain heard a sobbing voice from behind her before getting pushed around. When she looked back she saw her lightcaster, Zand, prostrating herself before the Serstine princess with tears running down her face. A very open display of regret, considering that she had to consciously open her cybernetic tear ducts like most Serstine. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
"Whoa, whoa, you're pushing us!" Norte said, speaking through a tiny speaker attached to her brain jar.
"I will say the surgery didn't quite go as expected." Norte said, this time sending her speech directly to Rain's auditory system rather than speaking it out loud. "She burned my cerebellum off, we should have brought a fleshmith to be honest." Norte paused for a second and then tightened her hug. "...or maybe not. I enjoy the closeness, Lady Rain."
Rain laughed. "There must be..." She had to cut herself off as she was already trying to consciously maintain balance, and even more so when Zand prostrated herself and apologized over and over and she had to bend down a bit to address her. She tottered to one side and then countered with a little thrust to right herself. "...erm. Apologies of my own. There must be some way we can share such a bond in the future without needing such a literal connection. I have felt on occasion that my secondary reactors have had a mind of their own already, so in a way this is the logical conclusion to that. Wouldn't you say?
And with that...Zand, up." She paused and saw, wow, she was going to town on this. "Up. We are alive, functional - to at least an acceptable degree - and able to go from here. To accompany us from here will make it up to me enough." Rain turned around and regarded their surroundings more closely, now that she was more lucid and getting a good idea of her bearings. "Now what's next?" Then a thought occurred to her as memories of being briefly turned into a thermonuclear NEFP flashed through her head. If that wasn't just happening right on their heads, then... "...or is that better said as 'what's left?'" She fretted.
"Understood, my Lady" Zand nodded and sniffled, getting back up and flaring her thrusters for a moment as she regained her composture. Now that they were all back up and running, the rest of the Serstine troop - 15 Suntouched who had come down along with the fighter jet, gathered around Rain to give their reports.
"We've scouted the area, lady Elduranda." One of them said then pointed at the tunnel opposite to where they'd come from. "Looks like it isn't just a tunnel, there is a pretty expansive underground complex up ahead. Sections of it collapsed from the earthquake but ultrasound and photonic pulses tell me there's still a lot of it left standing. We've also analysed radioisotopes in the area, it seems this place was powered by a nuclear reactor that got scrammed. A pretty massive one."
"A nuclear reactor?" Norte noted. "If geothermal power alone wasn't cutting it in this place then whatever's inside must be pretty important."
"There's some good news for a change." Zand said, standing firm now. "On top of the radionuclides we've also detected some traces of Levantene in the air. There might have been dawnstone stored here... might still be."
Rain balked. "Dawnstone...now what might that be there for, I wonder?" She wondered that out loud, then smiled. That was more like it, something to get her back on track. Indeed, she was still alive and so were some of her closest. There was some trouble to get into ahead of them all and she was the one to lead them.
Naturally, she said all this and then some before taking point for them all.
"More nuclear fire and a prize waiting somewhere in the embers of a planetary inferno? Now if I was to ask myself if there ever was a scenario where one seemingly made a hole specifically for us to fill, metaphorically as one does, then this would be it. We were offered plunder and prizes for our aid, and this was before the Bullhead and..." Rain stumbled on her words a bit, but picked fitting ones. "...fate..." She could feel Norte's bile well up in her own throat. "...decided to run up a sizable bill. We will collect on this debt owed to us, and it is owed to us, and I can think of no better time to start than now. We go now, and reap glory from this tattered mess!"
Rain led the group of Serstine down the tunnel leading to the complex, thrusters flaring just enough to quickly dart ahead while still somewhat upright. She wanted to be the group's vanguard, her and Norte in this curious ad-hoc fusion, but she wasn't about to go rushing ahead unnecessarily into any more unwelcome surprises
Norte and Rain advanced together, fused as one. Nortain? Rorte? The two exchanged a few silent thoughts while walking point for their comrades, wondering what exactly they were now. It wasn't as simple as a voice in each other's head. With their flames intermixed, a lot of times Rain felt she was thinking with Norte's brain and vice-versa. Zand guaranteed that the two of them would still be able to get separated after it was over, but they still hoped that their memories and personalities weren't leaking too much into the other. At least, if there was ever someone who Princess Elduranda could tolerate being fused with in such a way it was Norte, particularly in a time of her life where she needed some support.
The tunnel split and split again into an increasingly labyrinthine expanse. A two-track maglev railway system had once serviced the underground complex, upon finding a train that had derailed during the earthquakes the Serstine princess and her party got their first taste of sweet, sweet loot. Perhaps the sweetest she'd ever gotten, considering the grueling trial she had endured to get to it. A literal trainload worth of superconducting magnets that had once kept the cars afloat, in the form of thousands of small linked elements like the transmission chain of a CVT. They quickly got to work in dismantling some of the train and Norte fashioned some of the polymorphic aluminium-niobium-molybdenum-vanadium-tantalum-boron-rhenium-titanium-nickel chain.
"There you go, princess. Not quite the jewels of Crown Elduranda but it will have to do." Norte told Rain. "I think it will be wise to leave a couple warriors in this train, they can work on dismantling more of it and take turns carrying back to the hangar. They'll serve as our rear guard while they do it."
"There is at least the story behind it all," she said, looking over the chain as it was being stripped. "I doubt they would refuse. Spoils are always a good reason to dawdle - the one time a Serstine might." Then she thought for a moment and added, "...not that I'm entirely discounting it, weirder things have happened to you or I before this, but...you don't imagine any of those top-heavy freaks survived all that, do you?"
"No computer components for us here, at least." Norte said as she and Rain pushed the door open to look at one of the cargo cars. Much to her disgust, a sludge of blood-saturated acid covered the floor of the wagon transporting multiple broken canisters. It reeked of death, although Norte and Rain were lucky enough that their current body lacked a "noumenal" sense of smell. They only got the notification that it smelled like death.
"Ew." Norte remarked, turning on a headlight to inspect the canisters, finding half-melted corpses inside them. "Yeah, ew. Looks like we got a cloning factory of sorts, with a giant nuclear reactor somewhere AND some dawnstone operation. Things are getting really interesting now."
Armored blast doors had been activated at several points in the maglev tunnel. Removing the meter-thick doors was out of the question, so the party had to repeatedly go for smaller and smaller technical passageways and secondary tunnels. At some points they were able to re-join the main line of the railway and continue as the blast had caused some of the rocket-activated blast doors to come off their rails and not close fully. The fit was pretty tight, however. Especially since unlike humans, Serstine had completely solid construction and couldn't squeeze through gaps much.
"I'm getting some... weird radionuclides. Fresh boron." Norte said as she and Norte found themselves barely able to fit through the gap of the blast door. "Maybe the reactor isn't fully scram-."
A hand, an enormous hand reached for them from the other side of the blast door and forcefully pulled them through into the black tunnel on the other side, ripping a few winglets in the purpose and pressing Rain's new tiara into her skull. Whatever had pulled them in quickly threw them at the opposite wall of the tunnel in one single quick motion, although with Rain's new body Norte found it easier to break their impact. They fell to the floor and... teeth. There were human teeth on the floor. The tunnel was full of them, bloodied human teeth, an incomprehensible ammount of them, so many that they covered the floor at least a foot high, their enamel dissolved by the acid fumes into a disgusting sludge.
While they were in shock of what they were seeing, the monstrous creature that had pulled them in grabbed the blast door and, in an immense show of strength, managed to close it a couple inches more to trap the Serstine princess and her retainer in.
"Lady Elduranda! Lady Elduranda!" Rain heard the calls of her Suntouched and Zand, who tried to squeeze themselves through the now-too-narrow gap to no avail.
"Ya alright, Princess?" Zand asked just as, on the other side of the door, Rain finally got a look at what had pulled them in. She wasn't alright.
--
Dark rumors had echoed in the damp halls of the galaxy's most impoverished and deccrepit asylums of the Tooth Fairy, the entity that acted somewhat as the Bullhead's debt collector. The Bullhead, bearer of insanity, only offered to shoulder the burden of schizophrenia, BPD, somatic symptom disorder and many other mental horrors in exchange for servitude. As long as the pact held, the torturous hallucinations would fade and screaming voices would fall silent, swallowed by the psychic black hole of the Bullhead. A relief so coveted that pushed normal impoverished men into fighting Serstine in the hydrothermal basin of Aphanizomen. Cowardice and mediocrity in duty would make these unfortunate wretches' mental torture return, but for those who not only broke their pact with the eldridtch axiomata but actively tried to rescue others from its all-destroying grasp something much worse was reserved.
The Tooth Fairy towered over Rain and Norte, big enough she used the cuirasses of normal troopers for pauldrons. This insanity-driven mountain of ceramic and muscle was covered in the sigils of the Bullhead and thousands of teeth embedded in her armor. From her shoulders and back extended two dozen or so boron control rods, giving her the spiked look of a sea urchin and maintaining control over the... thing that glowed in her chest. It wasn't The Flame, it was like a sick parody of it. Fission instead of fusion, the blue glow of ionizing radiation shone through the gaps in her faceless armor.
"Oh, FUCK!" Norte shouted. "What the fuck is that?! WHY the fuck is that?"
Showing agility that could only be possible through some magical or psionic enhancement, the Tooth Fairy reached for and struck with her weapon: the head and spine of an axiomatic Paradox Hunter, using it as a flail. It struck the ground right near Rain as they dodged, sending teeth flying all over.
"Oh, good, so that thing is..." Rain grabbed for her tiara and tried to yank it back into shape as she watched its moves, eyes tracking the flail. "...real!" She decided to focus on keeping her distance and trying to keep Norte calm, hoping she'd spool her killer instinct back up if she was balanced. Then, she assumed a fighting stance and continued with what she knew.
"I've heard the stories from some of our more...adventurous...circles. Our youngest, most reckless soldiers out on rides far from the fleet pieced together the story of a monster of some kind; the accounts they picked up all sounded like the same sort of creature. I must say, she's bigger than I thought."
Tooth fairy slowly paced towards them, each thunderous bootstep echoing in the empty hall. Besides the disturbing piles of teeth that were everywhere, there were also four maglev trains sitting side by side, the one closest to them had been lifted off the tracks. This appeared to be a switchyard or maintenance depot for the maglev line that ran through the underground complex, turned into the nightmarish apparition's personal hideout.
She swung her gigantic flail in slow circles. In the first swing she quickly and ferociously struck, which was enough for Norte to snap back into the fight and boost herself for a dodge. In the same movement she sprayed Tooth Fairy with her gauntlet-mounted gun at near point blank range but the ceramic carapace that covered the behemoth barely dented.
"The moment we get split off from our AT boys this had to happen!" Norte dashed back to avoid another swing from the flail, then Rain had to think quick and strafe the ground in front of her to avoid shots of laser fire. As it turns out, the disembodied paradox hunter's head still had its laser fully functional.
"You think her being here has something to do with whatever the installation is hiding?" Norte asked.
The answer became rather apparent as Norte and Rain were surprised when they felt their leg grabbed by a hand coming from the churning piles of teeth. With a gesture from Tooth Fairy, dozens of near-skeletal humanoid creatures began emerging from the ground to grab onto Norte and Rain, their jaws torn open exposing bloodied and toothless mouths. The Deserters, traitors to the will of the madness-thirsting deity. It was all way, way more literal than Rain thought it was going to be, and the only explanation for the insanity that was starting to take place was that there HAD to be something reality-warping about this place.
"Nevermind, it definitely does." Norte spun around while deploying her nightstone whip, slicing all the deserters to bits and causing them to disappear back into the mass of teeth... which seemed to be getting deeper. More teeth were starting to pour in from somewhere, they couldn't tell. "This is beyond everything I was told about the Bullhead, my princess. Something must be empowering this pandemonium."
Tooth Fairy then stepped forward and plunged her hands onto the ground, pulling two heavily-armored Bullhead shock troopers with their autocannons at the ready. They seemed to be dead; armor riddled with shell holes and old blackened blood staining the joints of their armor. Yet they stood puppetteered by an invisible force and moving on the Serstine princess at the command of the large apparition.
Rain licked her lips. Something she could kill, before working her way up. "I've heard stories, if you want me to discuss tactics," she told Norte. "Anything could help us, and everything has a weakness!" She demonstrated by bounding at one of the shock troopers and trying to keep them from landing a hit by tracing dizzying patterns and picking up speed. "Be another set of senses, Norte. See what I miss!"
The fighters opened up, muzzle blasts from their twin-barrel autocannons being enough to light up the entire switchyard and make Rain and Norte notice that the additional teeth were pouring in from cracks on the roof. "This train!" Norte said as they dodged under the train held up by the lift. "If we could pull the big one underneath it, my whips could drop the machine on top of her!"
For now, however, the three held a mostly static formation. Tooth Fairy moved to keep the troopers between her and the Serstine.
"That'll do. Off we go!" She fired her boosters and decided to go in long back-and-forth patterns, occasionally closing into one line trooper or the other to blast them with some of her boosters point-blank. The idea was simple, and she ran Norte through it as they went:
"There must be one way to get them to shuffle, and that would be to kill one of the smaller ones," she said in between skidding across the ground, sending sparks everywhere in her wake as she expertly dove them under a burst of autocannon fire. "They try to reposition, we capitalize by forcing the Tooth Fairy's path underneath our target. It will require some expert timing on our part, but how much more synchronized can the two of us get?"
"That sounds good, my lady, I know how to do that!"
Norte's first intuition was to bait the autocannon fire closer to her by dodging in and out of one of the troopers' field of fire. After a third time -and when the train she was taking cover behind looked like a piece of swiss cheese- she and Norte dashed sideways then up, attracting a long burst of fire from the undead line trooper's autocannon. They aimed to fly directly above them, taking advantage that with the heft of the autocannon and the trooper's armor it would be very hard to aim the weapon vertically to keep up with their movement. This allowed them to outrun the line trooper's aim as it ended up shooting directly above itself, causing large pieces of the ceiling to come off and land on him.
While the trooper's heavy armor did not get damaged much by the debris, its ammunition belt broke, giving Rain and Norte an opportunity.
"That one's gun is jammed, let's go!"
Rain picked up speed and decided to go circling the Tooth Fairy. It was trying to keep space, and having her circle would, she hoped, force her to circle accordingly. Even if she didn't, she wanted to keep that speed up. If they shot again and tried to lead, she'd simply brake and change direction or double back. Just enough to keep Tooth Fairy circling, quick and efficient.
It took over an hour, a practically monolithic amount of time for Serstine, to defeat the Toothfairy, its huge fission powered form taking repeated hit after hit as it fought the Suntouched and the combined form of Rain and Norte. Losses had been heavy, and the things giant form had been so damaged enough that it had been forced to withdraw, its blue glow animating from the tunnels that it now withdrew down, covered by its own Bullhead Pointmen that had arrived to try hold the Serstine back. Despite how hard they had fought; the thing had eluded them. Still the pointmen did not last long against their blinding speed, and in short order the group discovered their objective. A huge Dawnstone capacitor with attendant computer systems, deep within the semi shattered complex the titanic power cables seemed to have survived the earth upheaval and were continuing to provide power to the anti-orbital weapons. Despite being guarded, without the Tooth fairy the Pointmen and other forces stood no chance as the Serstine danced around them, cutting them down and sabotaging the large capacitor and its cables. Already the Bullhead would know of its defeat here, and that meant one thing.
Swiftly escaping the underground confines, the shockwaves from the explosives almost instantly took the AO guns offline, something which was swiftly followed by the blinding flash of nuclear explosives, as Bullhead tried to take down the Serstine in its own defeat. But it wasn’t enough, climbing high into the sky to their own aircraft the deed was done. The planet was open to Axiomatic forces. And Rain and Norte had managed to, albeit not unscathed, survive the actions of their now dead insane allies.