Post by dokkywokky on Mar 22, 2023 5:58:14 GMT
Diadochi Salome of the Marauder Khanate was known for many things. She was known for her inescapable beauty. She was known for her sharp wit, her silver tongue, and much, much more. If one cared to look just a hair deeper, however, they’d have discovered her keen interest in all matters of trade. She had a particularly un-Khanate-like belief that ruling was best done through manipulating the subtle aspects of life as opposed to the heavy application of brute force and power. As it happened, economy and trade were one such aspect under her purview.
When the Khanate was founded, Salome was a key player in establishing its economy, trade routes, currency, and foreign policy. When the Khanate took to the galactic stage, she eagerly invested herself into the economic climate of the galaxy. With (supposedly) far more experience than she had started with, Salome had made what would be the Khanate’s first step into the wider galactic economy. The ‘Empyreal Forlorn Trade Company’, colloquially known as the Empyreal Company, was built from the ground up as the Diadochi’s personal interstellar trade organization. Naturally, the merchant princes of the Khanate, the Viziers, protested this. Many tried to take up their concerns with the Khanate and have the project scrapped: both out of personal ambition and for fear of Salome gaining too much power over her peers.
Alas, Salome was close with the Lord Khan. She had simply whispered into the Lord Khan’s ears, and all charges were dropped. So it was that the Empyreal Company strode forwards, gobbling up the enterprises of various Viziers who tried to make their own stakes in the stars. Soon enough, the Company had swollen so massively in size as to become Salome’s personal interstellar fiefdom.
One of the many subsectors of the Empyreal Company came to be known as the Empyreal Expeditionary Company. The Expeditionary Company was dedicated to laying claims on far off planets, only to scour them ruthlessly for everything of value. Its primary duties involved the creation of mining zones, industrial bases, and trade posts; and the subjugation of any resistance that came-by though the iron might of Salome’s personal marauders. It just so happened that a snowy, barren dwarf-planet had come under their attention. Discovered to be particularly mineral-rich, a force had been quickly dispatched to lay claims to it and bring it under Empyreal-Khanate control.
The situation became rapidly more complicated after that.
Jahuty-12,
Jahuty System Mech Hangar,
Empyreal Jahuty Headquarters
Rivaille Rivendare didn’t know how long it’d been since he’d arrived here, nor did he really care. What he did know, however, was that he preferred his old post. At least his previous station was a forest world with a human-friendly atmosphere, and not the glorified snowball he now helped occupy. Even his skin had been lightly tanned from the local UV radiation: as Jahuty’s magnetosphere had frozen with its air centuries ago. Rivaille let out a yawn, before sighing as he leant against the hangar wall.
The hangar itself was currently the glorified storage closet of the Khanate’s latest project - though he had to quietly remind himself that it had never been their idea to begin with. These mecha-frames were the trademark of his home planet: now just another vassal of the Khanate’s overbloated lordships. Rivaille gazed up at the towering frame of his own mech: a towering, bipedal pile of olive green metal. Its body was clunky, and its ‘head’ dominated most of its torso. It was a massive cylindrical casing, housing both the reactor and some weaponry in a rounded mass above its waist and between its shoulderblades.
Soon, he reflected, l’ll be deployed to scout the planet again. Soon, he was going to become a pawn of Vizier Xerxes’ will once more. As he did so, he heard the cold winds of Jahuty-12 whispering outside the confines of the hangar. Through the camera-and-screen ‘windows’, Rivaille was able to see the barren, vast expanse of frost before him. It wasn’t much. No, indeed, was practically nothing - but the wealth of mineral resources that laid beneath that stark blanket of pure, flat ground was truly something awe-inspiring. To the layperson, it was mind-numbingly blank: but to the Vizier, it was like the Holy Grail.
Why? He thought. Why must a soldier of a once-proud nation submit and bow to the heels of that greedy tyrant?
“Truth be told,” he said, gazing at his tired reflection in the lens of his frame’s single, scarlet camera, “I don’t even know anymore.”
Jahuty-12,
Jahuty System,
Plains of Jahuty
The star system was swathed in the great, black blanket of a nebula; leaving nothing but its Red Dwarf star shining among the frigid landscape. Save that and the pinpricks of Jahuty’s thirteen other planets, the horizon looked dark and barren. Removed from any context, the place almost felt like some alien purgatory - a desolate non-space where the dying came after death.
Patrolling this wasteland makes me wish for a nuclear winter, Rivaille mused to himself. He leant back into the seat inside of his cockpit, taking a sip of water. Currently, he and the rest of his lance were traveling through the plains, doing their usual security rounds of the area. There wasn’t much of anything to watch out for, but Vizier Xerxes saw it prudent in the case that any rival company tried to make a move here. Rivaille sighed, relaxing. Maybe he could take a nap while his mecha patrolled with the rest of his group on autopilot. He drifted off, amusing himself by recalling their formulaic, simple formation. A lance, he recalled, is a group of four mechs- two lighter machines, one medium, and one heavy. But they usually travel in sets of three: so really, I’m just one in a group of twelve giant robots. He chuckled at that; the biggest group he’d ever been in on his homeworld had only been a set of three. Rivaille yawned, feeling the dreary blanket of sleep closing in. Just an hour or two, and he’d be up.
He closed his eyes, drifting away: but then, something bright pricked at his eyelids. He rubbed his eyes and frowned, thinking it had been some kind of notification on his screen.
Then, the empty horizon lit up with something that nobody on the planet had seen before.
An aurora borealis? No: it was ribbons of scarlet and maroon light, crackling across the thin atmosphere. They looked like some eldritch cross between lightning, flames, and the northern lights. The snow leapt up from the edge of the planet as if it were trying to leave its surface, before the gargantuan plume painstakingly splayed out across the atmosphere in a great and gentle blizzard.
Rivaille nearly spat out his drink. His hands flew to his control panels as he snapped to attention, scanning the horizon intently. As he did-so, the rest of the Lance opened their comms.
“What the hell was that?!” Someone shouted. Most likely Leto: he was always a panicky one. “Are you seeing this?!”
“Aye,” Rivaille grunted; “Confirming visual. Lance-corporal Diana, your orders?”
For a moment, there was no reply. The taut silence was broken in a flash by her authoritative voice.
“I’ve reported this to command,” she explained. “Orders are to investigate. Washi, Leto, take point. Rivaille, behind me. We’re going in.”
“Yes, Ma’am!”, barked the men in a mechanical chorus. As they changed their formation, Rivaille idly mused about the old days; back before his world’s enslavement.
“This really brings back memories, doesn’t it?” He quietly said. There was no reply, save for the humming of his machine all around him.
As they’d raced across the barren white of Jahuty-12, the planet’s paper-thin atmosphere had whispered around them like a skittish cloud of wraiths. The snow had kicked up under their Lance as the mechs soared across the barren tundra. For hours, they’d been unable to see nothing but the briefest flash of some unknown effect on the horizon.
Then, they’d come across their first wreck.
“What the hell is this?”, Rivaille wondered aloud, broadcasting his words to the entire lance. The construct before them looked like a mech frame of sort, but not one he could recognise nor examine with any clarity. It was massive; almost as large as one of their machines - and at a cursory glance, it looked like nothing more than a strange art display. After all, no modern machine would use such an extensive array of strange symbols and gears. No current process would produce steel or gold at such an impure quality - and certainly no sane architect would incorporate such basic materials into a frame that large. Yet all the same, there laid on the ground some stone, humanoid statue encased in the golden plates of this machine’s great armor - and all the same did it show the signs of having moved once, with footprints and trails leading behind it already being consumed by the snows and frail winds.
“Did it run out of power?” Another voice chimed in. Washi. He was the Lance’s intellectual, tending to the side of analysis and theory. “I don’t see much damage.”
“Does it matter?!” Leto half-cried out, his mech moving erratically to its pilot’s whims. “W-We should head back to base. Do you see what’s ahead of us?!” Sure enough, lights and arcs of energy in the distance proved to unnerve all of them. All of them except the Corporal, that was.
“No.” Diana asserted, taking on an authoritative tone. “We’ve received orders to investigate the anomaly. Lances Gamma and Delta are moving to rendezvous with us near a location marked for us there.” It was clear that she had been recording their outing, sending packets of it back to command.
“Will we be receiving any more support?” Rivaille inquired.
“Maybe. A small task force is being mobilized at base but they’re just a reactionary force in the event anything happens to us. Other than that..” She paused, a grim tone framing her words. “Other than that, we’re on our own.”
With that grim reminder, the rest of the lance made their way towards the rendezvous point.
Stood at the top of a frigid rise in the snow was a silhouette, marred by the flashing lights in the distance and shadowed by their stunning brutality. Rivaille, Washi, Leto, and Diana lurked at the bottom of the foothill, their path interrupted by its mere presence. There was an intense quiet in the air.
The thing was almost unlike anything Rivaille had ever seen. His hands trembled over the controls as he watched it move with uncanny grace, more akin to that of a living being than a machine. A sickening void opened up in his gut, however, when he realized why it frightened him so badly. It reminded him of the stone people that had enslaved his world.
It was a cross between machine and rock, just about as tall as Rivaille’s medium unit. Its gold and steel segments were mottled and splattered with impure ore veins - giving it a strange, almost natural look. In the same way, however, there was nothing natural about the interlocking gears surrounding its almost black stone shoulders, nor was there anything natural about the strangely-emaciated body they were attached to, suspended within the machinery like some homunculus in a flask. The machine-statue's face was covered by a visored helmet with an upward spike, and its decency was kept by a two-sided robe lashed around its narrow waist by a sharp, nasty-looking chain. Raised in both hands and held like a rifle was something which looked almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a functional mech-lance. While a conical sweep of metal held the thing steadily in place and gave it a sturdy body, there was some kind of revolving chamber set into it. The tip was bayonetted with some brutal glaive-head - and it gave way to something like a Chinese cannon's decorated mouth. Inside was a clear gemstone, shimmering under an iridescent aurora. It was eerie. It was unnatural. But there was one saving grace:
It hadn’t seen them yet.
“W-what the fuck is that?!” Leto. The poor man must’ve been more terrified than any of the others. “That’s- That’s another mech! There’s someone else on the planet; w-we need to get out of here!”
“I concur,” Washi butted in. For once, the man almost sounded afraid. “We’ve found the likely cause of this madness. Besides, we’re a recon team: not an assault team. We should fall back to base.”
Rivaille agreed with their assessment. The sight of the statue unnerved him on a deep level; he wanted nothing more than to be as far away from it as possible. Before he could voice his assent, however, Diana suddenly spoke. Her voice was solemn.
“Fuck.”
There was a dreadful pause as she decided how to break the news. “I sent a live visual of this to the base commander,” she numbly reported. “We’ve been ordered to approach and apprehend the mech.”
Rivaille nodded in assent as he heard someone over the comms swear. “God help us,” they breathed. It took him a moment to realize that he was the one who’d said it. He grit his teeth, flicking his microphone off in case any more comments escaped his lips, and tried to steady himself by taking stock of the situation as they advanced.
A Khanate mech lance usually consisted of four mechs total, he repeated in his head, recalling his earlier train of thought. Two light mechs, meant for conducting attacks from all distances with the advantage of a light and nimble frame. One medium mech, far less maneuverable than its light counterparts, but capable of equipping more weapons and armor. One heavy mech. A beast mounted with truly heavy armor, meant exclusively for artillery or close melee.
As it stood, Leto and Washi both possessed light mechs. The former was equipped with a sniper rifle, intended more for long-range engagements. The latter chose a multitude of bladed weapons and a shotgun, for close-quarters combat. He himself had a medium mech that was designed for mid- to long-range battles: with a missile rack, an assault rifle, a grenade launcher, and two in-built chainguns.
Diana had the heavy mech. It was a behemoth of a frame, and it was armed to the teeth: bearing four arms, a chainsword, a chainaxe, a thermal lance, and a shotgun. Overall, they made a frightening force on the battlefield - though they still exercised caution in the face of this unknown enemy. Diana approached the statue headfirst, keeping her mech’s pace slow and steady. Washi followed close behind, while both Leto and Rivaille took a position further back. In the end, Diana broke the silence with a low, dangerous order.
“Greetings, stranger.” The noise rumbled through the snow, as it couldn’t travel through the paltry wisps of Jahuty-12’s atmosphere. “You are currently on Empyreal Company property. Lay down your arms and come with us: we have some questions for you.”
The thing visibly jumped as the noise rumbled up into its legs and body. Its helmet snapped toward the Lance of mechs, revealing a visor which seemed to toe the line between greathelm, arrow's-head, and the screaming face of a tusked creature in agony. What must have been thirteen eyes blinked open on the otherwise black surface, revealing mercury sclera and narrowed pupils.
"♩♫♫♬!?" Its voice was shockingly close to the noise of some kind of harmonic, electronic instrument. It growled and slized like a polynote synth, and it swished around, taking on a melee stance.
The Gold Man's attention was fixed on the Lance of mechs. The 'revolver' of the lance audibly clicked, sending a shower of auroric light crackling along the symbols carved into it. The Gold Man gave another musical order, shuffling backward from the Lance and glancing around it. Looking for cover, or perhaps its comrades.
“Fuck, man, it’s calling for backup,” Leto cried over the comms. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”
“Can it, you coward,” Washi snapped. “We’re here on a mission, and we will see it through. Hold your tongue or I’ll take it from your mouth.” Rivaille numbly drowned the chatter out as the two of them descend into pointless bickering. Instead, he focused on the scene before him. He didn’t know what the Gold Man’s weapon did, but he wasn’t too worried: it had a lance, and they had guns. Diana shared the sentiment, too; judging how she stepped forward and drew her frame’s chainsword.
“Rivaille,” she barked, “back me up.” She turned to the golem, her mech’s single eye lighting up as it focused down its thirteen. “Listen. Just come with us and we’ll get this sorted out right away.” To emphasize her point, she revved the mechanism of her blade. The deafening, ugly roar of its engine had the snow shivering and jumping beneath her feet, its teeth swirling in the air. Rivaille stepped beside her, spinning up his chaingun to emphasize the point. It’s violent, and a little stupid, he reasoned, feeling his heart-rate accelerating. But what else are we supposed to do? It can’t understand us.
The Gold Man's gaze crystalized at the muffled noise of the revving chainsword. Its carved tusks flashed in the dwarf planet's eerie light, framed in shadow against the crackling auroras of the unseen war behind it. Light crackled to life over its eyes and bathed the helmet in symbols, reducing any view of the thing's eyes to the cruelly-slashed glow of a humming visor. The gaps between the machine-statue's armor plates and mechanisms were sealed by the same red lights and different symbols. Bands of alien words and a shimmering cape of illusory light flared across its limbs and over what were now clearly clasps on its pauldrons, and it raised its lance in an aggressive stance, taking on a tense pose.
When the machine began its transformation, the entire Lance felt a shock run through their veins. It resembled something out of their nightmares - or worse, resembled one of the horrific memories they all shared of the Khanate’s invasion of their homeworld. The eldritch magic it brought forward terrified them all, and poor Leto had broken down into a traumatic, babbling soup at the sight of it. The monster before them had become a cross between a superhero, a demon, and a knight. Its overall shape now resembled the powerful, metal approximation of a human. It had a tiny waist, and huge pauldrons. Its glowing segments interspersed with its metal crackled in smooth shapes, giving it a muscular, fortified look. The prow-like shape upon its chest gave it a honed, aggressive direction - and the glowing light now searing upon what had once been a horn and was now a plume of phantom fire completed the visual as a finishing touch.
It moved not like a machine over a dozen meters tall, but like a swordsman hellbent on the task of victory.
The clasped jaws of the Chinese dragon were retracted into the 'Lance's hull, and the glaive-blade spread across the tip as it struck at Dana’s chainsword. The weapon flew cleanly out of her hands and crashed onto the ground, leaving only silence in the machine’s artful wake. It was answered by the two chainguns attached to the shoulders of Rivaille’s machine, their many hydra-heads vomiting forth a spray of armor-piercing rounds. The Gold Man reeled at Rivaille's gunshots, flashing its visor toward his machine as its arm and breast were sheared from its body by the gunfire. Metallic, iridescent blood whipped into lava-lamp like globs as they fell in the planet's low gravity. The plume atop its helm flashed into the shape of a white beacon, spearing into the air with searing radiance.
Then its chest shattered, having been ripped backward by the gunshots. There was an almost-imperceptible crunch-and-squeal of broken stone and bent metal which filtered through the planet's remaining atmosphere. Whatever gore it had was concealed by the blobs of viscera floating before its chest - and it carried these with it as it slowly, gracefully toppled to the ground. The Gold Man's visor and red panels vanished, leaving its gallium eyes to vacantly and blearily stare through their slit in the helmet. They were covered in a veil of tears, left behind by the agony of its death.
The four mechs were still, all of the pilots staring at the corpse of the Gold Man. None of them knew how to react. This simple display of mortality had struck them all deeply, whether they knew it or not. For a spell, all seemed totally and dreadfully stagnant. Then, the lights on the horizon slowed and stopped. The noises of alien war fell still and quiet. Shock soaked the air like the alcohol of a molotov cocktail, saturating it with the acrid anticipation of an open flame.
Rivaille was the first to speak, his voice a hoarse half-whisper.
“W-what the fuck?” He gasped. “Was that thing alive?!” Did I… did I just kill someone? He took a breath to steady his nerves and still his shaking hands. Taking a life never got easier: though the shock of the Gold Man’s death had rocked him with its unexpected brutality. Diana’s concerns were elsewhere, however: her voice crackling tensely over the channel.
“Something’s wrong,” she said; “I can feel it.” Her machine’s eye swiveled to the horizon, where all signs of war had ceased. She sucked her breath through her teeth in a flash of realization, belting out a string of orders. “Full speed. We’re getting out of here.”
“What about the corpse?” Washi asked, his mech gesturing to it.
“We don’t have time,” Dana snapped; “leave it!” Quickly, the Lance about-faced and started a rush towards the base - towards safety. The carbon-snow under their feet fluttered up like a fog as they made their hasty departure. It threw up a kind of smokescreen in their wake, which meant their group wouldn't be caught in the crossfire of any ranged weapons that the things behind them might have possessed.
They hadn't made it more than a quarter-mile's length when their sensors registered another spear of light behind them. It wasn't the white that the Gold Man had projected, however. It was a column of crimson lightning, wrathfully crackling and spitting in the thin air of Jahuty-12. It lashed up from the world behind them in a fit of rage, and then vanished - leaving only questions in its wake. Only then could they feel and hear the tremors of something coming. There were eight mech-sized jogging patterns thudding through the ice behind them. Though they all appeared to be fairly heavy frames, that might not have been reliable; as the Gold Man seemed to be both stone and gold-steel in equal parts.
“This is Lance-Corporal Diana requesting for immediate assistance! I am located at Quadrant-Two-Oh-Nine and in the Badlands! We are being pursued by hostiles!” She yelled into the open comms, hoping that someone would come to their assistance. Deep down, however, she knew that the closest mech lance was at least a few dozen clicks away. They were helpless. She gritted her teeth and dared to look at the monitor of the camera behind her mech, only to immediately regret it. Shit; they’re getting close.
“Rivaille!” She yelled. “My frame’s too slow. Take Leto and Washi to the base. I’ll hold them off!”
The corporal didn’t bother waiting for his reply. Instead, she turned her mech around and hefted the machine’s four bulky arms. The dual chain weapons - both axe and sword - roared to life. Her shotgun barked in the vague direction of their pursuers, hoping to catch at least one of them. Her fourth and final arm reared behind her back and activated the thermal lance. It’d take time to build heat, but she’d be able to use it soon. The gyroscope in her mech’s body began to spin, allowing her to use both of her chainweapon wielding arms like a blender’s blade, forming something of a ring of destruction around her.
Diana’s chainsword met a solid object in the smokescreen. For a moment, it was impossible to tell what it was - and then the rest of the massive kite-shield rushed forth from the dust to try and force her weapon back onto her. A spear tipped by an edge crackling with void-and-stars came rushing forth from behind it, but before the bearer could slash at her, their helm was crumpled into a concave ruin by a shotgun blast at point-blank range.
Diana heard Washi screaming something in his foreign tongue and saw his light mech rush by her side to assist, the submachine-gun spewing bullets in one hand and the blade raised in the other.
So be it, she resolved, grateful that he’d choose to die by her side.
Washi drew forth not spurts of mercury blood, but showers of crystal from the fog. He had little time to register quite what was in the mess before a pair of hands thrust from the vapor, making a flowing and complex series of motions backed by floating rings and linkages. The entire array glowed, finishing a figure-eight shaped apparatus surrounded by lines glowing in the air; and then his machine blurted out a warning. It said it was stuck - but, how? At his feet, a pile of snow had turned to stone: encasing his frame in the stuff from the ankles down. The crackling aurora from the enemy spellcaster flared again as it prepared for another transmutation, but it was interrupted by a blast of blood as one of Diana’s shotgun-blasts slammed into its apparent chest-area. The resolving silhouette in the cloud stumbled, clutched at its chest, and collapsed: writhing in agony. The rest of Washi and Diana’s bullets made echoing clangs of muffled noise in the veil of carbon-snow. As the stuff floated away into the planet’s atmosphere, its lifting curtain revealed three more opponents huddled behind their shields. Two possessed literal tower shields, adorned with sigils that flickered and shone when the shrapnel and shells came close to them: and one had a pair of wings splayed before them as a shield in and of themselves. While the tower-shields seemed to be transforming the ballistic flurries into puffs of gas as they came into contact, the wings were looking substantially worse for wear: having no such enchanted defence. Where were the other-? Wait. There. Two of the alien frames were circling to Diana’s side, with one raising its shield and the other brandishing some kind of ballista: and the eighth and final mech-knight-thing was barreling toward Washi with something that looked like a cross between a rapier and a wire garrote in-hand.
Throughout the brief scuffle, Diana had made plans. And all plans were unceremoniously thrown out the window each time these things pulled out another bag of their tricks. She was unable to accurately pinpoint their location due to the smokescreen but with that gone she could finally take note of what was happening. Eight enemy mechs, all ready to charge and clearly having magical powers of some kind. And Washi was unlikely to be able to move at this rate.
“Fuck.” She opened a channel to Washi as the situation dawned on her. “It’s been nice knowing you, friend. But I don’t think we can make it out alive.”
Washi gave a distorted laugh over the channel. “But our comrades will,” he seethed; “And that’s enough for me!”
His mech whirred as it brought out its submachine gun and emptied the magazine into the thing charging at him. The machine was filled with holes, forming a cloud of glittering, misted chrome blood. As the light faded from its mask, it tried to thrust the rapier toward Washi's hull; but the weapon had gone limp without the mind of its bearer to guide it. The Rapier Knight barreled into him in the low gravity, delivering a full-speed head-and-shoulders-butt to his frame's leg mounts as it tumbled lifelessly through the air in a low arc.
Washi was a skilled pilot- in fact, he was probably the best out of the four. But with his mech’s disabled, he could do nothing but scream in defiance as the lance sheared off the leg from his mech and sent his frame unevenly crashing face first into the ground. Washi most likely survived the impact- but he was out of the fight and not to mention, vulnerable to being finished off by the attackers.
Dana only vaguely registered Washi going down. Instead, her main focus was on her scanners: even as her mind struggled to wrap around what the fuck was happening. These things are alive, she remembered. They were alive, and they were vicious, and they were desperate, and they seemed like they could feel pain. What monster would deploy something like this onto a battlefield? For a moment, a part of her relished in the idea that these monsters would cause the downfall of the nation she was chained to.
The fear for her life rapidly overtook her brief hope once she realized she was now facing these monsters all on her own.
Diana’s thermal lance was charged now, the metal glowing red hot and billowing with vapor from the snow in the air. Her mech rushed forward, thrusting the lance right at the one wielding the ballista: but the Ballista Knight barely managed to throw her lance aside with the square shield on its arm. It let off an almost-silent scream of discordant notes in the thinned atmosphere. As her lance burned through its arm and weapon, she could see the metal sizzling and melting onto what looked like stone flesh underneath. Blood flowing from within vaporized and boiled on contact with the stuff. At one point, her lance even hit something solid within—and there was a satisfying crunch as one of the thing's mineral bones fractured and bent nastily to a wild angle.
Its ballista had been turned aside by the deflection. The thing wasn't done yet, though, damn it all; drawing forth some kind of pylon-sized truncheon from its side and smashing a shotgun out of Dana's grasp. As the Ballista Knight's truncheon came crashing down, the charging Shield Knight tried to bash her frame from behind - it’d hid behind its now-ragged shield from the volume of her shotgun's fire.
Dana made her choice in an instant. Her chainsword and chainaxe both screamed to life as she brought down both weapons onto the Ballista Knight, completely ignoring the truncheon that would no doubt cave the face of her mech in and kill her once it’d finished rising from its last impact.
The least she could do for her fleeing comrades was to make less of these monstrosities pursued them in the end.
The Ballista Knight's truncheon connected at the same moment her chainswords did. The Shield Knight's own implement came slamming in from behind just a tiny bit later, leaving the three in a chilling, static pose.
Jahuty-12 did not have an atmosphere that carried sound. It was thin, and cold, and most of it was frozen as snow upon the ground. It was beautiful and pristine because it had no weather - only the trenches and gouges and mounds carved into it from the movements of the mechs. Thus, when the three came to a stand-still, it felt more natural than any of their brutal, floating dance had before. The snow drifted around their ankles and legs in a veil.
The only noise which carried from Dana's chainswords was a harmonic 'thrum': one which tinkled against the stone and metal of the Ballista Knight as it sawed clean through the last of its corpse. Its truncheon slipped from her cockpit as its fingers did, and the Shield Knight solemnly leant back to let the two collapse. The diorama slowly tumbled to the frigid ground, the battle replaced by a terrible silence. The closed helm of the Shield Knight stared silently at the bodies strewn around it, and then it turned away - unable to bare the sight. As it did-so, however, its gaze fell upon Washi's broken mech.
In the back, the three others had lifted their shields (and the wings in the case of one) and began rushing forward - bounding across the frigid surface of Jahuty-12 with spiked and clawed boots and toes. While the Tower Knights had drawn the weapons upon their backs, the Wing Knight had been halfway through assembling something from rings and metal frames attached to a belt around its metallic skirt-panels: forming some kind of apparatus as it went.
The Shield knight turned to its three remaining companions as they skidded to a halt, the Wing Knight completing the last of its apparatus with a triumphant flutter of its feathers. As the Tower Knights stowed their axes once again, the Shield Knight made a silent word. The four stood there for a moment, gesticulating in the near-void as if in conversation. After a while, they came to a decision. The two Tower Knights came before Washi's mech, examining the remaining light and life within the frame.
Satisfied at their cursory peek, the two behemoths crouched and gripped it at the shoulders and hips. With a heave that sent the teeth of their joints clanking and slamming together, they lifted it between them like a triage team. The one at the shoulders waved to its two companions, the raised bands along its pauldron coming together as it flexed. They each gave a gesture, and then turned toward one side of the nightmarish lights in the sky. The procession marched toward the backlines of one of the battle; their only company the tremors of the earth growing louder as the shockwaves traveled up their feet and into their bodies.
They'd taken a prisoner of war.
Cainabel,
Forlorn System Forlorn Empyreal Trade Company
Main Headquarters
“I see,” the Diadochi Salome murmured.
She stared at the written piece of paper on her desk, as if willing for it to disappear. In the end, she sighed and waved a dismissive hand at the courier.
“Leave. Your services are no longer required.”
The courier gave a short bow and departed from her office, now filled with only her thoughts as company. The news from Jahuty-12… …Troubled her. Technically speaking, this was not the first time either the Company or the Khanate had a violent first contact with another species. In fact it was incredibly common nowadays considering how much of a mess the empire was in its current state.
Yet this one, unlike the other incidents, disturbed her.
According to the report, they had not in any way expected a warring force like this on the planet nor did they believe them to be native to Jahuty-12 according to the predictions of star shamans. Could this mean these mysterious knight mechs belonged to yet another star empire? Truth be told, she had been avoiding contacts like these. The company simply wasn’t suited for wars against a peer threat. Not only would it mean she’d have to draw from her resources to support the war effort, but it could also risk attracting the attention of her rivals.
Quickly, she began to make a list of priorities. First, she was to ready the Company Security in the event that a direct war broke out. This meant sending reinforcements to Jahuty-12. Secondly, she needed to put her personal units on standby in case it all went to hell. Thirdly, she was going to prepare an investigation party to prevent a war from actually starting.
“Damn it.” She cursed under her breath as she prepared to summon her lieutenants, only to suddenly receive a private message from one of her spies. As she took in the contents of the message, her eyes widened.
At that moment, she realized she had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
[Diadochi Lainar Made Contact With [MENTSHN EMPIRE] and sequestered their assistance in establishing MEGASTRUCTURE in Xibalba System. Likely Chance of Having Heard of Mentshn by This Meeting. ]
This was going to be difficult to explain.
When the Khanate was founded, Salome was a key player in establishing its economy, trade routes, currency, and foreign policy. When the Khanate took to the galactic stage, she eagerly invested herself into the economic climate of the galaxy. With (supposedly) far more experience than she had started with, Salome had made what would be the Khanate’s first step into the wider galactic economy. The ‘Empyreal Forlorn Trade Company’, colloquially known as the Empyreal Company, was built from the ground up as the Diadochi’s personal interstellar trade organization. Naturally, the merchant princes of the Khanate, the Viziers, protested this. Many tried to take up their concerns with the Khanate and have the project scrapped: both out of personal ambition and for fear of Salome gaining too much power over her peers.
Alas, Salome was close with the Lord Khan. She had simply whispered into the Lord Khan’s ears, and all charges were dropped. So it was that the Empyreal Company strode forwards, gobbling up the enterprises of various Viziers who tried to make their own stakes in the stars. Soon enough, the Company had swollen so massively in size as to become Salome’s personal interstellar fiefdom.
One of the many subsectors of the Empyreal Company came to be known as the Empyreal Expeditionary Company. The Expeditionary Company was dedicated to laying claims on far off planets, only to scour them ruthlessly for everything of value. Its primary duties involved the creation of mining zones, industrial bases, and trade posts; and the subjugation of any resistance that came-by though the iron might of Salome’s personal marauders. It just so happened that a snowy, barren dwarf-planet had come under their attention. Discovered to be particularly mineral-rich, a force had been quickly dispatched to lay claims to it and bring it under Empyreal-Khanate control.
The situation became rapidly more complicated after that.
Jahuty-12,
Jahuty System Mech Hangar,
Empyreal Jahuty Headquarters
Rivaille Rivendare didn’t know how long it’d been since he’d arrived here, nor did he really care. What he did know, however, was that he preferred his old post. At least his previous station was a forest world with a human-friendly atmosphere, and not the glorified snowball he now helped occupy. Even his skin had been lightly tanned from the local UV radiation: as Jahuty’s magnetosphere had frozen with its air centuries ago. Rivaille let out a yawn, before sighing as he leant against the hangar wall.
The hangar itself was currently the glorified storage closet of the Khanate’s latest project - though he had to quietly remind himself that it had never been their idea to begin with. These mecha-frames were the trademark of his home planet: now just another vassal of the Khanate’s overbloated lordships. Rivaille gazed up at the towering frame of his own mech: a towering, bipedal pile of olive green metal. Its body was clunky, and its ‘head’ dominated most of its torso. It was a massive cylindrical casing, housing both the reactor and some weaponry in a rounded mass above its waist and between its shoulderblades.
Soon, he reflected, l’ll be deployed to scout the planet again. Soon, he was going to become a pawn of Vizier Xerxes’ will once more. As he did so, he heard the cold winds of Jahuty-12 whispering outside the confines of the hangar. Through the camera-and-screen ‘windows’, Rivaille was able to see the barren, vast expanse of frost before him. It wasn’t much. No, indeed, was practically nothing - but the wealth of mineral resources that laid beneath that stark blanket of pure, flat ground was truly something awe-inspiring. To the layperson, it was mind-numbingly blank: but to the Vizier, it was like the Holy Grail.
Why? He thought. Why must a soldier of a once-proud nation submit and bow to the heels of that greedy tyrant?
“Truth be told,” he said, gazing at his tired reflection in the lens of his frame’s single, scarlet camera, “I don’t even know anymore.”
Jahuty-12,
Jahuty System,
Plains of Jahuty
The star system was swathed in the great, black blanket of a nebula; leaving nothing but its Red Dwarf star shining among the frigid landscape. Save that and the pinpricks of Jahuty’s thirteen other planets, the horizon looked dark and barren. Removed from any context, the place almost felt like some alien purgatory - a desolate non-space where the dying came after death.
Patrolling this wasteland makes me wish for a nuclear winter, Rivaille mused to himself. He leant back into the seat inside of his cockpit, taking a sip of water. Currently, he and the rest of his lance were traveling through the plains, doing their usual security rounds of the area. There wasn’t much of anything to watch out for, but Vizier Xerxes saw it prudent in the case that any rival company tried to make a move here. Rivaille sighed, relaxing. Maybe he could take a nap while his mecha patrolled with the rest of his group on autopilot. He drifted off, amusing himself by recalling their formulaic, simple formation. A lance, he recalled, is a group of four mechs- two lighter machines, one medium, and one heavy. But they usually travel in sets of three: so really, I’m just one in a group of twelve giant robots. He chuckled at that; the biggest group he’d ever been in on his homeworld had only been a set of three. Rivaille yawned, feeling the dreary blanket of sleep closing in. Just an hour or two, and he’d be up.
He closed his eyes, drifting away: but then, something bright pricked at his eyelids. He rubbed his eyes and frowned, thinking it had been some kind of notification on his screen.
Then, the empty horizon lit up with something that nobody on the planet had seen before.
An aurora borealis? No: it was ribbons of scarlet and maroon light, crackling across the thin atmosphere. They looked like some eldritch cross between lightning, flames, and the northern lights. The snow leapt up from the edge of the planet as if it were trying to leave its surface, before the gargantuan plume painstakingly splayed out across the atmosphere in a great and gentle blizzard.
Rivaille nearly spat out his drink. His hands flew to his control panels as he snapped to attention, scanning the horizon intently. As he did-so, the rest of the Lance opened their comms.
“What the hell was that?!” Someone shouted. Most likely Leto: he was always a panicky one. “Are you seeing this?!”
“Aye,” Rivaille grunted; “Confirming visual. Lance-corporal Diana, your orders?”
For a moment, there was no reply. The taut silence was broken in a flash by her authoritative voice.
“I’ve reported this to command,” she explained. “Orders are to investigate. Washi, Leto, take point. Rivaille, behind me. We’re going in.”
“Yes, Ma’am!”, barked the men in a mechanical chorus. As they changed their formation, Rivaille idly mused about the old days; back before his world’s enslavement.
“This really brings back memories, doesn’t it?” He quietly said. There was no reply, save for the humming of his machine all around him.
As they’d raced across the barren white of Jahuty-12, the planet’s paper-thin atmosphere had whispered around them like a skittish cloud of wraiths. The snow had kicked up under their Lance as the mechs soared across the barren tundra. For hours, they’d been unable to see nothing but the briefest flash of some unknown effect on the horizon.
Then, they’d come across their first wreck.
“What the hell is this?”, Rivaille wondered aloud, broadcasting his words to the entire lance. The construct before them looked like a mech frame of sort, but not one he could recognise nor examine with any clarity. It was massive; almost as large as one of their machines - and at a cursory glance, it looked like nothing more than a strange art display. After all, no modern machine would use such an extensive array of strange symbols and gears. No current process would produce steel or gold at such an impure quality - and certainly no sane architect would incorporate such basic materials into a frame that large. Yet all the same, there laid on the ground some stone, humanoid statue encased in the golden plates of this machine’s great armor - and all the same did it show the signs of having moved once, with footprints and trails leading behind it already being consumed by the snows and frail winds.
“Did it run out of power?” Another voice chimed in. Washi. He was the Lance’s intellectual, tending to the side of analysis and theory. “I don’t see much damage.”
“Does it matter?!” Leto half-cried out, his mech moving erratically to its pilot’s whims. “W-We should head back to base. Do you see what’s ahead of us?!” Sure enough, lights and arcs of energy in the distance proved to unnerve all of them. All of them except the Corporal, that was.
“No.” Diana asserted, taking on an authoritative tone. “We’ve received orders to investigate the anomaly. Lances Gamma and Delta are moving to rendezvous with us near a location marked for us there.” It was clear that she had been recording their outing, sending packets of it back to command.
“Will we be receiving any more support?” Rivaille inquired.
“Maybe. A small task force is being mobilized at base but they’re just a reactionary force in the event anything happens to us. Other than that..” She paused, a grim tone framing her words. “Other than that, we’re on our own.”
With that grim reminder, the rest of the lance made their way towards the rendezvous point.
Stood at the top of a frigid rise in the snow was a silhouette, marred by the flashing lights in the distance and shadowed by their stunning brutality. Rivaille, Washi, Leto, and Diana lurked at the bottom of the foothill, their path interrupted by its mere presence. There was an intense quiet in the air.
The thing was almost unlike anything Rivaille had ever seen. His hands trembled over the controls as he watched it move with uncanny grace, more akin to that of a living being than a machine. A sickening void opened up in his gut, however, when he realized why it frightened him so badly. It reminded him of the stone people that had enslaved his world.
It was a cross between machine and rock, just about as tall as Rivaille’s medium unit. Its gold and steel segments were mottled and splattered with impure ore veins - giving it a strange, almost natural look. In the same way, however, there was nothing natural about the interlocking gears surrounding its almost black stone shoulders, nor was there anything natural about the strangely-emaciated body they were attached to, suspended within the machinery like some homunculus in a flask. The machine-statue's face was covered by a visored helmet with an upward spike, and its decency was kept by a two-sided robe lashed around its narrow waist by a sharp, nasty-looking chain. Raised in both hands and held like a rifle was something which looked almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a functional mech-lance. While a conical sweep of metal held the thing steadily in place and gave it a sturdy body, there was some kind of revolving chamber set into it. The tip was bayonetted with some brutal glaive-head - and it gave way to something like a Chinese cannon's decorated mouth. Inside was a clear gemstone, shimmering under an iridescent aurora. It was eerie. It was unnatural. But there was one saving grace:
It hadn’t seen them yet.
“W-what the fuck is that?!” Leto. The poor man must’ve been more terrified than any of the others. “That’s- That’s another mech! There’s someone else on the planet; w-we need to get out of here!”
“I concur,” Washi butted in. For once, the man almost sounded afraid. “We’ve found the likely cause of this madness. Besides, we’re a recon team: not an assault team. We should fall back to base.”
Rivaille agreed with their assessment. The sight of the statue unnerved him on a deep level; he wanted nothing more than to be as far away from it as possible. Before he could voice his assent, however, Diana suddenly spoke. Her voice was solemn.
“Fuck.”
There was a dreadful pause as she decided how to break the news. “I sent a live visual of this to the base commander,” she numbly reported. “We’ve been ordered to approach and apprehend the mech.”
Rivaille nodded in assent as he heard someone over the comms swear. “God help us,” they breathed. It took him a moment to realize that he was the one who’d said it. He grit his teeth, flicking his microphone off in case any more comments escaped his lips, and tried to steady himself by taking stock of the situation as they advanced.
A Khanate mech lance usually consisted of four mechs total, he repeated in his head, recalling his earlier train of thought. Two light mechs, meant for conducting attacks from all distances with the advantage of a light and nimble frame. One medium mech, far less maneuverable than its light counterparts, but capable of equipping more weapons and armor. One heavy mech. A beast mounted with truly heavy armor, meant exclusively for artillery or close melee.
As it stood, Leto and Washi both possessed light mechs. The former was equipped with a sniper rifle, intended more for long-range engagements. The latter chose a multitude of bladed weapons and a shotgun, for close-quarters combat. He himself had a medium mech that was designed for mid- to long-range battles: with a missile rack, an assault rifle, a grenade launcher, and two in-built chainguns.
Diana had the heavy mech. It was a behemoth of a frame, and it was armed to the teeth: bearing four arms, a chainsword, a chainaxe, a thermal lance, and a shotgun. Overall, they made a frightening force on the battlefield - though they still exercised caution in the face of this unknown enemy. Diana approached the statue headfirst, keeping her mech’s pace slow and steady. Washi followed close behind, while both Leto and Rivaille took a position further back. In the end, Diana broke the silence with a low, dangerous order.
“Greetings, stranger.” The noise rumbled through the snow, as it couldn’t travel through the paltry wisps of Jahuty-12’s atmosphere. “You are currently on Empyreal Company property. Lay down your arms and come with us: we have some questions for you.”
The thing visibly jumped as the noise rumbled up into its legs and body. Its helmet snapped toward the Lance of mechs, revealing a visor which seemed to toe the line between greathelm, arrow's-head, and the screaming face of a tusked creature in agony. What must have been thirteen eyes blinked open on the otherwise black surface, revealing mercury sclera and narrowed pupils.
"♩♫♫♬!?" Its voice was shockingly close to the noise of some kind of harmonic, electronic instrument. It growled and slized like a polynote synth, and it swished around, taking on a melee stance.
The Gold Man's attention was fixed on the Lance of mechs. The 'revolver' of the lance audibly clicked, sending a shower of auroric light crackling along the symbols carved into it. The Gold Man gave another musical order, shuffling backward from the Lance and glancing around it. Looking for cover, or perhaps its comrades.
“Fuck, man, it’s calling for backup,” Leto cried over the comms. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”
“Can it, you coward,” Washi snapped. “We’re here on a mission, and we will see it through. Hold your tongue or I’ll take it from your mouth.” Rivaille numbly drowned the chatter out as the two of them descend into pointless bickering. Instead, he focused on the scene before him. He didn’t know what the Gold Man’s weapon did, but he wasn’t too worried: it had a lance, and they had guns. Diana shared the sentiment, too; judging how she stepped forward and drew her frame’s chainsword.
“Rivaille,” she barked, “back me up.” She turned to the golem, her mech’s single eye lighting up as it focused down its thirteen. “Listen. Just come with us and we’ll get this sorted out right away.” To emphasize her point, she revved the mechanism of her blade. The deafening, ugly roar of its engine had the snow shivering and jumping beneath her feet, its teeth swirling in the air. Rivaille stepped beside her, spinning up his chaingun to emphasize the point. It’s violent, and a little stupid, he reasoned, feeling his heart-rate accelerating. But what else are we supposed to do? It can’t understand us.
The Gold Man's gaze crystalized at the muffled noise of the revving chainsword. Its carved tusks flashed in the dwarf planet's eerie light, framed in shadow against the crackling auroras of the unseen war behind it. Light crackled to life over its eyes and bathed the helmet in symbols, reducing any view of the thing's eyes to the cruelly-slashed glow of a humming visor. The gaps between the machine-statue's armor plates and mechanisms were sealed by the same red lights and different symbols. Bands of alien words and a shimmering cape of illusory light flared across its limbs and over what were now clearly clasps on its pauldrons, and it raised its lance in an aggressive stance, taking on a tense pose.
When the machine began its transformation, the entire Lance felt a shock run through their veins. It resembled something out of their nightmares - or worse, resembled one of the horrific memories they all shared of the Khanate’s invasion of their homeworld. The eldritch magic it brought forward terrified them all, and poor Leto had broken down into a traumatic, babbling soup at the sight of it. The monster before them had become a cross between a superhero, a demon, and a knight. Its overall shape now resembled the powerful, metal approximation of a human. It had a tiny waist, and huge pauldrons. Its glowing segments interspersed with its metal crackled in smooth shapes, giving it a muscular, fortified look. The prow-like shape upon its chest gave it a honed, aggressive direction - and the glowing light now searing upon what had once been a horn and was now a plume of phantom fire completed the visual as a finishing touch.
It moved not like a machine over a dozen meters tall, but like a swordsman hellbent on the task of victory.
The clasped jaws of the Chinese dragon were retracted into the 'Lance's hull, and the glaive-blade spread across the tip as it struck at Dana’s chainsword. The weapon flew cleanly out of her hands and crashed onto the ground, leaving only silence in the machine’s artful wake. It was answered by the two chainguns attached to the shoulders of Rivaille’s machine, their many hydra-heads vomiting forth a spray of armor-piercing rounds. The Gold Man reeled at Rivaille's gunshots, flashing its visor toward his machine as its arm and breast were sheared from its body by the gunfire. Metallic, iridescent blood whipped into lava-lamp like globs as they fell in the planet's low gravity. The plume atop its helm flashed into the shape of a white beacon, spearing into the air with searing radiance.
Then its chest shattered, having been ripped backward by the gunshots. There was an almost-imperceptible crunch-and-squeal of broken stone and bent metal which filtered through the planet's remaining atmosphere. Whatever gore it had was concealed by the blobs of viscera floating before its chest - and it carried these with it as it slowly, gracefully toppled to the ground. The Gold Man's visor and red panels vanished, leaving its gallium eyes to vacantly and blearily stare through their slit in the helmet. They were covered in a veil of tears, left behind by the agony of its death.
The four mechs were still, all of the pilots staring at the corpse of the Gold Man. None of them knew how to react. This simple display of mortality had struck them all deeply, whether they knew it or not. For a spell, all seemed totally and dreadfully stagnant. Then, the lights on the horizon slowed and stopped. The noises of alien war fell still and quiet. Shock soaked the air like the alcohol of a molotov cocktail, saturating it with the acrid anticipation of an open flame.
Rivaille was the first to speak, his voice a hoarse half-whisper.
“W-what the fuck?” He gasped. “Was that thing alive?!” Did I… did I just kill someone? He took a breath to steady his nerves and still his shaking hands. Taking a life never got easier: though the shock of the Gold Man’s death had rocked him with its unexpected brutality. Diana’s concerns were elsewhere, however: her voice crackling tensely over the channel.
“Something’s wrong,” she said; “I can feel it.” Her machine’s eye swiveled to the horizon, where all signs of war had ceased. She sucked her breath through her teeth in a flash of realization, belting out a string of orders. “Full speed. We’re getting out of here.”
“What about the corpse?” Washi asked, his mech gesturing to it.
“We don’t have time,” Dana snapped; “leave it!” Quickly, the Lance about-faced and started a rush towards the base - towards safety. The carbon-snow under their feet fluttered up like a fog as they made their hasty departure. It threw up a kind of smokescreen in their wake, which meant their group wouldn't be caught in the crossfire of any ranged weapons that the things behind them might have possessed.
They hadn't made it more than a quarter-mile's length when their sensors registered another spear of light behind them. It wasn't the white that the Gold Man had projected, however. It was a column of crimson lightning, wrathfully crackling and spitting in the thin air of Jahuty-12. It lashed up from the world behind them in a fit of rage, and then vanished - leaving only questions in its wake. Only then could they feel and hear the tremors of something coming. There were eight mech-sized jogging patterns thudding through the ice behind them. Though they all appeared to be fairly heavy frames, that might not have been reliable; as the Gold Man seemed to be both stone and gold-steel in equal parts.
“This is Lance-Corporal Diana requesting for immediate assistance! I am located at Quadrant-Two-Oh-Nine and in the Badlands! We are being pursued by hostiles!” She yelled into the open comms, hoping that someone would come to their assistance. Deep down, however, she knew that the closest mech lance was at least a few dozen clicks away. They were helpless. She gritted her teeth and dared to look at the monitor of the camera behind her mech, only to immediately regret it. Shit; they’re getting close.
“Rivaille!” She yelled. “My frame’s too slow. Take Leto and Washi to the base. I’ll hold them off!”
The corporal didn’t bother waiting for his reply. Instead, she turned her mech around and hefted the machine’s four bulky arms. The dual chain weapons - both axe and sword - roared to life. Her shotgun barked in the vague direction of their pursuers, hoping to catch at least one of them. Her fourth and final arm reared behind her back and activated the thermal lance. It’d take time to build heat, but she’d be able to use it soon. The gyroscope in her mech’s body began to spin, allowing her to use both of her chainweapon wielding arms like a blender’s blade, forming something of a ring of destruction around her.
Diana’s chainsword met a solid object in the smokescreen. For a moment, it was impossible to tell what it was - and then the rest of the massive kite-shield rushed forth from the dust to try and force her weapon back onto her. A spear tipped by an edge crackling with void-and-stars came rushing forth from behind it, but before the bearer could slash at her, their helm was crumpled into a concave ruin by a shotgun blast at point-blank range.
Diana heard Washi screaming something in his foreign tongue and saw his light mech rush by her side to assist, the submachine-gun spewing bullets in one hand and the blade raised in the other.
So be it, she resolved, grateful that he’d choose to die by her side.
Washi drew forth not spurts of mercury blood, but showers of crystal from the fog. He had little time to register quite what was in the mess before a pair of hands thrust from the vapor, making a flowing and complex series of motions backed by floating rings and linkages. The entire array glowed, finishing a figure-eight shaped apparatus surrounded by lines glowing in the air; and then his machine blurted out a warning. It said it was stuck - but, how? At his feet, a pile of snow had turned to stone: encasing his frame in the stuff from the ankles down. The crackling aurora from the enemy spellcaster flared again as it prepared for another transmutation, but it was interrupted by a blast of blood as one of Diana’s shotgun-blasts slammed into its apparent chest-area. The resolving silhouette in the cloud stumbled, clutched at its chest, and collapsed: writhing in agony. The rest of Washi and Diana’s bullets made echoing clangs of muffled noise in the veil of carbon-snow. As the stuff floated away into the planet’s atmosphere, its lifting curtain revealed three more opponents huddled behind their shields. Two possessed literal tower shields, adorned with sigils that flickered and shone when the shrapnel and shells came close to them: and one had a pair of wings splayed before them as a shield in and of themselves. While the tower-shields seemed to be transforming the ballistic flurries into puffs of gas as they came into contact, the wings were looking substantially worse for wear: having no such enchanted defence. Where were the other-? Wait. There. Two of the alien frames were circling to Diana’s side, with one raising its shield and the other brandishing some kind of ballista: and the eighth and final mech-knight-thing was barreling toward Washi with something that looked like a cross between a rapier and a wire garrote in-hand.
Throughout the brief scuffle, Diana had made plans. And all plans were unceremoniously thrown out the window each time these things pulled out another bag of their tricks. She was unable to accurately pinpoint their location due to the smokescreen but with that gone she could finally take note of what was happening. Eight enemy mechs, all ready to charge and clearly having magical powers of some kind. And Washi was unlikely to be able to move at this rate.
“Fuck.” She opened a channel to Washi as the situation dawned on her. “It’s been nice knowing you, friend. But I don’t think we can make it out alive.”
Washi gave a distorted laugh over the channel. “But our comrades will,” he seethed; “And that’s enough for me!”
His mech whirred as it brought out its submachine gun and emptied the magazine into the thing charging at him. The machine was filled with holes, forming a cloud of glittering, misted chrome blood. As the light faded from its mask, it tried to thrust the rapier toward Washi's hull; but the weapon had gone limp without the mind of its bearer to guide it. The Rapier Knight barreled into him in the low gravity, delivering a full-speed head-and-shoulders-butt to his frame's leg mounts as it tumbled lifelessly through the air in a low arc.
Washi was a skilled pilot- in fact, he was probably the best out of the four. But with his mech’s disabled, he could do nothing but scream in defiance as the lance sheared off the leg from his mech and sent his frame unevenly crashing face first into the ground. Washi most likely survived the impact- but he was out of the fight and not to mention, vulnerable to being finished off by the attackers.
Dana only vaguely registered Washi going down. Instead, her main focus was on her scanners: even as her mind struggled to wrap around what the fuck was happening. These things are alive, she remembered. They were alive, and they were vicious, and they were desperate, and they seemed like they could feel pain. What monster would deploy something like this onto a battlefield? For a moment, a part of her relished in the idea that these monsters would cause the downfall of the nation she was chained to.
The fear for her life rapidly overtook her brief hope once she realized she was now facing these monsters all on her own.
Diana’s thermal lance was charged now, the metal glowing red hot and billowing with vapor from the snow in the air. Her mech rushed forward, thrusting the lance right at the one wielding the ballista: but the Ballista Knight barely managed to throw her lance aside with the square shield on its arm. It let off an almost-silent scream of discordant notes in the thinned atmosphere. As her lance burned through its arm and weapon, she could see the metal sizzling and melting onto what looked like stone flesh underneath. Blood flowing from within vaporized and boiled on contact with the stuff. At one point, her lance even hit something solid within—and there was a satisfying crunch as one of the thing's mineral bones fractured and bent nastily to a wild angle.
Its ballista had been turned aside by the deflection. The thing wasn't done yet, though, damn it all; drawing forth some kind of pylon-sized truncheon from its side and smashing a shotgun out of Dana's grasp. As the Ballista Knight's truncheon came crashing down, the charging Shield Knight tried to bash her frame from behind - it’d hid behind its now-ragged shield from the volume of her shotgun's fire.
Dana made her choice in an instant. Her chainsword and chainaxe both screamed to life as she brought down both weapons onto the Ballista Knight, completely ignoring the truncheon that would no doubt cave the face of her mech in and kill her once it’d finished rising from its last impact.
The least she could do for her fleeing comrades was to make less of these monstrosities pursued them in the end.
The Ballista Knight's truncheon connected at the same moment her chainswords did. The Shield Knight's own implement came slamming in from behind just a tiny bit later, leaving the three in a chilling, static pose.
Jahuty-12 did not have an atmosphere that carried sound. It was thin, and cold, and most of it was frozen as snow upon the ground. It was beautiful and pristine because it had no weather - only the trenches and gouges and mounds carved into it from the movements of the mechs. Thus, when the three came to a stand-still, it felt more natural than any of their brutal, floating dance had before. The snow drifted around their ankles and legs in a veil.
The only noise which carried from Dana's chainswords was a harmonic 'thrum': one which tinkled against the stone and metal of the Ballista Knight as it sawed clean through the last of its corpse. Its truncheon slipped from her cockpit as its fingers did, and the Shield Knight solemnly leant back to let the two collapse. The diorama slowly tumbled to the frigid ground, the battle replaced by a terrible silence. The closed helm of the Shield Knight stared silently at the bodies strewn around it, and then it turned away - unable to bare the sight. As it did-so, however, its gaze fell upon Washi's broken mech.
In the back, the three others had lifted their shields (and the wings in the case of one) and began rushing forward - bounding across the frigid surface of Jahuty-12 with spiked and clawed boots and toes. While the Tower Knights had drawn the weapons upon their backs, the Wing Knight had been halfway through assembling something from rings and metal frames attached to a belt around its metallic skirt-panels: forming some kind of apparatus as it went.
The Shield knight turned to its three remaining companions as they skidded to a halt, the Wing Knight completing the last of its apparatus with a triumphant flutter of its feathers. As the Tower Knights stowed their axes once again, the Shield Knight made a silent word. The four stood there for a moment, gesticulating in the near-void as if in conversation. After a while, they came to a decision. The two Tower Knights came before Washi's mech, examining the remaining light and life within the frame.
Satisfied at their cursory peek, the two behemoths crouched and gripped it at the shoulders and hips. With a heave that sent the teeth of their joints clanking and slamming together, they lifted it between them like a triage team. The one at the shoulders waved to its two companions, the raised bands along its pauldron coming together as it flexed. They each gave a gesture, and then turned toward one side of the nightmarish lights in the sky. The procession marched toward the backlines of one of the battle; their only company the tremors of the earth growing louder as the shockwaves traveled up their feet and into their bodies.
They'd taken a prisoner of war.
Cainabel,
Forlorn System Forlorn Empyreal Trade Company
Main Headquarters
“I see,” the Diadochi Salome murmured.
She stared at the written piece of paper on her desk, as if willing for it to disappear. In the end, she sighed and waved a dismissive hand at the courier.
“Leave. Your services are no longer required.”
The courier gave a short bow and departed from her office, now filled with only her thoughts as company. The news from Jahuty-12… …Troubled her. Technically speaking, this was not the first time either the Company or the Khanate had a violent first contact with another species. In fact it was incredibly common nowadays considering how much of a mess the empire was in its current state.
Yet this one, unlike the other incidents, disturbed her.
According to the report, they had not in any way expected a warring force like this on the planet nor did they believe them to be native to Jahuty-12 according to the predictions of star shamans. Could this mean these mysterious knight mechs belonged to yet another star empire? Truth be told, she had been avoiding contacts like these. The company simply wasn’t suited for wars against a peer threat. Not only would it mean she’d have to draw from her resources to support the war effort, but it could also risk attracting the attention of her rivals.
Quickly, she began to make a list of priorities. First, she was to ready the Company Security in the event that a direct war broke out. This meant sending reinforcements to Jahuty-12. Secondly, she needed to put her personal units on standby in case it all went to hell. Thirdly, she was going to prepare an investigation party to prevent a war from actually starting.
“Damn it.” She cursed under her breath as she prepared to summon her lieutenants, only to suddenly receive a private message from one of her spies. As she took in the contents of the message, her eyes widened.
At that moment, she realized she had made a terrible, terrible mistake.
[Diadochi Lainar Made Contact With [MENTSHN EMPIRE] and sequestered their assistance in establishing MEGASTRUCTURE in Xibalba System. Likely Chance of Having Heard of Mentshn by This Meeting. ]
This was going to be difficult to explain.