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Starbound Flotilla	This game zone for IFO, Interstellar Frontiers Online, appears to be a tremendous, shattered-open planetoid instead of an island in VRMMO Earth. The fractured planetoid drifts far above Earth, something like two thirds of the moon's size at least, and it glitters with a startling array of lights that indicate spots of activity, habitation, or perhaps even space colonization. Segments of the tremendous planetoid seem to offer strange mineral themes, conspicuous organic growth, or even obvious technological artificiality, depending on the nature of the individual fracture.     Today's target, though, is one of the far more mining-focused fragments of IFO's setting, Altair V. One of the various AUTO-WARLORD game bosses! Like so many things in Interstellar Frontiers Online, this, too, looks and feels exactly like something you'd expect from a fifties sci-fi movie. Like the other capital ship, this one is clearly inspired by flying saucers, but this one takes it all the way to the maximum. The vast saucer shape gleams brightly, all shiny and new, and seems covered with a variety of interlocking mechanical parts that likely unfold into strange configurations. Big fancy Raygun Gothic thrusters line it at the rim of the vessel. At the top, where one might expect the "cockpit" of a flying saucer to be, is like a massive jumbotron display in a hemisphere. A positively absurd emission system, large and distributed enough to basically be a full fighter-ship'sn swoop across, functions as the "head" of the massive Von Neumann probe.     A swarm of escort craft drift around it, whirling as the brilliant lights of the "head" of the mothership change, in time to the shifting of low "growls" on all radio bands. Some kind of vast communication system? Something more? It'll be hard to say. It looks, though, like the VFX of a truly ancient science fiction movie. The motions, dense and complex though they may be, are perfectly evocative of those old days of model ships manipulated on wire.     It's couched in-between a pair of heavy fragments of Altair V, mining them aggressively with big mining rayguns, meaning those approaching it have some flanking cover from the astroids, though also potentially hiding smaller drone threats within them. And as those who are here to help approach, the game HUD that everyone can access displays a bright red icon on the map, a large blip that registers as a significant enemy on the nearby ships list:                              VNP "CRUISER TORMOD"                                                     CLASS 5 VON NEUMANN BERSERKER
Starbound Flotilla	The Flotilla's main staging craft is not capable of capital-ship combat, but it is capable of acting as a carrier of sorts. The wide docking bays and such are conveniently environmentally sealed by atmosphere fields, and it's equipped with a local teleport that almost any Warpgate nexus has secondary access to. Loading up on one of the Swordfish, the ships, or the Loaders already possessed here would be easy, but so would hopping into one of the spare Swordfish fighters here, which are a silly array of Jetsons-like vehicles that are quite easy to pilot for those with good reflexes. Also available are Loaders, the space-maneuvering mechasuits that upscale their pilot's work to space-vehicle size, alongside a very small armory of Loader-scale weapons to match most traditional basic gear.     It's enough to get anyone started here, if they need it. It's also enough to get everyone out into the field and active!
Alexis Maaka	The Crimson Spectre is currently advancing with agile motions. Right now, Maaka's got a cutting torch running as she tests it on a steel plate that's a foot thick. It took around half a minute to cut through that steel, to say the least. As the ship advances, countermeasures and armaments (minimal as they are) are readied just in case things get dicey...and they WILL be that way.     "Get ready with the cutting torch, we'll be going through that ship fast and hard. Codenames from here on, Mokin."
Silica	Silica is here! In her Swordfish Fighter. She's pulled the gattling lasers out.... well, one of them anyway, and fitted an Anti-Capital weapon instead. The starboard pylon holding a very large missile in the typical Raygun Gothic styling. A giant Smiley Face printed on the head and various symbols denoting various types of exotic radiation hazards on detonation. "Leo 1, requesting clearance for launch." she radios to the Starbounders as she waits in the hangar to launch.     While she waits, she gives some warning to the others over open broadband. "Leo 1 to all points... be careful with these things. Auto-Warlords have /lots/ of drone support ships to go with their Point Defense and other inbuilt systems. Keep your head on a swivel too, these things can come from /any/ direction, and they're not subject to the same inertia physics as we are, so they can pull some /really/ crazy stunts."     After clearance, she drops out of the bay, and guns the engines, the twin ovals flaring brilliantly blue as the plasma thrust kicks her from standing to combat speed. "Leo 1, ready-op."
Yumiko Kojima	Today is one of the best days of Yumiko's life. And this beats the HELL out of any VR games she'd ever tried. Mostly because it's not a game, and she's gonna make a good profit out of it. And inhabiting a giant robot via the fiber optic cable running from her datajack to a heavily modified sim module is even awesomer.      Robo-Yumi probably stands somewhere on the order of ten feet tall, and mostly resembles her at least in shape, which was supposed to make it less disorienting. UNLIKE Normal Yumi, the Loadermech has forearm mounted twin-barrel autocannon pods, has a light railgun that would be equally at home on Ares' latest model main battle tank slung across its back, and sports a jetpack with oversized maneuvering thrusters. It'd taken her about half an hour of running around on the hull and flying through vacuum to get used to the increased size and mass, but she was starting to get pretty comfortable.      Currently, she's crouched on top of the outer hull, mag-arrays in her feet keeping her locked to the hull, a correspondingly oversized plasma torch clutched in one three-fingered hand. <<Mokin copies, Durandal. All diagnostics green, Systems hot, Torch ready.>>
Yuna Kagurazaka	Out of everyone who's come to assist in this boss battle, Yuna is the only one who, to all appearances, launched WITHOUT a fighter or a mecha. Granted, she was already in her Light Suit when she reached the Flotilla's staging ship, and stepping out into the vacuum of space doesn't even faze her one bit thanks to the battlesuit's protection against lack of atmosphere or warmth. The fact that the full Matrix of Light is with her certainly didn't hurt, either. But once she's far enough away from both the ship and her allies, Yuna calls out ...             "LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT *UP*!!! EL-LINE!!" A pillar of light engulfs Yuna, Elner, Jiina, Erina, and Marina, their forms obscured within the intense radiance; a few moments later, the gleaming form of the Matrix Figure, El-Line, materializes fully as the pillar of light fades and dissipates. Yuna wastes no time in engaging her mecha's thrusters, throttling up, and calling out, "Shugoseiheki!!" to materialize her kite shield - now scaled up proportionally for El-Line's use. "I can take the lead, tank some of the incoming fire," she offers to her allies. "Anyone who doesn't trust their own shields, form up behind me!" Of course, that'll only protect them from *one* direction - but Yuna's played tank so often in this world-region that she thinks nothing of doing so again, when she has the armor and staying power for it out of her own assets.
Iria	Meanwhile, the Hyper Blade is here as well. And at its controls is none other than Iria herself. There's a determined grin on her face and an attitude that shows that she's really in the mood for some action today. Then again, when isn't Iria in the mood for action? She arrives alongside the others and gives them a thumbs up as she approaches, although she doesn't know whether or not they can see her. Not that it matters to Iria. She's more about the adrenaline rush going through her now!
Septette Arcubielle	The DRIVE ME CLOSER is a barebones craft with a simple purpose: to ram into whatever it's pointed at at high velocities, and inject its deadly payload inside. That payload is Septette Arcubielle herself- a short, humanlike android who paces the hangar with resounding footsteps, her glowing eyes sizing up the craft and party members alike for useful strengths and circumventable flaws.      After initial introductions, Septette climbs into the craft's cockpit. It doesn't seem to have much by way of armor, or even life support; the pilot's seat is conspicuously open to the void of space. Either she's monumentally reckless, or she figures her metal's tougher than whatever the ships here are made of. "Going to need help getting close," she remarks via radio. "Pretty confident I can punch through that thing's hull, but I'll need someone to keep the drone swarms off of me. Don't exactly have many weapons on this thing."      With that, she punches it and speeds out of the hangar, reaching top speed with acceleration that might black out a human pilot. She maneuvers to line up on a straight approach to the mothership, though hopefully remaining out of its engagement distance for now. "I'll try to knock out that communications array up top," she says, switching to direct-conductance radio. Out here in the void, her voice adopts a peculiar rattle. "Tell me when."
Corona Arclite	Corona Arclite has been hard at work during the trip out here. It took her a while to figure out how the construction and equipment system for the Loaders worked, but after considerable trial and error she thinks she's figured it out. At least good enough for testing it in the actual field. Whatever it is, she's managed to fasten down some additional modules to the arms of her loader. Just in time, too. She climbs up into the cockpit of the Stampedge as the approach warnings start going off, tail swishing a few times with anticipation before she plops down, straps in, and starts doing all the flicking switchs and hitting buttons that go with starting up. Which probably don't really do anything the 'game' doesn't already do when you get into a machinebut it is just a thing pilots do. "Com'n Hopalong, time to get a move on b'fore the party starts without us!" The robotic jackalope climbs up into the limited cargo space the gunslinger mech has, as having that extra surprise handy worked well last time. Once he's also locked in place Corona tromps the Stampedge up to the hatches. "Foxlinger here, ready to deploy."
Kyoko Takada	HIBIKI is here, according to any interface that lets people know of their allies in the area. Kyoko Takada is the controlling woman's actual name, but there's nothing in her immediately available info to suggest that. Her vehicle of choice mostly resembles those G*ndam craft certain Earth-type areas are so fond of, though it's on the more simplistic side. Black with white markings, and a couple of wing-positioned circles that are really sensor pods. There's a lot of messy little gadgets just under the pods. Ignoring her sidearm, it's those gadgets she starts throwing off as soon as she's clear of the friendly carrier.     Actually throwing. They drift off unpowered, just a trickle of electric maintaining each mini-satelite, and taking in power from its own sensors to bounce a directed signal back her way. Once they're far enough away from her, she has her own sensor network in passive mode spreading around the space, giving dozens of perspective points from which to work while she, herself, stays behind the asteroid cover. Avoiding active sensors should hopefully stop them all from being blown up, for now.     After that, she starts... playing around? Spinning a bit, moving back and forth, getting used to the controls... possibly giggling without turning her mic off first.
Sanary Rondel	For someone who has clearly never played an MMO before, Sanary's actually finished with the customization fairly quickly. Appearance-wise, she's gone for something... Spiky. And bricklike.      It might as well be a flying spiked brick for what it is. The front? Spikes and a frontward-facing slab that could probably function as a shield. On the sides? More spikes, more slabs. Every other direction? Even more spikes, even more slabs. It's perfectly symmetrical, too, except for ominous cannon poking through the front-facing slab. If not for the sound of thrusters firing off shortly after it launches out of the Flotilla's staging craft like a blocky cannonball, it'd be hard to believe this thing could even move around in space.      Eventually, anyway. It's jerking around unsteadily, almost as if the pilot had no idea how to actually fly the cube monstrosity. <<"Do I need a codename, too? Ergh... Coming up with those always sucks. Uhh...">>      It's going to take her a minute.
Staren	"...Their capital ships look just like their little ships but bigger?!" Staren stares at the... Identified Flying Object as the Star Hawk approaches in fighter mode. He left the Stranger than Fiction back near the Space Bar, and flew his personal combat machine alongside the Flotilla's craft on the way here. Those with an eye for detail (or poking around in the tacnet) notice that he's swapped the Annihilator, anti-Wireless railgun, and missile gunpod out for missiles, more missiles, and a laser gunpod.     In it's fighter mode, the Star Hawk looks out of place in space. Like an oversized, chrome F-14 with extra parts. It's also the wrong aesthetic to be some sort of raygun gothic space plane, though.     As Yuna takes point, he forms up alongside her. "I'll try to draw some off you and outrun them."
Kirito	Kirito, having taken up his spot in the 'Black Relic' Loader with TWIN PILEBUNKERS for swords and basically ZERO ranged combat ability, is fighting the urge to freeze up and panic at the sight of a Raid Boss.     But this is the path they need to get their necessary loot for stopping the Neurovores once and for all, lest chaos spread on Earth.     And with EVERYONE even remotely connected to this present, he can only clamp down on his instincts - instincts that say, 'bugger off, go enjoy life in Alfheim.'     A long, deep, raspy breath breaks the silence in Kirito's cockpit as he gathers his wits, steels his will... and triple-checks his equipment and stats.     The all-black Loader grinds into motion as he takes the controls and keys the comms!     And briefly, his thoughts turn to Silica, and how impressive it is that she's all but taking command of the situation. Hard to connect what's happening now with the encounter in Aincrad's Forest Maze.     That, and the sounds of others speaking on the comms, is enough to ignite his drive despite the cold fear building in him.     He LOATHES piloting this thing and would much rather be using his swords personally. But that requires atmosphere to fly with and breathe.     "Black Relic, ready! What's our strategy? Work throught he drones and close in on the boss?!"
Kutsuuko Shiratori	Finally, there is one more Loader, which isn't going to be needing any equipment from the hangar. Built with heavy and compact, but with most of its weight accounted for in the banks of thrusters that blossom from its back and stud its arms and legs, and the massive hydraulics of its limbs, it looks to be all performance and zero compatibility with anything. Painted black and accented gold, its pilot has taken the time to emblazon the wolf's jaws and crescent moon logo pominently on its chest, and to outfit the hand of its hugely oversized and over-built right arm with some kind of finger lattice of scarlet metal.     This is because the Loader is using its pilot's equipment in lieu of anything else. Scarlet Symphony is clutched in the dominant hand, engaged in its assault cannon configuration. The stupid size of the thing means that it serves perfectly well as a heavy submachine gun for the Loader without any modification whatsoever, with a handful of black tendrils plugged directly into the red metal assembly.     "Grandioso disengaging from dock." says the pilot, uncoupling the magnetic harness and letting her machine drift into space for a couple of minutes, before testing the omnidirectional thrusters with several experimental jukes and bursts, apparently designed to automatically cancel inertial drift with reverse thrust. "All clear here. Someone get its attention and I'll start working on the drones. I loaded down the storage with O-Ampoules, so no ammo worries here."
Tomoe	Kirito was not alone as Tomoe launched her own dighter to join with things for now and she thinks she might wnat to try and get a loader for depening on the situation. "Iron Lily here ready to go." She seems ready as it is chekcing over her ship's drive and she's got to think damn Silica really has grown up since they first met in SAO and she's glad of it. She'll fall in making ready to tank once she gets out of the launch bay.
Starbound Flotilla	Clearance to launch is given! Streaks and streams of light gush out of the staging carrier in dramatic arcs, a dozen strong once all the participants in this operation get to work! Silica is among the first, scouting ahead quick and giving her an advantageous position. This means she's among the first to draw attention. Streaks of raygun fire blast around her on her opening advance, but her combat-speed approach gives her a few seconds before any solid lock can be achieved. She can work on clearing drones or defense from any particular region here.     Thankfully, Yuna's here to tank, and now so is Tomoe! As a tank, emitting the loudest electromagnetic signature means they draw the most fire, and the kite shield is barraged by both ship defenses and drones that close in any begin attempts to flank around her El-Line, while Tomoe's craft can activate her own heavy ECM systems to scatter and TAUNT the enemies into a huge rush.     Fighters and Loaders might want to work on clearing out those flanks though! All those fighters coming in behind, who aren't fully up to combat speed yet, will have plenty of time to begin getting to work on it, on their way to surge past Yuna and into the main battle. Staren has a stranger tactic, but one that works; when they begin bothering Yuna's flank, his effort to draw them off and outrun them will probably work, as the simple drones scream after him on their heavy thrusters.     Maaka's approach does get a bit dicey. Roving swarms of drones threaten with their scanner sweeps in crimson cones of light. The same thing happens for Septette, though the CLOSER has a similar problem. Her very active signature draws a lot of those bright red scanning cones. As she reaches topspeed and heads for the communications array, interlocking mechanical pieces of the hull near it begin to shift and rumble. Something's going to happen as she approaches, but she'll need to get through a swarm of drones full of sensors ready to try to intercept! Someone should help her!     These active sensors are easily picked up by Kyoko at first, meaning she can map out the paths of Tormod's minions and examine them for patterns. It's easy to find per-squad patterns, meaning she can easily provide straightforward predictive paths for every enemy -- this provides an ACCURACY BUFF to the whole combat squad! -- but the broader tactical efforts are harder to decode. Mostly because they seem to be entirely dependent on the dramatic EMISSION PATTERNS coming from the massive head of the machine.     As the group approaches, that head has turned to a deep red color, and begun displaying vast iconography of what looks like forests, bloodsplatters, and gaelic weaponry on its massive, multi-faceted screens. The machine emits a gutteral radio SCREAM, one that the drones and escort ships around it mirror with their own varied horde scream.     It's a battlecry.
Alexis Maaka	The Spectre begins to take evasive action, popping 'flares', little space buoys designed to drift in space flashing fake signals to confuse enemy tracking, and she opens fire with the turrets as she tries to pop some of the drones out of the stars. They are gonna need some backup, if they're gonna get in and aboard the ship. Gritting her teeth, Maaka growls as she begins letting off bursts upon the horde of bogies.     "C'mon, shitbags, comin' right into our line of fire here." She hisses with malice, trying to keep aggressive as she evades and then accelerates toward the Auto-Warlord. That may still be difficult, as the machine ship is sending out horrific screams. Maaka's mind races with possibilities as to what the -hell- this thing could even be. Is it...alive?     At this point, such a thing wouldn't shock her.
Corona Arclite	Thrusters launch the Stampedge out of the hold, and it doesn't take long for Corona to get living up to it's name. There's a SFX clip not unlike that of a shotgun being pumped as the weapon is brought to bear, just a bit more mechanical and a few times louder due to the weapons size. "Time to clean out some riffraff. Yeeeehaaaa!" This may be space but it's a game, so there's plenty of sound to go around. So the scattergun-arm can be heard barking loudly every time it spews spread-fire blasts into the swarms of enemy defenders as they make the mistake of rushing towards the tanks getting all their attention.
Yumiko Kojima	Yumiko Kojima drops her hand down, lowering the plasma torch to one thigh where it sticks to the magplate, and unslings the railgun. <<Copy. Switching to Railgun.>> She braces the 'stock' of the weapon against her shoulder, the smart-link system kicking in and providing her aimpoints for each target, dropping into a further crouch and locking one knee to the hull as well to provide a more stable firing platform. She lines the aimpoint on her visor up with the lead indicator one one of the incoming drones, and fires, sending a one kilo tungsten alloy slug towards it at multiple times the speed of sounds. She re-targets and fires again, popping drones at about the rate of once every second.
Silica	Silica rolls out, pulling a wide barrel roll before gunning the engine again. "They've seen me! Going hot. Leo-1, Engaging!" she locks the Torpedo down for now, drawing the bulky tip back into the launch tube, covering with the blast cover so any stray shots that break through the shield can't detonate it. "Alright then, lets dance... Computer, scan area, give me all hostile targets found. Sweep lock, prime main gun for saturation burst."     The computer bleeps affirmative, the barrels of the gattling spreading out, and gaining a slight angle, as her HUD lights up with all the Drones her sensors can find. "Plow the road!" She squeezes the trigger, and lets loose a laser show, skewering multiple drones with the first barrage of red beams. "Computer, target sweep on Capital Ship. Locate: Shield Matrix. Secondary target: Reactor Coolant Outlet."
Iria	There's always something Iria can do, even if she's more of a speedster than a strong girl. Likewise, Hyper Blade is more of a swift craft, but still it has its fair share of weapons as well. And when Iria sees that Yuna and Tomoe need cover on their flanks, Iria is quick to move in. "All right, here we go!" As Iria gets closer, she grins even more. "We're gonna have us some fun! Don't worry, you two, Iria and her trusty Hyper Blade are here to help you out!"
Kyoko Takada	With the battle joined, and some very active signatures attracting proportionally more attention, 'Hibiki' sends a signal through her network to switch from passive to active mode. This will show up the network on all enemy sensors, but it's a calculated risk. It looks to her like the size of the signal affects the size of the aggressive response, and each node in the network is a small signal. If they do get destroyed... she has a second wave of mini-sats prepped for launch, though after that she'll be all out. This is an eggs-in-two-baskets strategy.     Right away, though, she starts pulling in data, both from her network and anyone else sending it her way, and automatically pushing even disparate formats together into a single map of enemy positions, routes, and 'attention' spaces, the latter being the zones it looks like the opponents will most likely immediately react to. This gets a priority send to Septette and anyone else aiming to dodge their way into the boss, but everyone with a machine paying attention will get the feed within a second.     Whether it's 'onboard' or at her live location, she clearly has a LOT of processing power available, and it's all pushing this multi-spectrum data through a series of filters into a slowly-building predictive model, with the 'first guess' pass on enemy actions already available.
Yuna Kagurazaka	"LIGHTNING SHOOT!!" That escalated quickly, as the saying goes, and Yuna has a distinct feeling that it's going to *keep* escalating, probably just *as* quickly. She's not surprised that El-Line is drawing this much hostile attention, and her first response is to raise El-Line's right hand (almost if waving) and let loose with the aforementioned attack call. For all that she calls it 'lightning,' the operative word is closer to 'light' - El-Line's palm glows bright gold, and a crackling blast of concussive radiant force rips out to smash into the first cluster of hostiles to angle towards her flank. Yuna is confident enough in the Wall of the Guardian Star not to worry too much about getting hammered from directly in front; it'll still nibble away at her defensive reserves over time, but not as badly as attacks on the rest of the Matrix Figure. For all that it's a promising start, though? Yuna is already a little worried. She's brought El-Line into battle against mass-produced forces like this before, and while she has abundant allies to help take the heat off, the fact remains that El-Line is a big target which can't shoot in too many directions at once. Without the kite shield, she could go two-handed with her mainstay attack, but she'd still run a grave risk of getting swarmed and overwhelmed. So it's *really* good that Yuna isn't alone out here. Tomoe's drawing her own share of attention, and Staren and Iria are forming up to provide additional cover. "Thank you, everyone!" Yuna calls out over the radio, then opens up on another cluster of approaching fighter-drones, trying to rip through the group of them with a single concussive blast. Meanwhile, even as Elner serves up the data Yuna needs to keep fighting - highlighting incoming hostiles and flagging vectors that need to be attended to - the temporarily dematerialized robo-faerie is *also* gathering as much data as El-Line's sensors can gather on the enemy forces in general, and relaying it across the tactical data network for allies to add to, analyze, or simply use as they see fit. Keeping Yuna's tactical awareness up is Elner's priority, but teamwork is vital, and knowledge is (as always) power.
Septette Arcubielle	The CLOSER begins to careen and weave in its approach trajectory, deviating from the most direct path as the drones close in. Septette isn't just trying to dodge them, though- several of the minions are caught on the sharpened edges of her craft's triangular dart-like hull, exploding on contact. Where she can't quite maneuver to nick them with the hull, she instead leans out of the open faces of the cockpit to clip the zipping drones on her integral arm-blades. Five or six feet might be an impossibly narrow margin in high-velocity space combat, but her mechanical precision serves her well here!      Of course, Hibiki's predictive projections prove incredibly useful as well. For the first two-thirds of her approach, the CLOSER takes minimal damage. But as she nears the capital ship, the drone swarms grow denser, and her ability to swerve without going off-target restricts. "That covering fire would be really useful about now," she intones in a deceptively calm voice. "The Closer's going up in flames either way, but I'd rather not be damaged on arrival."      With that, she activates an elemental enchantment, her talons and arm-blades glowing a dull red with magical heat. She shifts in her cockpit to leap free of the CLOSER when it blows apart- whether under sustained fire or on impact- and hopefully skid to a halt on the mothership's hull near its dome, where her talons can find some purchase to keep her from bouncing off!
Sanary Rondel	<"So /that's/ left... Wait. Which... Up left? Right.. Down... Shit.">> Sanary continues fumbling with her spacebrick even as the call for combat goes out, her... 'Spacecraft' starting to glide towards the mass of fighters coming in from behind them.      <<"Alright, I think I got this figured out! Where do ya need this thing?">> She calls out over the radio and braces herself as she flips some more switches, and the spiked brick thing abruptly blasts forward, following not too far behind the path of her more agile and maneuverable allies. She's coming in hot from behind Silica at the drones, although instead of actually swerving around with evasive maneuvers, she's just going straight for the mass of drones.      <<"Gghk... I'm coming in from your port... Board... Behind you!">> Strangely enough, all those thrusters loaded onto Sanary's stupid brick thing means it can actually jerk sideways relatively easily, but it seems like she's built it more for speed and ramming girth instead of complex evasive maneuvers!
Staren	As drones come in to attack Yuna, the mini-missile launchers mounted on his wings fire to take some of them down before he zooms off. He flies around distracting drones, firing missiles which turn and attack behind him, occasionally firing some railgun and laser fire at other targets when he gets the chance to fly /towards/ the fight instead of away from it.     He was originally planning to charge the capship and unload everything, but now he's not so sure that's a good idea. They need to get the drones and escorts first, unless they're sure they can drop the boss quickly. So it is that he takes it slow (well, in a fight progression sense), leading off swarms of drones and missiling them.     After he's fired sixty minimissiles, he switches patterns like a boss. The space jet jettisons the empty missile launchers and cuts its thrusters, coasting in microgravity, transforms, legs and arms unfolding under the fuselage, turns about face, then transforms the rest of the way to humanoid, using its laser and railgun to take out the rest of the current swarm following him.     He transforms back to fighter mode and flies back to the fight!     The advantages he has over these enemies are sheer speed and the ability to transform and aim with precision only fighters with turret mounts can emulate.     He tries to put these advantages to work diving into the swarm and shooting the laser at them as he passes, but unless the positioning is perfect, that's kinda hard. Still, any that /follow/ him are easy to pick off after he passes by.     He decides to try a new tactic:     This time, Staren dives into the fight headed for one of the escort ships. He fires a steady stream of laser and railgun fire as he approaches, but that's not his real plan here -- He adjusts course to pass right next to an escort ship, transforms, and deploys beam sabers, trying to drag the plasma blades across the escort ship as he passes!
Tomoe	Tomoe is here to do what she can to taunt the enemy and brings her ECM systems online She heads out ahead of everyone else doing what he can to get the attention of the enemy ahead. This was going to be big this was going to be crazy and if it was actually just a game? It would be a hell of a lot of fun. This is no longer a game, it is no longer fun. It's one hell of a fight and someone's going to need to help cover her flanks. She does make shots when she gets a chance to but it's mostly to help keep the enemy's attention on her. <<Hey Silica? You sure have grown up.>> Then she finds she's got some cover from Iria. Good that should help a heck of a lot and with Yuna along side her thing should hopefully be going well. <<Kirito try to keep up!>>
Kutsuuko Shiratori	As she asked for, Kutsuuko stands by while 'Hibiki' runs scanners and gathers information. It's standard, and sensible, procedure for a God Eater to wait for proper reconnaissance before committing, and it gives her some time to check her figures. "Well. All gauges green. Barrier at one-fifty. Synchronization looks eleven percent down, but that probably can't be helped. Nine hundred O-units in reserve. Hopefully more than enough fuel. Burst mode won't be accessible, but . . ."     Oh, there's the data! There's a /lot/ of it too! Whoever Hibiki is, they built their unit for EWACS out the wazoo or something. "Thanks, Echo." Kutsuuko remarks through the group radio, while she picks out clusters of drones that appear to be moving together, and brings up their lead indicators. "Damn! You can read energy signatures for miles out here! That makes things really easy! Let's see . . ." she trails off busying herself with the HUD, having to substitute it for the display on her God Arc.     -->#4:SPREAD JAVELIN<--     --> <--     -->#6:LUNAR SCATTER<--     Something within Grandioso's arm clunks twice, very loudly, and twin pulses of amber light shoot up the tendril wires and into the CNS, bridging the God Eater's P-53 implant and the mecha-scale mock-up. The God Arc comes alive, its rose and bronze surfaces warming up to the cherry red and whote-gold hues of molten metal. The gigantic spiral barrel spins up, the muzzle aperture begins to burn, and the first couple of shots go out, both scaled up enough to use up half an ammo gauge.     The first cuts a streak of white rocket exhaust through the black of space, before breaking apart into thirty individual submunition missiles that are somehow not really much smaller than the original, which close in on the swarms of drones following Yuna, Tomoe and Staren (the 'tanks' for now) in an elegant corkscrew of eerie screaming that is best to ignore, where they blow up in miniature suns that last several seconds before collapsing. The second shot is a solid wall of buckshot blast, with each 'pellet' being a coruscating particle of bright, colour-shifting energy, which crashes right down on the defensive wall of scanners ahead of Septette and Maaka.     Grandioso gushes coolant vapour and makes another loud clunk. The arm opens up, and six spent canisters are ejected into the void. Normally the size of a soda can, with her mecha arm, Kutsuuko can reload them with a literal, revolver-style speed loader.
Starbound Flotilla	Maaka can get some heavy work done clearing out the whooshy drones, but it's going to draw some attention to her. Clearing her own path is working well, but once she deploys to cut that hull, she'll need cover. Thankfully, she gets a heavy clearing effect from Kutsuuko, whose shot slams downfield spreading wide to brutalize the drones closing on her. She'll have the time and the space to slice into one of the interior areas, though some extra cover will be really helpful if someone can give it to her! Otherwise, by the time she slips inside, she'll have hellish raygun fire bearing down on her!
Starbound Flotilla	Septette goes for a high-value target with a low-stealth approach, and that means that the drones are making barriers against her. When one of those shots from Kutsuuko slams through, it impacts hard against the swarm, blasting through it and scattering parts. That means Septette will still have to weather shots from the ship's surface guns, of course, but those are pings of damage against armor that she doesn't care much about.     What she might care about is the fact that one of the interlocking mechanical pieces unfolds into a titanic mechanical /arm/, which swings a wide hook straight at her!     If she adjusts course, the emission array will suffer less damage. If she doesn't, she'll have to slam right through that inhuman mechanical fist.
Kirito	'Keep up?' Kirito covertly balks and snorts at the message, gripping his controls a bit more tightly. Challenge accepted! His Loader's thrusters fire and he comes sailing out the moment Silica's been spotted!     Of course, he has set a course on a zigzaggy plunge towards the Von Neumann mothership that will take him swooping through drones to PILEBUNKER TO PIECES as he swoops around to form up with Tomoe. She's got the tanky, and he as always is heavy-hitting DPS. That much hasn't changed, even if almost everything else has!     "Heh! Not that much different from hunting Evil Gazers, in the end... ONWARDS THROUGH THE HORDE!"
Alexis Maaka	The Spectre begins to get in nice and close as it tries to dock with the enemy vessel. Maaka gives Yumiko the order to open up the side of the hull so they have a way in, and on her way to the hangar, she gets to loading up. Bringing a Blastech DLT-19 with multiple modifications affixed to the weapon, making it more like a modern GPMG than a blaster rifle. Then again, it still fires blaster rounds.     With the weapon in hand, she remains at the airlock, waiting to get the ship opened up while she seals her suit.
Yumiko Kojima	Yumiko Kojima re-slings the railgun, the weapon slotting back into its storage mount on her back, grabbing the plasma cutter again from her thigh as she drops into a crouch. As soon as Maaka gives the word she launches forward, leaping upward off the hull along with a burst from her thrusters. SHe flips around halfway, crunching into the hull of the mothership in a superhero landing, torch hand upraised to protect it from damage. <<Cover me, Entrance in sixty seconds.>> She brings the muzzle of the cutter down to just above the hull, and droplets of molten hull start to fountain outward as it goes through the plate like a hot knife though butter.
Starbound Flotilla	Corona rips through the crowds flanking Yuna and Tomoe here, with a brutal short-range tactic that is shitting out crowd stuns. Where the enemies aren't killed, they're at least knocked around and slammed into each other, creating a gratuitous cloud of stunning effects, and they work wonders with El-Line's heavy stunning strikes. This means Iria can lance through with the Hyper Blade, and Kutsuuko's stray guided shots can finish them off, while Kirito immediately gets to work on the stunned and slowed foes that remain, piercing through them and turning them into puffs of dramatically scattered voxel on the end of his pile bunkers. Oddly, though, some of those drones are closing in a little hard on the group. They bear what appear to be laser swords, spears, and other such weapons, not just the sword-like weapons Kirito's got. The Auto-warlords are quite literal!     Kirito will soon find himself matched with this, while stranger and stranger drones close in hard. Heavier, armored things, with dramatically draped cloth around them? Bright crimson cloth like some kind of space-sized tapestry. These units seem intent on closing to incredibly short range and dogfighting the group around the tanks! They're stunned in waves by Tomoe's ECMs, but she can't get them down and taunted quite the same way the others are vulnerable to.
Septette Arcubielle	The CLOSER bleeds ablative armor like the petals of a sabot as the surface guns rake its hull, but Septette predictively compensates for the jarring impacts to its frame with minute adjustments on the manual controls. She's just punching the accelerator for final approach when the glinting, silvery fist swings around in a lazy arc, and her eyes flare in alarm. This is a complex value judgement, not a simple tactical call- but she has all the time in the world to figure it out.      The subjective instants stretch out into an interminable pause as her mind races. There are no conflicting values here, only different paths to the same objective: protecting people. Trying to plow through the UFO's menacing fist is an immediate gain, in that it could end the mission quicker and more cleanly, minimizing risk to teammates. But sustaining personal damage in the process could result in an indefinite amount of utility lost in the future, if it lessens her ability to defend others while she works on repairs...      By the time her value calculations reach a satisfactory conclusion, a handful of milliseconds have passed. As difficult as it is to justify loss of functionality from potential damage, it's harder for her to justify potential injury to allies. There will be no course change.      Septette's perception of time snaps back. The fist swings around. The fighter's engines roar. Her senses fill with the vibrations of shrieking metal and the vacuum-choked explosions of fuel as her craft tears through the boss's raised fist, and self-diagnostics flare with warnings as pieces of jagged shrapnel embed in her limbs and exposed components. Acceptable losses.      A fraction of a second later, what's left of the CLOSER slams directly into the dome, and Septette skids to a shrieking halt on the hull next to it, unfolding one blade in preparation to either deal a coup de grâce to the communications array or fend off whatever defenses the ship tries to deploy next!
Corona Arclite	This was sort of turning out the same way fighting the bandit gangs back home does. You clear out the rabble and the bigger, more important thugs start coming out. "Reckon it's time to play with the new toys." That and the scattergun needs some cooldown, so that retracts back into storage. Allowing one of the extra modules Corona attatched to slide forward over the end of the limb. Some sort of emitter on the end starts to glow, and when Corona raises the arm over the Stampede it swirls around, forming into a large loop made of energy. "There's one way to deal with a mean herd -- round 'em up!" The loader mimics a throwing motion with it's arm, though it's mostly a gesture for visual reference (because this IS a game) as the energy lariet is launched. Aimed to snare around one of the new enemies and reel the Stampede in to land on it, hopefully with enough force to smack it off course as the loader's feet impact and the mech yanks of the energy tether to twist its body and point whater propulsion it has in a different direction.
Starbound Flotilla	Silica is surging past the drones and seems quite intent on getting those scans. Thank goodness, Kyoko is going to need that data! Silica's own data only gets a series of half-resolved datapoints, places where energy surges up in a way that MIGHT be an exhaust or a shield emitter. The way that the stray shots impact the shield shows a pulse in many of them, and each boost of Tormod's engines shows a boost in others, but she'll need significant DATA ANALYTICS to identify which specific subsystem is where!! Thankfully, she doesn't need too much cover. With the tanks holding off most of the swarm, what little goes for her is more than possible to blast through with heavy sweeps. She could still use the help though, as a rising tide responds to the active scan.     Thankfully, she has both Staren and Sanary here. Sanary is able to slam through through a cluster, suffering what damage she might through the scrap breaking on her hull, but shearing hard through it. Some of these things have heavy shielding, which make them incredibly, annoyingly bouncy for her, though! Someone should handle the shielded ones while she focuses the hull-focused ones. Spikebrick is more of a mace. Or a flail.     Staren, though, has fewer problems with the shield. His melee means that, when the rush of melee weapon fighters comes in, he can lance through shielding hard and cut them in half in his dramatic close-in rushes. As long as he prioritizes the shield runs, this should be okay... Though he might also want to prioritize some of those cloth-draped ace dogfighters closing in, who're focusing hard on Silica with their short-range machine-rayguns!
Iria	Iria does see the opportunity to lance forward with Hyper Blade. She lets out a battle cry as she attacks, grinning widely as she moves in. "I love a good fight, whether it's on foot or in space!" She hopes none of her colleagues hear her, but that's just the way it is sometimes.
Starbound Flotilla	Kyoko's effort actually manages to achieve a relatively low profile. Unfortunately, even the smallest signature attracts a breakoff when the ECM occasionally oscillates downward. If she doesn't find a way to handle the signal during oscillations, she'll have to sacrifice some of those little network drones. She's starting to improve DODGE BUFFS on all allied units! Her analysis helps improve enemy evasion now, not just the firing solutions!     This is when she gets hit with the array of data from Silica, who is trying to find a shield system and an exhaust system. She'll need to match heat and power oscillations up against shield impacts and heat generation if she's going to find them, because the automated analysis sure can't!
Tomoe	The battle contiunes on the tanks are taking damage such has herself but it could be a lot worse. She's got two off tanks and some support on top of that. She was pretty pleased to be running. She will tak her shots she will do a few stunts and keep the ECM up hoping the others can burn the rest down in time. She pulls a loop and then comes in again trying to launch several more attacks at the alien infested things.
Silica	Negative contact... damn. She sends the data feed over to Hibiki, hopefully she can get her a firing solution. Until then, she jukes away, behind an asteroid and breaks off the attack run since she cann't dumbfire her torpedo. It /needs/ a track to home in on, or the warhead just won't detonate. "Gonna need a wingman for my attack run. Got a /lot/ of drones coming my way!" she calls over comm, rolling out, then shifting her gattling to straight fire mode, trying to ambush some of those incoming dogfighters. "Computer, divert auxillary power to the field emitter, Half weapon throughput and divert that into engines." as she reroutes her power systems, the blue flare of her engines turns a whiter hue, and the shield bubble around her craft flares briefly as it gets reinforced... but each shot from her weapon does less damage, even though it's firing a bit faster to compensate. She's just going to have to last until she can get that firing solution!
Yuna Kagurazaka	Group tactics *work*. Yuna doesn't appreciate this fact often enough - particularly from the perspective offered by El-Line's cockpit. Sure, she has plenty of allies, plenty of friends, but most of the time, when she's in El-Line, she's effectively on her own in that part of the fight; even when *she's* on foot, outside of the VRMMO scene, she doesn't often coordinate as thoroughly with others as she could. But she's very definitely not alone in this battle - and the evidence is all around her. So she doesn't *have* to take out individual ships; she can scatter their formations, leave them off-balance, disorient them, and let her allies do the mopping up. Besides, as a tank, she *shouldn't* be focused on 'finishing off' anything anyway - she's supposed to be the bulwark for her allies, absorbing the brunt of enemy attacks so that the weaker, more offense-oriented members of the party (or the raid) can focus on dealing out damage. With that in mind, Yuna changes her tactics a bit. When she sees groups of enemies harrying her allies, she snaps off a Lightning Shoot to distract the baddies and throw them for a loop; if she has to take more than one shot to get a band off of Kutsuuko or Iria or Staren, or even draw their attention away from fellow tank Tomoe, she does so - just as long as she can take that shot WITHOUT risking injury to her friends. And when she sees one or more of the attacking ships getting taken out ... well, they're 'exploding' into voxels rather than material shrapnel. They *are* just part of this game zone. So she can fight without feeling guilty - but Yuna stays cautious all the same.
Starbound Flotilla	Kutsuuko, having held back for the most part in ranged artillery-like shots, finds that the ACE DOGFIGHTERS are noticing their efforts! Though her strikes have worked quite well in all arenas she's fired on, her response is tailored. A cluster of a half-dozen Ace Dogfighters are closing in hard, in a wide flanking formation that closes in from multiple sides and then tries to either chase her down if she gets into motion, or hit-and-run at her if she doesn't! Their draping crimson cloth adornments whoosh dramatically in their own exhaust, leaving elegant spiral trails when they curve in for an attack.
Kyoko Takada	A lot of what Kyoko's doing is automatic, either in literally being part of an automated process, or in the sense of something she can do without conscious thought, like the state a person can reach playing with a numbers puzzle when they've already figured out all the rules. This isn't, however, such a simple puzzle, and what's consciously occupying her attention as the information still flows in and out is the need to modify her data. Variables are pushed in and out of the formula, information discarded or added in, the predictive power tested in watching the enemy move, and then changed again. It's still largely intuitive, even if the relations between indicators and action often aren't.     How much do squadrons care about the proximity of other squadrons? Do they react to the nearest enemy, three enemies, or the whole battlespace? Do they dodge fire that wasn't directed at them, but comes close? New weapon modes enable on the enemy craft, and the model makes another major shift. The influx of data slows down the model's resolution, but not by enough that most people will notice. When it comes to data, 'Hibiki' is a heavy lifter, as well as an inquisitive sort, her professional pride ensuring she won't let the machinery handle it all for her.     And here, safely behind cover, she at least has the time to work at that. It really is an interesting game. And there is an opponent, she knows--the boss itself, who will soon throw out all her calculations if it decides to progress the fight to the next stage. She's not really that much of a gamer, but she at least knows that there's always a point at which the boss turns red and goes berserk. Come to think of it, didn't someone mention 'berserker' earlier? But there's no time to start a search through possible meanings of that word and watch Hunting videos. Maybe later.     Her allies are far less predictable, and limit how far ahead her model can work. Like the one that just plowed through an enemy attack when given the chance to dodge it. Others feed her data entirely outside her model, and she has to shift attention as Silica's ship starts giving her guesses on subsystem locations. That looks important, so she broadcasts the necessary signal to have some of her mini-sats reorient on that target. Others, that drifted out of range on the initial, passive approach, she fire their own thrusters to improve her network coverage. With more sensors focused, and with every impact, she starts mapping out the possibilities. "Shield matrix and reactor coolant outlet, huh... just a heat emitter? Probably not dropping material." One neat thing about her methods of analytics is that knowing anything about the subject she's analyzing helps, sure, but isn't strictly necessary. She's hardly an expert on space combat. Or on combat, at all. That may be part of why she doesn't bother saving her mini-sats, knowing that she still has another wave that can replace any losses. They're an acceptable sacrifice, while she works out Silica's problems and bounces around and back a firing solution as soon as the confidence interval is high enough. That'll get updated in real-time, too.
Kirito	Non-standard and odd-looking drones swoop towards Kirito and Tomoe, leaving him unsure how to proceed. UNKNOWNS are the bane of his existence, for he must take many risks to learn their fighting abilities while hopefully not getting blown up in the process!     Yet the sight of these weapons sets him a little more at ease. These, he knows how to deal with. Swords and spears will always be used certain ways!     Which is why his confidence SURGES. "Now we're talking... Tomoe, keep their attention and I'll run them through!"     It's a pretty good plan he hopes. Because it's really all they CAN do.     Kirito hits thrusters for ALL they're worth and dives straight into this fray, making full use of his knowledge of medieval weapons combat to position an approach past guards and attack arcs and STRIKE with everything he's got!
Staren	Staren sees some MELEE LOADERS going for Kirito and Silica -- Silica happens to be closer. The shields require him to fight melee in kind -- he's okay with that, since it seems unlikely they'll try to grapple while holding a shield and a weapon.     But now ACES are coming in with cloaks or something. Staren suspects they might have special moves, so is hesitant to get close right away. <"Look out, Silica!">     Staren devotes some missiles to the current group of shielders -- These larger, mech-scale explosive missiles launch from the shoulder packs, and try to circle around to hit the shielders from behind.     As for the aces moving in on Silica, he tries to get their attention with laser and railgun fire. Watching closely as they dodge -- he's hoping it's in a predictable pattern he can use to fake them out and then shoot them, but if not, he's going to need another strategy!
Starbound Flotilla	CRUISER TORMOD has changed its "mood" from not just the signs of ancient celtic war, but to elaborate, rapidly flickering images of birds of prey, World War 2 era fighters, and historical fencers, all interspersing among the massive displays on the huge emission array. The battlecry has transformed from a scream to a sort of a staticky, buzzing chant, a repeated "####! ####! ####! ####!" The "chant" is mirrored by the drones as they attack, and sounds unspeakably hostile.
Sanary Rondel	As the unnamed spacebrick barrels through a mass of drones with varying results, Sanary takes a look at her creation's stats. It's still in decent shape, although she is going to have to keep a closer eye on its stability if she encounters anything else with good shields. It takes her another moment to actually figure out how to stop the thing's forward momentum instead of just spinning it around, but she soon figures out which way is not-facing-a-wreckage before searching for more targets.      <<"Hey, Staren. Get the fast ones, will ya? This thing's more of a... Big target hitter, you know?">> Slang for 'unwieldy as hell', clearly. Sanary is at least aware of where this thing's strengths lie, though, and it surges into motion once again on another collision course with Silica's bigger, slower-looking pursuers (relative to the smaller and shieldier ones, anyway). Instead of just relying on the brick's spikes and mass to do the job, though, the healer actually opts to test out its cannons this time around!      There's a buildup of energy in front of that slab-mounted cannon, and then it unloads a spray of plasma in front of it. Although none of the shots are particularly accurate nor even hitting in a straight line in front of her, the spread is fairly wide and a decent fit considering the machine's turning speed. The recoil also doesn't slow it down much, likely due to THE GIRTH.      Sanary, however, sounds disappointed (and nauseous) by the cannon's volley. <<"... Aw. I thought that was gonna be a bigass beam or something. Remind me to change that if we do this again.">>
Starbound Flotilla	Maaka and Kojima get into CRUISER TORMOD! And holy flying hecks. The interior of this is a nightmare. Yumiko is going to need that plasma cutter and that loader, because the inside was designed for drones to move around, and only for drones. Thankfully, once Maaka deploys, she won't have to deal with ship-scale drones. She and Yumiko, on their efforts inside, will only have to deal with swarms of weaponized repair drones, since most of the ship-scale ones are stuck fighting the fighters outside     The inside of this is SURREAL though. While it takes slicing through hulls and such to progress, the sheer variety is intense. In one region, Yumiko and Maaka have to deal with coolant lakes full of artificial gravity that freeze and boil as the battle progresses outside. There's a segment that involves heavy zero-gravity platforming through an ore processor unit that's the size of a small skyscraper. Sensor management rooms are full of sweeping sensors that call in swarms of drones when alerted. The massive Raygun Gothic interior is also dark as night the whole way, with absolutely no interior lighting. So that's a huge inconvenience.     As they move through, the massive MACHINE BRAINS they encounter can be damaged and sabotaged, piling on debuffs on CRUISER TORMOD's defenses outside!
Yumiko Kojima	Yumiko Kojima replaces the cutter on her hip, bringing one hand up to scrape re-hardened metal off the sensor cluster that serves as her 'head', and digs the chunky fingers of the loader into the seam before ripping out the section of hull. Tossing it aside in a safe direction, she calls <<Breaching!>> before ducking through first and unloading a hail of HEDP rounds from both arms' autocannon pods into the drones inside. Due to the high rate of fire on these things, ammo pickups from the drones are a savior. She lets the more experienced 'Durandal' dictate the route, although she tries to take the brunt of incoming fire given her armor is a lot thicker than Alexis' human scale suit. If things get too close for the ACs, her loader proves just as brutal in melee combat, punches and brutal kicks with the talons on her feet shredding the swarms.
Alexis Maaka	Maaka exhales in relief as the hull is opened after a tense minute or so. She exits out the airlock, right there the mech is probably just climbing aboard the bigger ship. She follows suit, using her suit's own boosters to get inside after a quick grapple to clear the rest of the distance.     Inside, she switches to night-vision, using her blaster repeater to open fire upon the drones as she grapples her way to cling to Yumiko's mech's back.     She'll pull her own weight, using quick bursts to fire on each drone in her sights that Yumi misses, riding atop the mech even when Yumiko lashes out punches and kicks. SHe'll be fiiiiiiine.
Starbound Flotilla	Septette plows through the punching arm with a brutal ruthlessness, and slams her scrap-metal-that-used-to-be-a-ship into the dome of the emissions module. The massive thing screams over every radio frequency and then some, and Septette might even hear it despite the void of space. Inside, there's not a single boss so much as an incredibly hostile environment.     How exactly the emission array does what it does isn't clear. It's videogame logic! But what it's doing is apparently being operated by some sort of massive mechanical brain at the center, which Septette can get almost no clear glance at. The entire dome is dedicated to massive robotic arms shifting huge cathode ray apparatuses around and about, and during all of this, while doing their best to maintain their function, the huge electronic manipulation machines strike out at her. They try to crush her between huge emission arrays and flood her with electromagnetic assaults, they try to bash her with the scrap of her entry and her combat, they try to give the floor out from under her, they do all sorts of things. The only glances she gets of the massive screaming mechanical brain-shaped thing at the center are when robotic arms and their flickering screens split long enough for the brain to fire some kind of huge white beam of erroding energy her way, blasting out the back of the dome.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	"Good stuff Hibiki!" Kutsuuko says with evident satisfaction when she sees both shots wipe out a score of contacts off the radar. George had be right. The weirdly mismatched left arm is handy. It lets her do the dextrous movements required to work the complicated piece of non-game bio-machinery she had stuck with. Within seconds, Scarlet Symphony is cycled up again, and the ammo counter is reading at 100.     As she predicted though, the enemy isn't going to leave her along after she just did that. The caped Aces, oddly reminding her of fancy court knights, come right in from out of her field of fire and divert their attention on her. "Give me thirty seconds. I'm not going to be able to provide further fire support like this." the God Eater says into the radio after one look at her IFF list. She doubts the Ace craft will let her sit still and select more perfectly suited chips, and it'll use a lot of ammo to fight them off. Which is why, when they get close, she keeys the manual switch now connected to the hilt release.     -->SFORZANDO [-]<--     --> ||     -->FERVORE [X]<--     Scarlet Symphony's assault cannon folds back into the heart of the God Arc, and in its place, an eight foot long, white-hot slab of a blade built like a car-sized katana flashes out. The motion isn't anything as simple as the flip of a switchblade; it's more like the cannon had exploded into two dozen mechanical components which had all jarringly yanked themselves back together mid-fragmentation. It also happens in pretty much the blink of an eye, which is just quick enough for Grandioso to fire all its port thrusters at once and rocket into the nearest Ace as a streaking glow that is as much blazing sword as it is thruster flames.     It looks like Kutsuuko aimed to replicate her melee fighting style as much as she could in three dimensions, because from then on, her duel with the Aces is a strobing plasma ball of fiery, zigzagging lights slamming back and forth and into each other. She flashes from target to target almost entirely by pulses of massive, instantaneous thrust, maintaining no straight vector or steady speed for long, and dodging in much the same way, accepting the strain the heinous g-forces place on her body that would otherwise pulp an unaugmented human.     She hadn't slapped a lot of armour on this design, and it shows in how she moves, maneuvering to constantly be in a fighter's face, gigantic sword in hand, and already cleaving through whatever has the best firing solution on her before it can pull the trigger. It's clearly a new beast for her to have to process all these enemies in so many dimensions at once, and here and there her insane reflexes are betrayed by her limited spatial awareness, though rather than rayguns and sci-fi melee weapons immediately stabbing right into her boosters and blowing her up, they clash against concentric ripples of golden light; not the Loader's defensive field, but Scarlet Symphony's defensive module. The red gauge ticks down from 150 to 145, 130, 110, but it's better than the alternative of immediate critical systems failure, and considering the sheer mass of her Loader, they don't knock her off her lighting-strike attack patterns.     When the squadron is dealt with, Kutsuuko keys all her rear boosters and accelerates to the highest speed she can get (which is pretty impressive considering almost all her mass is dedicated to motive systems), and swoops in to catch up with Silica and the rest of the ship buster crew. There, her God Arc flips back to cannon mode, and she aims to stay close and lay down a hail of suppressing fire at any interceptors that come close, relying on more generic 'blaze bullets' in enormous, minigun-like quantities to conserve her ammo bar for a time.     "Echo! Leo! The minute you identify something vital, crack it open with that giant torpedo! I have a follow up in mind! Durandal, Mokin, Closer! Update your positions so we know where you are! Don't get hit from outside!"
Starbound Flotilla	Corona's crowd control becomes real crowd /control/. Her lasos grant her a few significant advantages here. A lot of the melee-specced enemies are vulnerable to being struck by their similarly melee-specced allies, and being yanked around by a lasso is sure to cause some friendly impacts, not to mention opening up a world of tactical options for Corona to rip these things apart in melee! It looks like this whole group's troubles may be winding down, in fact, as the swarms grow more and more dispersed.     Iria slams more and more rounds through the foes, though her less direct and focused assault means she draws the attention of less vengeful aces and more OPPORTUNISTIC kinds! With a sort of abruptness, a trio of dogfighter aces close in, trying to get behind the Hyper Blade, and chase her down, peppering at her with gunfire! At least the ones that focused in hard on Kirito are easier to deal with. The non-humanoid tactics that they use those weapons with may be strange, but they can still get read.     Yuna and Tomoe will find, after Tomoe's fancy stunts and Yuna's own heavy strikes and stuns, that the clusters grow less and less common. Not because Kyoko's predictions are faulty, which they're not, it's simply the fact that there's less and less drones! The group has churned through enough of them that they can shift their efforts to assisting one of the other groups! Collaborating with the Maaka/Yumiko team, trying to give Septette supporting fire, or perhaps more relevantly... Covering Silica, Sanary, and Staren's BOMBING RUN! The pressure is finally easing up enough to let them take their pick!
Starbound Flotilla	CRUISER TORMOD's display has shifted to something disturbing, and remains functioning despite the huge hole punched in it. Dramatic photographs of crowns flicker, images pop and sputter of neurovores in varying states of mutilation, archaic alchemy textbook scans display... And settling, for a full five seconds, on a red monochromatic image of Earth. The "chanting" has turned to a slowing, scattered series of defiant, angry noises, violent and hateful. But as any Von Neumann berserker ought to be, it's utterly incoherent and disinterested in being truly understood in the first place.
Septette Arcubielle	The ferocious electromagnetic disruptions do more damage to Septette through induction than anything else; long wires in her limbs spark and sputter with surges of electricity, even kicking up minor fires that lap at her frame. But she scarcely seems slowed by the disruption, ducking and weaving between the flailing heavy limbs with aplomb as she formulates a plan. When the floor gives way, she simply scales the limbs instead, like a shifting zero-gravity parkour course.      Gradually, the defenses start to wear down: whenever she leaps onto a limb, her long superheated blades rake along its motors and dig into chinks in the armor, impairing its functionality if not wrecking it outright. She feels relatively comfortable in having even that chaotic mess of a boss-arena figured out, making complex spatial calculations and movement predictions to leap seamlessly between thrashing limbs and crumbling surfaces...      Her mistake, of course, is in approaching the Tormod as if it were a rational opponent, and not a video game boss- a truly intelligent enemy wouldn't open up its weak point just to launch a convenient attack! The possibility never really occurred to her that it might use its brain as a weapon, and the searing beam of light leaves her with only fractions of a second to react. A magical fireball erupts from her hand, sending her careening partially out of the way, but the beam still squarely clips her lower body and blackens the metal!      "Careful on approach to dome," she chimes via radio over the beam's roaring scream. "The brain itself possesses ranged attacks." But before the screens can close again and cut off her line-of-sight, she summons a trio of small magical drones at equidistant points around the core! They won't last long against its defensive fire, but- "Trio of homing beacons around the core," she calls out. "Fire at their averaged position!"
Iria	Iria forces her way through and laughs in a victorious style... Only to find there's three bandits on her six. "Aw great, you just had come out all at once, didn't you?" She grumbles a little. "Very well, if you want to fight me like that, then I shall gladly oblige you!" She attempts to pull a swift one-eighty somersault in hopes of catching them off-guard and disorienting the enemies long enough to strike when they least expect it.
Tomoe	Tomoe is happy to have Kirito along side her it was good to have people who she consider like family fighting along side her. Also strangers who cared enough to aid her world for whatever reason, it was because of aid like that that's she's still alive. She knows this well and keep going now as she checks the ECM to make sure it's up and she keeps fighting. "You know it, Kirito!" She fires a salvo of mini missiles to add to the havoc as she bucks and weaves about. Her fighter keeps going going pulling more stunes as she goes. She makes note of her comrades attacking n it eems team tank? Is doing it's job quite well.
Corona Arclite	Sometimes this was the only way to deal with a herd of angry steers. You take control of the lead and bang them around until they're too wore out to keep running rampant. Maybe you'd understand more if you've seen the big ornery bulls they have on Brimsteel, but this isn't the place for confusion visuals. So let's just to stick to the image of a loader mech on the back of one of the fancy alien meleers, using an energy lasso to yank it around so it smashes into the other fancy alien meleers, herding them away from clustering together and into the path of other attackers. Then Corona taps her controller, and the module she jury-rigged to the opposite arm also slides forward and opens, reconfiguring the end into.. a mech sized wrench head. Corona had intended to be ready in case she had to do some space robot scaled dismantling. But it's just as effective for doling out blunt trauma to the enemies her wild ride thrashes close to.
Starbound Flotilla	Silica's data updates quickly and intensely. Every bogus signature is crossed out, leaving her with only a pair of them. One power signature for shields, one heat signature for coolant. And coincidentally, she has a path that takes her through both of them, though she'll need to hit them in sequence. First the shield generator, then the exhaust port, where the boiled coolant comes out in hot waves. There's even a convenient trench running along the surface!     Thankfully, the aces are more for dogfighting pressure and less for tanking, and while they're quite a bit stronger, they go down pretty well. Sanary dumping fire out of the front is actually pretty effective area denial, if she can manage it! For now, though, they have some clear space to work in. And enough to start their bombing run!     But when they do, they'll need to deal with three issues. First, the turrets atop CRUISER TORMOD, running along its body, which threaten to shoot down any encroaching craft with a death of a thousand cuts. Second, the shield generator, which needs to be smashed entirely (perhaps Sanary can find some success there). And third, the heavy mechanical interlocking robotic arms that MENACE near the exhaust port, and threaten to interfere with the torpedo! Those who are helping and participating in this dramatic assault will need to do what they can to take out all three of these final threats!
Yuna Kagurazaka	It feels a little early to be out of enemies, but that's mostly because the big boss battleship is still out there. Silica and her wingmates are the first group to come to Yuna's mind, and that's most of what she asks about ... But much closer at hand, Iria's picked up a couple more hostiles. El-Line turns to face in that direction, right arm angling to take aim, and Yuna works the controls with a mixture of urgency and caution. If she shoots at the wrong moment or angle, she could hit Iria instead of the bogies ... And one blast of crackling radiance tears across the darkness, aiming for whichever of Iria's sudden pursuers Iria didn't manage to take out on her own. *Then* Yuna sends El-Line flying towards the Cruiser Tormod. Elner's already scanning to try and pick up Silica and her wingmates, so that Yuna can start providing them the necessary cover. And until then? Well, a big white super robot tends to draw attention, and Shugoseiheki *is* still equipped. Maybe the fighter screen has been taken out, but Yuna's more than happy to keep the turrets preoccupied in her role as tank. If she's in a position to pick off some of the hull defenses, she can certainly do that too.
Yumiko Kojima	Yumiko Kojima pauses after putting one three-fingered hand through a sub-brain, and takes a knee. Once Maaka's clear, she unslings the railgun, bracing it firmly against her shoulder. <<Closer, Fire support incoming.>> The three beacons show on her HUD, which calculates the center position, and the railgun kicks and punches glowing red holes in the ceiling as she puts a three meter spread of ten slugs at the 'brain', before re-slinging the heavier weapon. <<There's your fire support. Getting back to sabotage in here. If we keep venting the place, the coolant should start boiling off. Let's make some noise, Durandal!>> Since Yumi's comm is coming over DNI, nobody except Alexis is able to hear the roar of the autocannons, or rather the vibration tearing through the bulkheads as Yumi hoses the place down, plumes of fire erupting from the muzzle brakes over her hands.
Sanary Rondel	What's that? A strong, stationary target that needs to get eliminated? This just the sort of thing Sanary was hoping to find! With the cannon working better than expected against the dogfighters, it would only make sense for Sanary to use it again to dispatch the shield generator. Would a shield generator have its own shield, though?      Better not to take chances. Learning from her first encounter with the shielded targets, Sanary doesn't just charge straight at it and hope for the best. No, she instead starts flying her brick closer to the surface, firing off a volley of the whatever-cannon's shots at what she's hoping really is the shield generator to try and loosen up any secondary-shields that would just make her bounce off again. After she fires, however, Sanary puts her ship's thrusters on full blast and very nearly flattens herself against the seat as it...      Well, it's still not moving /that/ fast. Still, it's fast for someone who isn't used to this sort of thing, and the brick hurtles towards her target. She's smart enough (for once) not to just go straight at it and risk pancaking herself into the side of the capital ship, too! Instead, Sanary's flying perpendicular to the ship so her own actually has somewhere to go after hitting the generator.
Staren	The 'aces' turn out to be more quantity than quality, or perhaps just suffering from conservation of ninjutsu. Once they're down, Silica identifies the remaining key targets on the boss... And Staren sees where he can help.     The Star Hawk flies away from the battle a bit, circling around to make a low pass over the surface of the capital ship, right by its turrets. Hopefully he can time it right to take the heat of     Once he's pointed the right way, he pours out a hail of railgun fire at the turrets, then speeds past Sanary's ship, building speed. As the turrets take notice, he transforms to hybrid mode, and deploys the left arm's beam shield as he approaches, hoping that the shield will take most of the fire and then as he speeds past the turrets will ineffectively try to track him!     Once he's past, he transforms back to fighter mode and speeds around the ship. As soon as that shield goes down, he plans to fire his remaining missiles -- two dozen and change -- as a screen for Silica's shipkiller torpedo, to distract and take out arms that would interfere!
Starbound Flotilla	Yumiko and Maaka breathing through and around the ship get a good synchronization going. Striking with autocannon rounds and pounding through brain and drone alike, she works as an effective heavy weapons platform to coordinate well with Maaka's infantry precision. There's times Maaka will be necessary -- to scour enemies from a vent system, to rip access codes out of machines -- but for the most part, they can stay in perfect cooperative tandem.     Slugs fire through the bulkheads and rip through them like they're butter. A line of dripping, slagged metal turns to voxels as it falls from the holes she's slammed in the interior. Dramatic. Each slug is stronger than the last, as they have less and less strong bulkhead to move through. Here's hoping the final slug is the one that lands.     By now, they've inflicted a disturbing number of debuffs on the foe! It's ready for the bombing run! It might be a good idea to breach /out/ of it now, before it blows up.
Silica	Silica watches as her HUD updates. <<Firing Solution acquired. Target locked on. MK-48 primed to fire.>> chimes the Computer. "Alright! Good going Hibiki... okay. Leo-1 to all points. I have track on the shield emitter protecting the coolant vent and the vent itself. Mister Staren, if you can take out the sield. I'll hit the vent with the Mk-48. Leo-1, beginning attack run!"     She guns the engines, draining all remaining power from her weapon array, save for what's needed to launch the torpedo. She dumps that energy into the engines and shields, bringing herself around into a launch vector to the exposed port. "Just waiting for you to bring down that shield!" she transmits, holding station until she picks up the shield going down.     Once it does, engines flare brilliant white, and she closes on the vent, she begins to juke any turret fire coming her way. Raygun blasts deflect off her reinforce shields, but they begin to drain rapidly. 250%, 220%, 185%, 100%, 80%... CRACK. 50%, Hull 82%, shield emitter damage, recharge reduced. CRRRK. Armour damaged, caution, hull breach imminent. "Target lock! I have tone! Leo-1, Weasel weasel!" The torpedo emerges from the launch tube, the smilie-face opens to show the tracking tip at the head which scans the vent, locking onto it before the cap at the opposite end opens and a plume of plasma ejects as the weapon begins to move. It picks up speed rapidly, and Silica peels off from the run, pouring on speed as she banks up and away. "ETA to impact 30 seconds!"
Alexis Maaka	Well, it's a good thing Maaka's a well coordinated fighter. She opens fire, blasting away and clearing vents either with melee strikes or a well aimed high-ex grenade round from a grenade launcher. She also is quick to rip access codes. She's no Kotone, but she can definitely crack a system time to time.     They make a damn good team, all things considered, her and Mokin. Whenever she takes a slug or two, she can tell Yumiko will open fire in revenge to shred those drones, and vice versa.     Eventually Yumi gives the order to hold on for death life, and Maaka slings her DLT on her back as she grabs on tight. "I'm in place, blow this thing so we can get out of here!" She calls out, using paramagnetics to adhere to the mecha.
Yumiko Kojima	Yumiko Kojima waits for Alexis to be secure, before spinning around and starting to charge back the way they came. This time, she doesn't stop for combat, quickly shooting anything in front of her she sees in time, anything she doesn't gets crushed underfoot and pulverized by her claws. She skids around a corner, pushing off the wall with one arm, and sees stars through the hole in the distance. Picking up the pace, she increases the pace, quick bursts of her thrusters keeping her on track, before a final leap takes her through the torched hole, main thrusters kicking in to rapidly propel her clear of the ship that's starting to explode around them. She stretches her arms out in front of her, blitzing her way through the drone swarm with sheer volume of fire, aiming to get clear and meet up with Maaka's ship.
Starbound Flotilla	Corona has a lot of clear space here, thankfully. By now, the others are peeling off and heading to support Silica's run, but they'll still need some help! By setting herself up for melee, she can work to stun any of the stray drones that flank in and mess up the support for the bombing run! Crushing them and dazing them, especially the melee ones, can keep harassment off of those who can't quite handle it as well as the tanks among them can.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	The sheer scale of this ridiculous space battle is a little much for Kutsuuko to track all at once, but the helpful game interface boils down the essentials in the way they should. Grandioso is formed up with the rest of the bombing team, the drones and Aces are disappearing, the escort craft can't do much, and this 'Von-Neuman' thing is already bleeding its guts out its eyes. Distantly, she can catch the ridiculous dance Septette is doing outside of her cockpit with the brain boss, and makes a slow, troubled frown, before the drone positions light up and Maaka's and Kojima's IFFs ping up on her targeting screen.     Grandioso fires its inertial canceling thrusters and once again becomes stationary in space, falling back from Staren, Yuna, and Sanary flying along with Silica. The pilot takes her time to eject and load the God Arc anew, and then hook it up to the reserve tank with a half-dozen extra creeping tendrils of inky blank snaking into the arm wiring. Counters drop at a precipitous rate whilst the ammo gauge fills and rolls over several times. Scarlet Symphony's plating unfolds by several degrees, lengthening the gun muzzle to twice its original size, and splaying the casing out like the petals of a flower. The barrel ceases to spin, becoming a fixed cannon that burns red, white and gold through its extensive etching. The firing aperture burns like the heart of a furnace, rapidly spiking energy readings across all scanners to a preposterous figure, as if a reactor were going critical inside of it.     --> <--     --> <--     --> <--     -->#13:LONGINUS<--     The heat creeps up the Loader's arm, searing away the black paint and causing the metal to sizzle, groan and ping as it becomes the colour of hot coals. The woven black tendrils crackle with energy, and the God Arc's exposed CNS radiates waves of amber light into the void. In the exact moment Kutsuuko pulls the trigger, where the thought of doing so races down the neural connection and beats her finger to the pull, her heads up display flickers with a split second of inexplicable digital corruption, blasting crackling static into the cockpit.     --o-}} HOLY HOLY HOLY {{-o--     Grandioso has to fire all its rear thrusters just to stay in place with the tremendous recoil of the final shot. The energy signature built within the gun multiplies instantly into a miles-long lance of coruscating white radiance, unraveling into a fantastic double helix of gold and blood red fire as it travels, and headed with the flickering impression of a gilded spear tip. At the very last instant before the Mk-48's impact, it concentrates just about all of the Loader's remaining ammunition-energy into a single hypervelocity point, aimed to blast right through the battered shields, skewer the generator, and blaze a path straight through the massive hole left by the anti-ship torpedo, threading it right into Septette's designated coordinates.     Needless to say, the Loader is pretty much overheated junk for the next couple of minutes. A machine can only handle a God Arc so well.
Starbound Flotilla	Septette marks the spot with perfect triangulation. Her dodging only has to last one or two more seconds for the heavy railgun bolts to begin popping out of the ground at strange angles. They zip in from an angle just off of below, leaving trails of stylish, almost magical liquid superheated metal. They almost seem to grow more rapid! More and more pop through the bottom bulkhead, slamming into support structures around the screaming mechanical brain, until one finally slams straight into the center of it, with a dramatic screeching impact; it rests there against the shielding systems for a full second, before the kinetic energy overwhelms it, pops the shield, and the brain is impaled right through the center. The EMISSIONS SYSTEM is knocked out! CRUISER TORMOD is muted! Now, Tormod's minions can't be directed to counter the bombing run, or even informed to begin contingency rebuilding!     The dome finally settles to stillness. It won't last long; Silica just delivered that thirty second ETA, after all!
Septette Arcubielle	Railgun slugs tear through the 'floor' and a bolt of heavenly light pierces through the brain a moment later, finally ending the comms-brain's thrashing- and keeping the drones alive. Just as an arm comes down in an attempt to squish her like a bug, Septette leaps off into empty space, twisting around her center of gravity to face 'down' at the arena as she rises. Her drones aren't going to last long if the ship focuses its defenses on them properly- she's got one shot at this stunt, and one shot only.      She raises one hand, points her finger at the red drone below, and cocks back her thumb in a finger-gun gesture. A small magical circle appears in front of her hand, shifting rapidly between blue, yellow, and red. One of her eyes shuts off and goes dark in an imitation of a wink, and she sticks out her tongue ever-so-slightly. "Goodnight, sweet prince..."      The circle condenses into a bolt of red light that streaks towards the red drone, which reflects it off of a hexagonal shield, turning it yellow and amplifying it in the process. The yellow drone reflects it and turns it blue, and the blue drone sends it back to red in an ever-accelerating one-player game of Boss Tennis. A second later, the final handoff splits the beam in three, and all three crackling beams of energy drill straight down into the hull, carving out paths parallel- albeit significantly inferior- to the God Arc's lance as the drones burn themselves out.      "I think we're just about done here," she murmurs, savoring the soothing embrace of the void for a moment as she drifts away into space...
Corona Arclite	Corona Arclite is all find and dandy with playing clean up while the others deal with finishing off the capital ship. "Reckon it's about time to wrangle up this rodeo." The Stampede releases the laser lasso finally, partially because it was starting to run out of juice. But not before giving it a good kick as it does to send the battered fighter tumbling haplessly along. It shouldn't be able to do much else after the battering against its allies Corona put it through. A few maneuvering thruster bursts and the Stampede stabilizes itself admist what's left of the swarms. "But don't think Ah'm gonna just let the rest of ya varmints run off." A few bashes here and there to stun-lock the drones, and then the wrench head proves to be useful as an actual grapple too. Grabbing one stunned drone, clamping shut to crunch it, and then throwing the remains into another to disable it. Corona's fighting style is pretty unorthadox. And with Tormod's comm-net taken, the remaining drones don't have the guidance to deal with it.
Kyoko Takada	Clear, simple tasks like taking the average of several positional signals and then feeding that back out as a clearly marked HUD element don't take much longer for Kyoko to accomplish than it takes to speak the problem. Septette's homing beacons are there fore anyone who wants them. But isn't it shielded from the outside? Well, that's someone else's problem. Kyoko's mecha probably won't even be firing the sidearm it carries.     Certainties rise close enough to 100%, and the exhaust port and shield targets sent out, as well. Labels are delayed another few seconds, the underlying analysis having little idea what it's looking for in human-readable terms.     That's about it, really! There's only so much you can do to prepare other people to get their jobs done. Apart from moving some data around to simulate how the thing might break apart--a rather poor simulation, since she doesn't have that much information on how it's put together, and it's pracitcally out-of-the-box physics programs crunching rocket science--she just has to sit back and take the mini-sat's-eye view of the resulting action.
Starbound Flotilla	Yuna's brilliant electromagnetic signature draws fire away from the trench run, even while she's busy blasting the scrap out of the Aces that Iria didn't take out herself! She'll have to deal with two lines of heavy laser bolts now though, but not that much more. The drones have suddenly become far, far more stupid in the absence of their commander's voice! The berserker has its own namesake defend it blindly, and Corona deals with many, but the stray damage will still accumulate...     Sanary's goofy space spikebrick slams weirdly into the shield generator, after eating through it with her weird... Plasma... Gushing thing. It looks like it isn't going to finish the job and get the shields down... Until SOMETHING, something moving way too fast, impacts it from above, ripping a thin hole in it and then moving further inside fast. The shield emitter is damaged! Not enough to stop it though, and so... She SLAMS into it, shearing hard through the whole structure of the thing, and it just rips most of the major power systems clean out of it in a spray of coolant and oils and mechanical gore. It also is likely to send her into a helpless spin, which is something she'll need to figure out how to fix on her build later. Because that's gonna be BAD for motion sickness! Whether or not she can manage to get away now is a problematic sort of question! But... There's tanks around. If she's incapacitated by the spin, one might be able to get her.     Meanwhile, the bullet keeps traveling. It rips through the systems, and up towards Septette's chamber. Since she targeted that, she got it to line up straight with the center, and it blasts a path clean through the midsection, weakening the path that Yumiko's shots took, and damaging the heavy mothership bottom to top. When it emerges from the dome, it gushes digital and technological gore, spilling drops and scrap all through the space around here.     Staren's defense screen works like a charm. Arms that rush to grab or punch that torpedo instead wind up blasted away by those final missiles, in spite of every effort to touch the oncoming death. It goes in! Without their defenses, the heavy torpedo rips through the coolant vent, which had weakened the path of both. As its destructive arc moves further and further inside, the time to peel away goes down. THIRTY SECONDS! They need to get oooout! Yumiko, especially, has to take about ten seconds to jet her way to Maaka's ship, then it's another five or so to load up and get going, and that leaves them as little as fifteen seconds to escape! Maaka will need to put the pedal to the metal to get away!     Within thirty seconds, that torpedo slams hard into a destabilized set of reactors that Kutsuuko pierced. Almost everyone will have time to escape the results, but the absolutely titanic blast looks like an expanding sun as it grows out of the core of the mothership. Of course, for those with heavy shield specialization, this could be directed. If one of the tanks wants to give extra cover to Maaka, or perhaps to Sanary if she's wound up vulnerable, such a gesture would definitely halt some of the dangers of that growing fireball. But everyone here needs to get out fast!     Once they're all clear, one way or another, and back at the staging carrier... They get a loot drop popup! Tons of great gear, resources, and other assorted suchlike, redeemable at inventory stations all throughout Interstellar Frontiers Online. But the most important one is marked in a shining blackish-purple:         <<<GAMMA AGENT>>> ACQUIRED.
Yuna Kagurazaka	Even if Septette hadn't joked about 'maybe not gonna make it,' Yuna would still be watching out for her allies - anyone who might not be *quite* fast enough to get away after the big enemy ship goes boom. So after tanking a substantial amount of firepower (on top of everything El-Line ate during the initial assault and counterassault), the Matrix Figure is *still* not the fastest to run away from the Tormod when it's about to explode. There's a very simple reason for that, and it's the same one Yuna spelled out on the radio: she's not letting anyone die on this run. Okay, so it's technically part of an MMO. That doesn't change Yuna's determination to protect her friends. So if Sanary or Maaka aren't *quite* fast enough for comfort getting away in advance of the big explosion, they'll at least have Yuna and El-Line trying to get in the way of the explosion's blast front - any protection Yuna can give her friends, she will.
Sanary Rondel	Mission successful! Almost. Sanary's spacebrick worked out a lot better than expected, but without any real form of stabilization, that impact does indeed send her careening off! Slowly, but still careening nonetheless.      There is some small comfort in not having eaten a big dinner before coming out here. Needless to say, the healer's not really in any condition to halt her own momentum, and she'll make a mental note to thank Yuna properly once she's done making a mess in her cockpit.
Staren	Staren smiles as he sees his missiles do their job. It's great when things go just as planned!     Looks like some of the others may have some issues getting away though! The Star Hawk transforms back to hybrid mode and prepares to give Maaka's ship an extra push as soon as Yumiko is ready!
Kutsuuko Shiratori	That takes care of that. Kutsuuko can slump back in her chair and exhale a sigh of relief that no further action will be needed of her. The counter is saying it'll need at least three minutes to fully purge the overheat status, and she wouldn't like to be in the middle of a firefight under that.     She exchanges a few comments over the radio, guides some people back, but mostly just metaphorically kicks up her feet in a cockpit too small to do it physically, crosses her arms over her chest, and stares at the monitor. The corners of her lips slowly turn down as the heat decreases a pixel at a time, her gaze growing distant and hard.     "I thought we were past this." she murmurs into the cockpit, too quiet for the microphone to hear.