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A2     ---=====13:30====---
...
21O: Is it really ethical to put them in this kind of danger? What about our purpose?
1C: If it were, our programming would have stopped us. The results of the tests are conclusive.
21O: But still . . .
1C: It's fine to be inspired when you're reminded of what we're fighting for, but /they/ are not /who/ we fight for.
21O: Understood ma'am. Relaying coordinates. Diverting Resistance operations to sector eight.
...

    ---=====15:30====---
...
21O: Your directions are to infiltrate the factory through any means available, then scout the area for signs of Machine Lifeform activity. We can't risk sending the Resistance into this sector if the factory is really running again. We need verifiable intel regarding the Machines' operations, numbers, and battle strength, as well as data about the local terrain. The assets we can deploy to assist you are extremely limited. Please handle this mission with caution. If you succeed, YoRHa will officially allow access to the command chain on your part. You may be instrumental in helping us win this war. Good luck, and glory to mankind.
...

    ---=====17:00====---
    For a few, the place designated for an emergency operation request might be familiar. A gargantuan and utterly ancient factory complex sprawls across the drab grey shores of a cold and sluggish ocean, so thoroughly exposed to salt and storm and sea spray that every single surface appears to be more rust than metal, giving it the appearance of a hulking mountain of martian rock rather than something entirely made by human hands. It's as if several blocks of downtown New York were picked up and welded together, the spaces between skyscrapers filled in and turned into endless decks and catwalks and elevators, now reduced to a foreboding monolith of gently creaking metal and dark, abandoned halls, precariously supporting the weight of millions of tons of bulkheads and cargo floors.

    As far as anyone can tell, it looks to be some kind of refinery. More than anything else, the complex bristles with cranes, excavators, drills, moulds, and cargo containers, and is connected to a ten lane highway bridge that stretches well out into the misty horizon, built by ancient humans out of materials that still hold strong, however faded and cracked, thousands of years later. Nothing of significance grows here, and hasn't since the Elites entered through the decrepit remains of chain link fences and husked cars (and battle tanks?) not too far in the distance.

    Even after the first time however, the gigantic, battered double doors that take up a large part of the loading platform coming from the highway remain ostensibly active, with a 50s-style electric lamp sitting in the wall next to it, glowing green. Beyond it lies an elevator fit for transporting squadrons of jet fighters rather than just a few pallets of cargo. Up above, the topside of the complex hosts scores of helipads and runways between its smokestacks, now belching thick black fumes into the otherwise cool and pristine, if clammy, air. Massive exhaust shafts and furnace piles that are no longer in service offer plenty of additional access, if one is willing to drop through hundreds of meters of dangerous and dilapidated superstructure, or if one is willing to come from the side and crawl through dangerous industrial power and sewage tunnels. It's inarguable that /something/ is going on here. Deep beneath the earth, there is a heat signature so massive that it shows up as a faint blob even on standard IR vision pointed at the dirt, bleeding out from where what must only be the tip of the iceberg breaches the surface.
Mei Hatsume      Pulling a pair of fancy-looking goggles over her face, Mei watches the smokestacks pumping crap into the sky for a few moments longer before turning her attention to the double doors. "This should be easy enough if we're careful. Get in, get the intel, get out, and get the information where it needs to go!"

     It sounds simple, but things are never quite that simple. Adjusting her goggles again, the pink-haired inventor pulls out a few pairs of binoculars while kicking on her hover boots and floating backwards to start heading inside. "Does anyone need a pair? I've brought extras, and they even work in the dark!"

     Should anyone take a set, she'll go over the basics of turning the knobs and making sure not to shine the light in their own faces before taking a closer look at the farthest end from where the group is coming from. She does it without any binoculars, though, instead relying on her Zoom Quirk to see as far ahead as she can!
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone had almost forgotten she'd given the natives of this world gene samples of herself. She checked over her own systems one more time making sure her body's security was up to date. She had no idea just what the machines could do with E-warfare. She was not on foot, given how many enemies could be in there? She'ds piloting a hulking suit of powered armour known on her world as an ARMED Suit, it has two sets of arms and is carrying some heavy weapons. It moves with the party while Kotone keeps an eye on her inputs.

"Well here we are and damn it's pretty intact considering it's age."

She will cycle from Thermal to UV as her combat unit scans the looming mass of structures ahead. Kotone while not needing the hardware Mei is offering seems impressed.

<<Nice good thinking on that Kit, Mei.>>

Kotone will launch some very cheap camera drones basically flying Camera to send on ahead to see what they can scout out, the data will be fed back to her and any allies who might want it. She's currently heading past all the hulked tanks and cars making for the main double doors.

OOC the ARMED suit https://i.warosu.org/data/tg/img/0209/68/1349238344162.jpg )
Count Kord     A creature far up in the sky circles the industrial zone, its body red and black. This foreign beast scouts for the best way to make his entrance into the structure. Its underbelly glows faintly with flowing red light.

    That's Kord. His blue and white eyes find a nice spot, and then he makes a languid loop in the air, and curls his wings inward... then dives downward into the structure like a shock trooper, knowing he can easily stop his fall one way or another. It's the fastest way to get inside without any faffing about with walkways and elevators or sewer tunnels. The core of this industrial zone must be investigated, and so he will.
Nova Terra     A few minutes ago...

    "Despite their size, there's not a lot of maneuvering room."

    "Don't need it."

    "There could be structural damage or debris that we can't pick up from here."

    "The pod will make it."

    "It's a dangerous and reckless move."

    "I'll be fine. Don't worry so much, Reigel. Time to go."

    Now. Those beginning to enter the factory on the ground may notice something up in the sky. A streak heading down towards the very facility they're entering. Closer inspection, for those with the tools to do so, will reveal an object at the head of the trail, plummeting. It's small, clearly man-made. Some kind of pod. And it's dropping fast.

    Inside of said drop pod, Nova holds on tight to the restraints holding her in. The structure of her entry method shakes around her. The Dominion's drop pods have never been all that comfortable a ride, but they get the job done! On the screen in front of her, Nova watches the automated navigation system as it controls the pods descent towards a specific point: One of the large exhaust shafts.

    As she watches the opening of the shaft displayed on the screen quickly coming towards her, Nova mutters to herself with some regret, "Probably should have gone for the dropship..."

    The pod disappears from view into the shaft entrance.
All-Seeing Eye      A remote-controlled drone--a golden-irised eyeball which crawls upon articulated nerve clusters as would a spider--perches atop the rusted, flaking cab of an abandoned crane. It climbs up the arm of the long-forgotten vehicle, slowly climbing up the surface despite the treacherous footing and the brisk sea breeze. It surveys the landscape, the decaying metal jungle that is this facility, zooming in on the treacherous catwalks and decks which crisscross the infrastructure like metal cobwebs. Footage is recorded of the island's landscape, saved to an internal storage device within the drone.

MOBILE SENSORY DRONE OFFLINE

     The drone scurries back down the arm of the crane after capturing some footage of the landscape, taking the most direct path back down to its owner. Down the cab of the crane, past the treads, over the cracked concrete lip of the building upon which it rests, down pitted, flaking walls, and across the hard, aged ground to a pair of suede, cream colored boots. It climbs up these, then a pair of dark blue jeans, across a navy v-neck t-shirt, and down the matching, rolled up beige sleeve of an unbuttoned dress shirt, into the waiting palm of All-Seeing Eye.

     With a smile, he simply places the dormant drone up to his face, and the obvious prosthetic which slid into his socket to preserve his binocular vision is soon replaced with the much more lifelike original. "There we are," he says with a smile. "Not my most detailed work, but surely enough to develop a sound infiltration strategy!" He flicks his braided hair over a shoulder, leaning up against the enormous double doors of the elevator. "Especially taken alongside your own recon," he says with perhaps a slightly patronizing air, nudging Kotone on the shoulder.

     Having been here once before with Mei, he politely declines her offer of binoculars. Instead, he looks for whatever means of operating the elevator they used before, in the hopes of activating it and reaching the excitement without being beaten to it. With a nod towards the entrances of Kord and Nova, he offers some chipper encouragement for his fellow Paladins. "Come along, comrades! Time is of the essence.~"
A2     Peeking through binoculars and specialized drones, nothing seems amiss about the factory. Seagulls and oceanic pelicans can be seen perched on its various desks, making their homes on slabs of super concrete an collecting nests made as much of plastic as twigs and grass. The layout is absolutely mazelike, meant to be a nexus of trade and manufacture for a very wide area and very large industry, and has been set up extremely cheaply for its massive size. Close inspection indicates it might once have been military in nature, but now its fuel towers and turbines have long dried up and ceased to turn.

    Advance scouting does turn up some Machines, being largely the medium and small biped types, tottering along with their creepy, wind up toy strides, staring blankly at their surroundings with their little button eyes in their round and blank heads. There are few -mostly only stragglers- wandering around stairs and exterior bridges, as if lost, but close observation begins to get the impression that they aren't walking randomly, but engage din some sort of haphazard and poorly planned patrol. All of their eyes glow the red of a fully functional intelligence.

    The elevator is untouched. No security is present. Piling onto it, those who take it are in for another bottomless ride through ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred floors and counting of swift descend, watching an entire habitable island's worth of space slowly unfolding before them as they swoosh past endless webs of walkways, corrugated steps, pipes and cables. Giant vats of molten metal, each the size of olympic swimming pools, glow brightly in the dark, moving along a huge assembly line of hanging pots that pour it into agitating beds, and then into casts, which are then drenched in water taken from the ocean, and slammed onto huge, ludicrously unsafe conveyors of thousands of robotic presses, saws, hammers, and torches. It's ten times as active as before, and the Machine presence this time is blatantly obvious.

    Humanoids totter about the various floors in force, manually carrying stockpiles of materials in their spindly arms and atop their spherical heads to speed the process. Flying bots with their torsos welded to propellers and jets zoom around the cavernous space, carrying larger components suspended by webs of cables between them. Tremendous silos perforate the distance like gargantuan, rusted iron trees in a pitch black forest, barely visible for the constant flickering light of sparks. Thousands of prickling lights surround one structure in particular, dead center, larger than the others, as if an entire legion of buzzsaws and welders were at work. They may actually be. The sound of industry is inescapable, dulled only for the immense distances involved.

    Investigating from the air isn't too difficult. Kord dives into a shaft wide enough to fly a jet through, save for the sheer amount of junk that fills it. Tangles of power lines, retracted satellite dishes and solar panels, repair scaffolding, stuck emergency elevators, and just plain collapsed junk, make the flight itself a bit of a nightmare. It isn't until he suddenly passes a triple deep ring of armed flying Machines, turning out of a blind perpendicular corridor, that things get ugly.
A2     Specifically, they get ugly as soon as Nova drops in. Though the other Elites have little difficult simply walking in on foot, someone flying in at high speed from space, ostensibly much harder to notice or do anything about, is what starts the factory's ancient, crackling emergency siren, not dissimilar from a bomb warning from the world wars. As old-timey as the sound is, the response isn't, because she's not even halfway down before entire helipads flip over as rotating panels in the upper deck, bearing huge, anti-orbital lasers, which begin firing on her immediately. The slumbering pile of ancient junk is immediately lit up by massive beams of coruscating red and black energy, firing miles up into the sky to intercept the pod, until one manages to clip it on the way down, and result in a crash landing on the roof.

    Those familiar with how the relatively functional red-eyed Machines work would know what happens next. Every Machine Lifeform on the premise stops what it's doing in a visibly expanding wave, showing exactly where the broadcast is spreading within their network. Within seconds, Kord is besieged by scores of flying gunbots, swirling around the interior of the vertical tunnel and firing extensive curtains of crackling energy orbs, which quickly begin to fill up all available space, with how large and slow they are, and how dense the pattern is. Those on the ground floor are left with the elevator doors opening up on ranks of humanoids, still wielding massive power tools alongside heavy chopping blades made of scrap armour and industrial rivets, which pour into their extremely limited space en mass, swamping them with sheer numbers and bad terrain.

    Nova on the roof is in for another experience. Though a squadron of larger, quad rotor Machines strafes over her, dropping flashing, beeping explosives that home in on her with their own propellers, part of the crane assembly comes to life in of itself, and a building-sized excavator arm, built with a rotary saw blade design as wide as a house, turns towards her like a living thing, whirling up to an incredibly dangerous speed before ploughing across the deck to get to her. It's much different this time. The Machines are here, and so is the Network. They are organized.
Mei Hatsume      No takers? Not a problem. Slipping the extra headgear back into her backpack, Mei moves onwards! It doesn't take long before their group is besieged by an army of rampaging killbots, drawing an excited squeal from the inventor.

     "Ah! Perfect chance to see how my new TASER BOLAS stack up against mechanical opponents~" And without further delay, Mei swings her backpack around to her front as she starts slinging out bolas at the closest Machines, the wires holding the balls together electrifying shortly after being let loose. The current in them would really only be enough to stun a human opponent briefly, but she's banking on it working much better against the machines!
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa says "We'll be able to cover more ground that way and faster, so long as it works it doesn't need to be pretty."

Kotone seems mostly in good spirits over there is the powered armour she's using and it's faceplate turns a bit as she tries to scope out once before.

<<The fact this place is even remotely operational still at its age? Just damn. If we can find any terminals let me at them. Though I'm not sure about jacking indirectly to them....>>

Sending out the Camera drones works quite well all things considered she gets some idea of what's waiting for them. It seems it's easy enough to get into. She will have her machine cloak though as the Thermoptic Cameo the combat machine vanishes and moves out and its large calibre battle canon will open up on the nearest of the machines. Shells go flying giving a hint to where Kotone is located bug the suit is moving at a fairly good clip as it lays down fire. She's now very happy she brought this, it's turning out it was not /overkill/ to bring this kit with her.
All-Seeing Eye      The ride down the elevator shaft is more or less uneventful, at first, Eye begins to record the trip, starting from the point he sees the molten metal.

     Above, or perhaps amidst the din of alarm klaxons, firing weaponry, and mobilizing security measures, there drifts a single sigh. With arms crossed and a hand resting upon his chin, the frowning Exalt activates the miniaturized pulse cannons hidden in his eyes. The recording will unfortunately bear certain watermarks, such as his targeting suite, but he hopes it'll at least provide an accurate idea of both the machines' mobilization capabilities, and the scale of their operation here.

     The footage occasionally whites out as bolts of lightning streak from his eyes, bouncing between opponents in the target-rich environment before him. "Production remains at or above previous capcity," he says with disinterest, if not outright annoyance. "Rapid response is possible within minutes of breach." He clicks his tongue, as a shot bounces off of the floor and strikes upwards at the crowd. "As evidenced by non-Paladin actors pursuing non-conventional entry methods. Security features may not trigger if standard means of entry are used--but means of detecting YoRHa technology may be present and unaccounted for." He has to speak up to be heard over Kotone's firing and Mei's bolas, to say nothing of the machines--and he stubbornly refuses to move from his spot unless one of the many rapid response units attempts to force him. His aim is to use the bottleneck, large though it may be due to the sheer size of the elevator, to his advantage, picking off the units as they try and pile into the elevator, well past the point that this would be considered tactically sound.
Nova Terra     Alarms begin to sound within the drop pod, the dim interior lighting turning red. Nova's eyes going wide as the onboard computer begins to display the quickly revealing weapons. She starts tapping on the screen in earnest as she attempts to initiate some evasive maneuvers. All the while she asks, "WHERE THE HELL DID ALL THAT FIREPOWER COME FROM!?"

    A response crackles in over the pod's comms as the sounds of high intensity laser beams rip through the air around her, "Unclear, we're attempting to-" Whatever they were attempting to do is cut off as the pod suddenly shakes drastically, jolting to the side and pinning Nova as the sounds of metal warping and systems shorting out alert her to a hit.

    The drop pod leaves behind a smoking trail of black now as it crashes the rest of the way down to the roof. It hits at an angle, screeching across the metal surface, sparks flying before its momentum is finally arrested.

    The sparking, smoking remains of the drop pod sit still for a moment, before finally a hatch violently ejects away from it, flying through the air before clanging down on the roof. From within, Nova climbs out, over the side and drops down to the ground. She stumbles for a moment before getting her footing. She stretches for a few moments, trying to shake off the impact. She then checks herself over. Apart from feeling a little sore all over, no serious injuries. Likely thanks to the pod's safety systems and her own protective suit.

    Reaching back into the pod, Nova pulls out her rifle, sword, plus a few small modular compartments she attaches to her suit. Taking her rifle up in both hands Nova begins to walk away from the crash site, glancing around for signs of the enemy. Not twenty seconds later, the drop pod explodes, bits and pieces flying everywhere.

    The first warning Nova gets of approaching hostiles is the sounds of rotor blades. Her mind tricks appear to be useless here. Spinning around to face the approaching quad rotor machines, Nova doesn't even hesitate to raise her rifle and start taking shots at them. Then as the fliers begin to drop their remote bombs, Nova begins shooting at those to try and detonate them early. But before long she's overwhelmed and forced to jump away just as some reach her, exploding behind her. The shockwaves send her tumbling, but she reorients herself and skids, armored boots screeching along the metal room until she comes to a stop on one knee.

    As she's standing, Nova feels the roof begin to shake. The sounds of motors starting up behind her don't go unnoticed. Nova turns, coming face to saw with the huge excavator arm. Once more shock adorns Nova's face as she complains, "You've GOT to be kidding me!"

    Nova watches carefully, preparing herself as the large saw comes ripping through the roof towards her. At the last moment, Nova jumps away once more, this time using her telekinesis on herself to give her a bit more momentum. Just clearing the deadly saw, Nova bounces across the ground a couple times before landing one more. She raises her large rifle up, starting to take shots at the large arm's joints in the hope of disabling it.
Count Kord     Kord is not easily caught off-guard, but he's still airbraking hard when the robots start firing upon him. His claw-tipped wings snap out, and he begins to clamber over the structure's side, maneuvering with leaps and hops to avoid getting just rained upon with endless hails of robotic attacks. Once he finds a good spot, he opens up his maw and does his best to return the favor to all of the Machines that have begun attacking him without pause or warning. His claws and feet brace and his maw opens to release a beam of black and red light, curiously similar to the shots that are being made at him.

    He sweeps the beam in Kaiju-level lack of consideration for collateral damage. The beam sears through structures as if it were white hot, but it sends debris flying outward because it's more wind-aligned than that. The beam cuts an enormous crescent through the local structures, catching robots in its path, blowing apart junk and creating chaos the likes of which many here may never have seen before. Without knowing where the others are, and being an arrogant and selfish dick, he keeps this up as long as he can.

    Of course, he does get hammered with shots nonetheless, swiping his claws and tail to try and avoid becoming a bloody smear at the very least.
Mei Hatsume      In between tossing out bolas and making incoherent excited noises, Mei's also been backing up to keep her allies between herself and the Machines. She's also keeping her allies slightly to her left where possible, what with making sure she's got a clear enough arc to fling out said bolas.

     Dodging the smaller Machines' close range swings isn't particularly troublesome as she fires wired arrows from her harness to jerk her around out of harm's way, but the bombs prove to be more difficult to work with. The closer explosions singe and throw her around fairly easily, but she's quick to regain her balance even if it means pulling herself towards a wall and hanging off it. The larger Excavator...

     She'll figure something out later.
A2     Inside the factory, the Machines are anything but complicated to fight. They charge eagerly into the breach of the elevator, utterly heedless to any thought of their own destruction. Taser bolas catch several at the fore and knock them over, starting the foundations for a growing pile of mechanical corpses as heavy gunfire and Essence bolts rip through their mass, chewing back the frontline as fast as it can encroach, and building up a barricade of slain Machine Lifeforms. Even then, they hop and clamber over each other, walking over their own dead to get into the elevator, pouring on them like a clanking mechanical tide, just for the 1% chance of getting in a stab with a spear, a swipe with a saw, or a blow with a pneumatic jackhammer.

    Larger units begin to show up too, the first of their kind seen so far, modelled on the medium humanoid figures, but easily eight feet tall, with powerful, blocky, armoured limbs, and which move even faster. They bear heavy weapons which fire thick beams of crackling energy into the elevator shaft, simply using the smaller ones as easy cover. Pretty soon, there are even Machines crawling down the exterior mesh of the shaft from upper floors, trying to drop into the group. It's easy to assume they're just stupid and simply programmed at first, but as space shrinks and attacks intensify, with no sign of slowing down, it may very well be that they're just hyper-aware of their individual expendability and the meaninglessness of their casualties. They seem eager to roll the dice with such terrible odds because if they fail and are struck down, it's just a bit easier for the next, and the next, and the next . . .

    It's much the same situation for Kord in the generator shaft. His powerful breath weapon is more than enough to obliterate the flying Machines it sweeps across, causing them to glow white hot and then explode from within in showers of raining fragments. Chains of them elegantly blow up in sequence, only to be replaced with even more as reinforcements come in from above as well, blocking off the route from which he'd entered. They seem to be happy to lose as many units as it takes to box him in, slowly trapping behind an encroaching wall of that oddly slow energy bubble fire that hems him in towards a shrinking selection of small and risky exists.

    Nova isn't in quite the same situation on the roof. The response there isn't of having wandered in, but of the Machine factory having detected approach from space. In fact, they may be /primarily/ geared to respond militarily to orbital entry. After all, all of YoRHa's infrasturcture is in high earth orbit, and they can't attack without dropping from the atmosphere. Rather than being mobbed with the factory's mechanical 'immune' system, she comes under fire from the heavier, faster fliers, which can sustain continued shooting by detaching and blowing up components that Nova hits with their rifle, purging weapons sytems and coming back with secondary cannons, or even whirling blades. The gigantic excavator/saw rips through even the solid metal plating of the upper decks, carving it up as easily as an earthen trench. Precise shooting with her canister rifle manages to blow out several important pressure pistols and power cables, leaving the very base of the fixture unable to swivel, and thus only slam up and down in place impotently.
A2     That's when the siren intensifies. Down low, up top, inside or outside, everyone present can feel it. The superstructure of the industrial monolith shudders in its rusted slumber, violently quaking on every level as entire floors shift, bend, screech and groan deep inside. At first, it seems like the thing is collapsing, or as if there had been some terrible explosion. Those indoors can see the distant welding lights go out, however, and the tremendous, hulking shape in the dark begin to rise. The shaft Kord is in suddenly reorients, turning swiftly until it becomes horizontal, smashing several fliers in the process. Nova on top views the giant saw drift away and leave her, and an entire deck of the roof surface begin to soar upwards and outwards, exposing interior levels of the building as if a core section was taken with a giant ice sampler.

    It turns around, slowly rotating its mass of cranes, excavators, smokestacks and towers, and reveals that it is not part of the building at all.

    Sunlight filters into the interior as a part of the factory gets up and /leaves/. Birds flee from the scene in great flocks as their perches crumble away. Even the flying Machines rise to get clear, circling high above something the size of an oil rig that stands on two, colossal, mechanical legs, each as big around as two office towers welded together. The black smoke gushing from the pylons that stud its top mix with belches of roaring flame. The industrial equipment swivels this way and that, locking into place so that it sports two gigantic excavators as weaponized arms. Anti-orbit guns flip out into position on its top, front, and back, and dozens of smaller turrets appear on every surface, discarding some of the rusty stairs and catwalks that still cling to its vaguely cylindrical mass. When facing fully forward, it reveals the one part of it that doesn't appear to be repurposed rig equipment of monumental proportions: a 'face' made of polished, iridescent metal or resin, all sharp angles like an Asaro bust, and incredibly uncanny valley in its almost baby-like proportions and mannequin mouth. Two giant red lights blaze in its sockets, giving it the full impression of sight as it directs its gaze down on the Elites.

    "KILL." the thing booms, the combined effect of so many speakers and intercoms slamming down like a physical wall. It's so large it doesn't need to pick a target -the guns all over it all open up at once, pouring into the elevator deck, ripping through the generator shaft, and bombarding the remaining roof. Explosions of combusting fuel erupt all over one of its gigantic arms as it raises it high up above its 'head' and then brings it down straight on the factory front, aiming for Nova, but carving all the way through to the factory floor with the collateral damage of its huge excavator blade, showering those inside with debris and flaming wreckage.

    All-Seeing Eye and Kotone have their HUDs briefly scrambled, and some kind of message written in a series of line-and-dot glyphs flashes across their vision. The strange code disappears quickly after.
Kotone Yamakawa The Machines seem simple in how they assail the party she cuts down a good number of them but more comes followed by bigger and worse ones are making for their attack. Kotone turns her gun on those larger units, the thrumb of fire continues and then Kotone will pause only to slam a fresh magazine into the gun before opening up again.

Then comes something that scares her more unknown code, her HUD is hacked and she'll have to look at her memory files on that later. For now, she checks her own E-warfare systems and moves to turn on Autistic mode for fear of being hacked further.

She forms up on Mei turning off her cloak, there is no point, and she's glad for the suit's heavy armour. Oh god is she ever right now given the punishment that's been coming their way also from the debris.

<<Copy that Eye. Damn these things are like Zerglings! They just mindlessly keep coming!>>
All-Seeing Eye      As bodies pile up in the doorway and machines drop down from above in ceaseless supply, Eye begins to realize that he may well be forced from the elevator shaft. His brow twitches and his frown deepens, the Exalt taking umbrage at this fact being a matter of numbers rather than individual skill. That annoyance shines through in his voice when he continues his narration. "Suicide tactics suggest a strong infrastructure capable of quickly replacing casualties, even in high quantities. Frontal assault..."

     He sidesteps a machine seeking to drop down on him from below. Refusing to even face it before dispatching it, he fires a crossbow bolt at the upper portion of the open doorway, sending it bouncing off, striking the ceiling, and heading downwards, aimed for the machine's simply-constructed head. "Not advised without scorched-earth tactics. A surgical strike aimed at production centers may be the better option."

     One of the crackling energy beams fired into the gradually more-cramped elevator ignites the sleeve of his dress shirt, singing the skin beneath it and drawing a reproachful glare from the Exalt. This--not the ever-growing numbers which threaten to swarm him and his allies, is what spurs him to fully move from his spot, and to abandon his contemplative posture. Patting the flames to smother them, he pulls the sleeve taut to observe the damage, much more concerned with the damage to his garment than the potential third degree burn beneath it.

     The next beam to breach their position is swatted contemptously back into the crowd of encroaching machines by an electrified whip, spun so rapidly as to appear more like a disc-shaped shield than a flexible wire weapon. "We won't get any intel about their operations from this position," Eye shouts over the din of battle. "Activate the--"

     The shaking causes his stance to falter and the order given to die in his throat. The recording glitches out, his targeting reticules distorting, fading away and flickering back as lines of unfamiliar glyphs. When it returns, warning messages of incoming projectiles flood the screen. The 'industrial behemoth' is no longer a figurative term to describe the island--it is now towering over them, causing flaming wreckage and debris to fall upon them just by virtue of having moved. He grins, finally faced with a challenge worthy of his time--having ordered Kotone to protect Mei from above, he forms a shield with his whips to protect them from the front, reflecting attacks from any machines who haven't retreated in the wake of the giant.

     "Chevalier Hatsume--clear us a path, or get the elevator started again. We'll cover you."
Mei Hatsume      With their maneuvering space shrinking with each passing moment and wave of broken Machines, even Mei's grin starts to shrink. "Persistent, aren't they? We might need to resort to plan B..." She muses with a dramatically ominous tone in her voice, although the specifics of that never come to pass as something else negates the need to rely on that: The shrinking space issue quickly being replaced by an enlarging threat issue. Fighting the smaller machines and even the slightly larger ones is one thing since avoiding them with crafty dodging and careful maneuvering is one thing.

     Fighting something bigger than most buildings and with greater firepower than a squadron of soldiers, though? Even her wire arrows might not be enough for that. "This.. Could be bad. Or good. Very good!" Mei's grin is even wider than it was when they started.

     "How is something so large /not/ collapsing on itself? What's powering it? If I could turn this sort of thing into an armored suit..." Talking excitedly to herself, poles start to thrust out from the sides of Mei's harness as she lurches forward rapidly, narrowly evading the devastating excavator blade. The impact and resulting shockwaves are still enough to launch her into the air, but the wire arrows pull her back towards (relatively) stable ground near Kotone and All-Seeing Eye. She's not too proud to use either of them as cover, but doesn't stick with it for long as she gives the pair a quick whistle and gestures at the excavator arm.

     "We can get on from there! And then..." She points towards the giant's main body and launches a wire arrow at the excavator arm, aiming to latch right onto it. "It'll be easier to bring it down up close, right?! The elevator won't help if it can cleave right through the whole thing!" As she calls out her plan, Mei looks along the excavator arm to the giant's head from afar, trying to identify potential weakpoints through LONG DISTANCE SIGHT and trying to pull herself along the length of the arm to get anywhere but here.
Nova Terra     Nova relaxes just a little as her shots find their mark. Standing and lowering her rifle, she watches the excavator arm smash helplessly against the rooftop. Nova let's out a breath...

    ... Only to hear a new rumbling. The roof beneath her suddenly heaves, causing her to stumble. Righting herself, Nova watches in awe, and fear, as the structure not metres from her quickly rises up into the air. She watches numerous levels of the once-factory zip past her as the massive machine rises to stand.

    Nova cranes her head up to take in the entirety of the monster, her only response is, "Oh f-"

    Nova's cut off as the machine's voice booms out across the area, the vibrations felt right to her core. Nova takes several instinctive steps backwards, having a hard time trying to figure out how she can fight such a thing. She doesn't have time to come up with anything though as she watches the massive machine raise its large excavator arm, then begin to swing it down towards her. Nova's eyes go wide and she starts to run.

    The excavator arm crashes down into the roof behind Nova, its massive weight and spinning saw ripping right through the structure. The roof begins to collapse as Nova runs, trying to out pace the falling debris, but it's quickly catching up! She can already feel the roof beginning to fall out beneath her and finally she jumps, reaching out and grabbing hold of a structural beam at the edge of the roof. Nova dangles from one hand, glancing down at the gather pile of debris that was once a building below her.

    Nova pulls herself up onto the still solid beam, perching on it as she takes in some quick breaths. After a few brief moments to recover, Nova stands once more and stares up at the massive machine. She's been keeping up on the forming plan over the radio and now realizes what she can do to help.

    Nova slides a new clip into her rifle as she announces over the radio, "I'll try and cover you from down here." She chambers a new round and then raises the weapon to aim through the scope. Sighting in on one of the gun emplacements trying to bombard the group below. Considering the size of the machine, it's probably quite a distance away. But Nova pulls the trigger with confidence nonetheless, quickly switching her aim to the next and then the next, trying to silence the guns and help give the group an opening to act.
Count Kord     Kord pauses his beam spam only to mix it up with huge pulses of psychic energy that make his eyes glow a vivid violet, shattering robots in a huge dome around him and obliterating the oncoming bullet shots in an explosive bubble that gives him the breathing room to calculate his escape. The blast is enough for him to brace himself for a launch, his mythical monster strength prepared to send him back upward and out of this hellstorm of gunfire. But he doesn't get that lucky, oh no, because the terrain lurches and shifts, smashing the mindless killbots in the process and forcing him to brace just so he isn't skewered by metal beams or crushed by assorted debris. His head shifts, and his eyes widen, his heart leaping into his throat when he realizes what's happening.

    The entire factory is moving.

    He fires a blast up into the air just to clear some room for his launch, and twirls only to come face to face with a goliath robot that makes his blood run cold. His eyes widen and his pupils shrink, terror briefly echoing through his instinctual mind. This is not something he should be fighting, this is something to run away from, says his lizard brain.

    He ignores it.

    When it begins doing exactly what its tiny cousins were doing on a much larger scale, he responds in kind. He whips his head up, spreads his wings, and his underbelly radiates like a great furnace as energy pours from the core of his insides. Then he fires a condensed beam of black energy right into the core of the creature, blowing aside the gunfire in a spray of impressive light and noise. His whole silhouette wavers from the residual heat of the attack, painting a contrast of his black shape and the red wounds the robots have inflicted on him so far. Loose blood sprays off of him in a cloud behind him and the recoil sends him backward into the air. His head twists to use the momentum to further launch himself.

    Kord's smile can be seen in this moment, his visage cartoonishly happy. Nothing like simple violence with no moral bullshit to distract him!
A2     Mei's close visual inspection may actually turn out to be the group's only chance here. Most of the machine is so heavily armoured that assault with anything less than anti-building weapons would be a hopeless endeavour, and the rest of it is just so /huge/ that even the damage they deal to it would quickly just result in the 'wound' being so full of scrap and debris that it becomes no long possible to do any more damage, simply piling up minor malfunctions on the outside. It's clear that the giant Machine wasn't quite finished when they alerted it however. Here and there, she can see tiny ladders and platforms still stapled to its sides, indicating areas under construction. There are hundreds of them all across its body, and most are relatively worthless -just gaps in the armour that lead nowhere, or a redundant motor that wasn't quite rigged up. The most glaring issue seems to be on the underside of the left arm however, where there are man-sized portions of chassis missing and exposed internals around its 'armpit'. Those seem to lead directly into the smokestacks that billow fire and fumes from its back, and which explosively drive its swings.

    Latching onto it, at least, is a trivial endeavour. It's so huge it's impossible to miss, and a good portion of its surface is covered in beams and struts. Grabbing hold though, the motion of the goliath raising its arm back up, unwedging it from the factory floor, is enough to send one flying all the way up to its top. Anyone who gets that high up is immediately assailed by swarms of flying Machines, covering its slight blind spot with hails of energy orb fire. The elevator still works, against all odds, but is no less dangerous. The many, many guns of the beastly machine are able to spray fire its way for a solid portion of the way up, slamming it with energy blasts large enough to fill almost the entire platform, until it disappears upwards into the buried section between the assembly line and the surface.

    Those guns are frustrating numerous, and not made of the same stuff as the usual robots too, actually built to soak a bit of fire instead of to just be long-lasting and easy to recycle. It doesn't just take one shot per turret, but sustained triple taps to drill into the batteries inside the turrets before they'll blow up in fiery explosions, and each time Nova starts to clear a blind spot, the giant slowly turns towards her to bring even more to bear, until its face is staring directly at her. A second later, twin lasers fire from its eyes, each large enough to consume a semi truck, and obliterate her remaining stretch of roof, carving it off the factory complex and into the ocean simply as collateral of the blast aimed at her.
A2     Kord's massive blast of his own draws its attention. The dark beam punctures its outside and rips deep into its superstructure, causing bursts of fire and flying steel to spray from several points along its body as secondary components rupture, overload, and explode. It oddly 'staggers' on its feet, listing to one side, before slowly, titanically, rolling back around, turning up to 'look' at him next. "HURT." it booms. "DIE." it demands. The plating over most of its face opens up, and a tremendous wall of those deleterious orbs flies out, no longer a matter of patterns, but of sheer volume of fire, spitting out hundreds per second in a 45 degree arc ahead, which is already a massive area. It drowns his airspace in crackling red and black bombs. They're completely impossible to dodge at this point, though Kord finds out his abilities can destroy the red ones, leaving him only to dodge the still extremely dense black fire that his attacks seem to phase through. He can't get too comfortable before a pair of gigantic lasers fire at him too.

    Those coming topside from the elevator aren't off the hook. Though they're briefly in the factory's shadow, the giant takes only two steps to clear it, then another to step over the shore and into the water. It lowers one saw as close to the ground as it will go, and then all of its stacks fire at once as it pushes into an alarmingly fast whirling attack, ripping straight through the smaller buildings all around it in a massive circle.

    The same Operator unit from YoRHa bleeps on over the radio, apparently keeping track of their progress.

21O: Unknown Goliath-Class Machine Lifeform confirmed! A military satellite will pass over the area in two minutes and thirty seconds! Break down its defenses as much as possible until then! Because you can't be replaced, we won't leave you to fight alone!
All-Seeing Eye      Eye nods his approval at Mei, smiling smugly. He follows suit, vaulting over a small hill of destroyed machines to fling a whip towards the excavator arm--it's a much more exciting option than the elevator. It wraps around, and pulled taut, easily allows Eye to zipline himself up the surface. His boots slide across the metal for purchase, and in that moment, the movement of the arm tosses him up into the air.

     His vision allows him to maintain a picture of his surroundings even as he flips head over heels, and he notes with a small smile that his momentum carries him into a swarm of flying machines. Unlike Mei, he didn't take the time to search the beast for weaknesses, but he figures those machines are there for a reason.

     So, as he hurtles through the air into the swarm, he lashes out with a leg, sending a steel cable whip to latch onto the upper portion of the beast's gigantic arm, setting himself upright in the air and drawing him closer to relatively solid ground. A kick from the opposite leg effectively tethers him in place, granting him a measure of reprieve from simply being tossed off--at the expense of being glued to the floor.

     "Goodness," he says to the crowd of flying machines, flicking his arms outwards to reveal a whip protruding from either wrist. "There certainly are a lot of you!" He beams at them as two additional whips, these made of purple, solidified electricity, materialize in his empty hands. Rooted in one spot, his means for attack are relatively limited--but that suits him just fine.

     Rather than engage them directly or make a show of destroying them, he toys with them, deflecting their attacks with his whips and trying to keep their attention with strategically placed shots from his wrist-mounted crossbows. Hopefully, he can buy Mei some time to get at that weak point she mentioned!
Mei Hatsume      Mei's face contorts into a grimace as the reality of the situation starts to dawn on her. Can they really take down something this large?

     Maybe they won't have to. The operator's voice chiming in through the radio gives them a different objective, and Mei laughs confidently even as she's catapulted into the air by the Goliath raising its arm. She doesn't draw herself back towards the limb, instead using that higher vantage point to scan it further and even retracting her arrows. "Under the left armpit! There's an opening there, so you might be able to get in and dismantle the arm from there! Or..."

     Well, Kord does have his beams, and Nova's got those pinpoint shots. All-Seeing Eye's shots could hit the more hidden parts, and cause some damage in there as well, and Kotone's cannon...

     This could work out rather well. "... Focus fire in there! Like the Operator said. We just need to dismantle its defenses, not take it down ourselves!" She bellows out and spies a curtain of bullets heading towards... Everywhere, including herself. The flying Machines don't give her a chance to really breathe, either, and Mei's visibly having trouble just trying to get her wire arrows to stick to any of them to use as makeshift grapple points for swinging around!

     Some of the wires snap and burn off at getting hit by the flying plasma, making her evasive swings and bursts of speed from her boots erratic and disorienting at best, completely throwing her into more shots at worst. There's burns on her, missing chunks of uniform and her gear, and even trying to land in the water is going to be a big gamble.

     Good thing Eye's trying to thin the herd. Banking on a potential opening being created by his shots, Mei twists herself around to to fire one more last ditch wire arrow at the Goliath's shoulder, aiming to get right onto it. Her planning hasn't gotten quite to the point of figuring out what she'd do if she got there, but...

     Well, better trying to get on the shoulder than falling forever.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is quick to follow after Mei and Eye. The ARMED suit bounds along using grapple lines where need to work it's way up after them as she keeps going.

"Someone's taking design ideas from the Imperium of Man." It's a bit of a joke but damn this is big as some of the robots the Imperium has. She will keep focus mostly on the mission as she goes she'll fire shots at the flying machines, hoping to aid Eye in getting the attention of the drones.

"Come you want some of this! I'm a little old human in a tin can don't you want to crush me?!"

She doesn't know if they will understand but hey she'll not leave Eye to draw fire alone. She will also take shots at turrets as well, anything to draw fire. Well until the moment Mei tells her where to shoot, then the weapon is targeted at the pint and Kotone aims to unload the entire magazine into the point she was told to fire on.
Nova Terra     It's taking a little effort, but Nova's clearly away those guns. She had no delusions about destroying them all, but even a small opening in the weapons fire could be of great use to the others. Unfortunately it does seem that her attempts are drawing the massive machine's attention. And soon enough Nova comes face to face with giant face of the machine. Still some distance away, Nova watches the lasers fire from the machine's eyes, reacting quickly by leaning backwards.

    Nova falls off her perch, plummeting downwards just as the lasers disintegrate the remaining structure she had just been standing on. Nova winces as she feels the heat from the beams pass just behind her, before turning her focus towards her fall. Quickly reaching the ground, Nova flips over and lands with a softer thud than she has any right to, the artificial muscle fibres in her suit absorbing much of the impact to prevent her from breaking her legs in the process.

    Standing and running once more, Nova begins to follow the massive machine as it lumbers towards the ocean. She vaults over and slides under fallen building debris as she goes, before jumping up into the angled side of one of the broken structures. Running up its side, she comes to a stop at the edge and looks out at the water.

    As Nova watches the others still fighting on the structure of the machine, starting to get swarmed by the fliers, the radio transmission from YoRHa comes through. They need a delaying measure... But Nova's going to need something a little bigger than her rifle. Nova raises her hand to touch the side of her visor, "Reigel, prepare the missile tubes."

    A response crackles through, "Which ones?"

    "All of them."

    Nova kneels down, fiddling with the controls on the scope of her rifle for a moment before raising the weapon up. Looking through the scope, Nova tries to find a point of interest on the massive machine to target. That's when its vulnerable spot is reported by Mei. Nova settles on that, pulling the trigger. However, the weapon doesn't fire a shot. Instead, a targeting laser beams out from the scope, sweeping into the internal structure through the machine's open underarm.

    Off in the distance, out towards sea, there's a glint of reflecting light. Soon enough, something starts coming into view, speeding along just above the surface of the water and kicking up a large spray behind it. It's a starship. Nova's to be precise, the Griffin. The stealth frigate is coming in low and fast to try and avoid the anti-orbital weapons previously seen. On the bridge of vessel, the crew go about their jobs with a profession air, even as the vessel undoubtedly comes under fire from the large moving fortress. As a targeting lock from Nova's laser is reported the man standing at the head of the bridge says, "Fire!"

    The missile ports at the front of the Griffin's body open and from within, a barrage of missiles streak out and towards the massive machine. They follow their programmed path, sweeping down, around and them up to try and penetrate into the machine's internals.
Count Kord     'Hurt?'

    Kord briefly hesitates at the creature's childish demeanor. He's winded from the nearly constant blasts of energy he's done so far, sapping his reserves quite handily by sheer overload of targets in a short period of time. He goes on the defensive, then, to conserve energy, which means that he can take advantage of the gaps in the bullets. Thankfully, he is able to avoid getting destroyed if he focuses on slowly advancing through the wall of energy that is coming at him, slashing and blasting in small bursts to gain on the goliath. And then he decides to do something very stupid.

    He darts close enough to the creature's face to almost touch it, then... he goes intangible, briefly. He gets right onto the Machine's face and pushes its 'jaws' open with one wind and his feet, squinting through the burn and the sheer visual noise of what's phasing through him, his own energy wisping away as he can't quite mitigate all of the damage when there's just so much of the stuff to deal with. He has one good shot left in him, and he goes for a staple of all Pokemon when they need to get one last big attack off.

    A flash of bright white light erupts from his maw as he fires a Hyper Beam point-blank into the Machine's mouth. It'll slam with more force than anything else he's done so far, with far less time to travel. He angles it down through the industrial behemoth's center of mass to try and do as much damage as possible in one shot... which is, as we have established, a lot of damage. He is good at breaking things.

    He is, however, coated in his own weird glowing blood, and about ready to retreat. This might be the last volley he can make.
A2 1O: 150 seconds until satellite alignment.

    Even with All-Seeing Eye sent flying into the air as a side effect of the grapnel line, the Machines don't waste time in attacking him. He isn't even falling before hovering Machines are diving at him like angry birds, sprouting razor sharp blades along the outside of the hover fans spinning wildly into him. The guns of the great behemoth down below blast at him the whole way down, heedless to the percentage of fire that is reflected, merely pockmarking the deck. When he tethers himself still, the Machines swarm, circling around him and pouring on fire from 360 degrees, using both quick shots to keep him on the defensive, and slow orbs to slowly build up to a wall of fire outside of his ability to deflect all at once.

21O: 120 seconds. Keep it up.

    Even still, Mei is a prime target herself. The remainder of the flying guard chase her as she swings and skids away from the central deck, dive bombing her while detaching and sending their own flying explosives, more like kamikaze mini-Machines rather than missiles. Her last, high-g swing to the shoulder causes a cluster of them to careen into the arm, blowing out the beamwork of the repurposed crane frame covering it and letting out a loud, groaning shriek of metal.

21O: 90 seconds to satellite alignment. Keep fighting as hard as you can.

    The ARMED suit's machine gun has a difficult time dealing with the sheer distance from the ground that its targets are at. Several of the guns are where Nova has already done their work, but her bullets sparking on the Goliath's chassis and starting fires where they land cause many of the mounts to swivel and blast her simultaneously, converging multiple lasers on her that turn the ground to smoking glass with each pulse. She is forced to shoot while moving under fire, and then come face to face with that giant saw flying at her dead on, before her full salvo can strike the weak point in the partially protected motivator assembly under the arm, where the Machine explosives have blown away some of the remaining frame. They're only large machine gun bullets, but several of them puncture the power lines and combustion chambers attached to the smoke stacks, which cough cinders and rippling gas from their mouths as the Machine starts to list.

21O: Only 60 seconds left. You don't want to be at ground zero!

    Once again, whatever the Machines use for detection, it picks up the space craft immediately. Largely ignoring the Elites flying around and clambering over it, the Goliath turns its attention to the frigate flying at it at high speed. Planting both feet deep in the seabed, up to its 'waist' now for what must be stabilization, the giant Machine's front continues to unfold from just its face, incorporating its undamaged frontal turrets with several newly exposed cannons into a single blossom of coruscating death, charging up for just over three seconds before unleashing waves upon waves of gunfire that sweeps over the ocean like a meteor shower.

    Though most of it is made up of the powerful, exploding/imploding red and black energy bubbles, they move at supersonic velocity now, filling the space between raking blasts of laser fire from ultra long range, making the craft dodge and juke the entire length of its attack run. A couple of shots even manage to shoot down the barrage of missiles inbound, but the majority strike home, curving upwards under the arm and into the widening breach, dumping massive firepower into the exposed pylons. The explosion is catastrophic, and only cascades into further failure detonations. The smoke stacks on the left side of the Goliath erupt like volcanoes of rusted iron. Massive quantities of radiation escape from a breached tank, beaming reddish light into the seawater that causes it to visibly boil. The entire arm assembly cracks its shoulder mount under its weight, blowing up at the joint and then falling off.
A2 21O: 30 seconds until satellite aliment! The charging sequence has already begun! Get out of there fast!

    The creepy, hard-angled, mechanical facsimile of a face stares directly at Kord from its ''pudgy'', almost ''infantile'' profile, even as he wrenches open its mannequin-like jaw. Strangely, despite the giant, glowing red laser eyes looking right at him, it doesn't fire. The assault he has to deal with is the bone-splintering roar of its speakers so close. "BIRD." it rocks him with. "NOT ANDROID." The sounds then turns into garbled, skull-splitting static as he fires the hyper beam straight down, causing chained explosions to bubble under the central chassis and its iron skin to bulge outwards in glowing orange lumps. He must have hit some kind of power plant, judging by the way the whole Machine jolts, lurches, and then goes down on one knee, with its right eye and all guns on that side dimming and going quiet. The speakers only blast him with auditory nonsense.

21O: 5 seconds to satellite discharge! Four! Three! Two! One! Get out of there!

    Only a moment after the final countdown, barely enough to account for light lag, the steely clouds rip open and the air roars with the passage of a pillar of radiance from on high, booming outwards as the sheer heat of the beam causes the air to combust and explode. Unlike the Machines' crackling, red and black destructive energy, it's a focused, white-gold spear of blinding light, lancing straight through the immobilized Goliath's upper decks, diving deep through the hole left by its former shoulder and smoke stack assembly, and pierces the rest of the power plant directly, causing an immense fireball to erupt from every part of the titanic Machine's body, from the largest vent to the smallest bullet hole. The ocean turns to a geyser of steam that erupts a mile upwards, falling back down as scalding hot rain, which sizzles on the glowing hulk of the giant robot. It seems to have penetrated out the bottom as well, taking out the remaining knee, causing the Goliath to finally crash into the seabed for good, throwing up a thundering swell of water crashing down on the shore.

    Despite that, the unit is alarmingly intact. It still has half its anti-orbital batteries, most of its death blossom, and a good quarter of its point defense turrets, as well as a functional saw arm. With its exhaust and power systems so badly damaged however, firing any of those guns would cause it to melt down, and it certainly won't be getting back up. With one eye sputtering on and off in its socket and half of its face charred and blackened, the crippled titan slowly swivels left, slowly swivels right, and then booms in garbled tones "I GIVE UP." before promptly powering down and going totally dark.

21O: Excellent. Mission accomplished. I knew we could rely on you.
Nova Terra     Nova watches, rather impressed, as the blinding light lances down through the sky and the massive machine all the same. She shields her eyes as the machine errupts, unleashing firery debris everywhere before toppling into the water.

    The resulting wave strikes the building remains that Nova is standing, spraying her with water but otherwise leaving her unharmed. She looks up again once more to see the Griffin swing around the remains of the fortress, checking it out for a moment before moving off once more. From where she is, she can see the scorch marks and holes in the hull of the ship, "Damn, that's going to require some work."

    Looking back down at the machine remains, Nova briefly ponders its last words. A strange thing to hear, whether spoken by giant moving factory or not. But, maybe it's normal for this world... One she's not familiar with. As far as she knows.


    Nova hefts her rifle up to rest over her shoulder as she touches her earpiece again, "Find a place to set down for a pickup. Hopefully the locals are grateful for the assist." Nova turns and begins to slide back down the side of the building, her job here done.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa takes a good deal of damage well her ARMED Suit does and it's very much a mess wiwhn all things are considereed when the call to go is given? She heeds it her machine sprinting off the hulking titan. It leaps away to the ground leainv an impact crate that rattels it and Kotone inside it. She never thought she'd hear out of one of the machines.

I Give up.

That was a new one she will see if anyone needs help and get ready to pull out of here, before something else comes after them all.
All-Seeing Eye      During the countdown, Eye gyrates and bends at the waist, his whips striking and coiling through the air in a circle around him. He can see the drones surrounding him from every angle, which makes defending easier--but by no means effortless, whatever the Exalt himself would have others believe. For starters, his canvas dress shirt and soft cotton v-neck provide an unsurprisingly small amount of protection against overlarge energy projectiles and razor sharp blades.

     Reflexes and perception do only so much to protect him from the onslaught, especially when the anti-aircraft guns below him are introduced to the mix. Eventually, he decides to retreat, with a pneumatic hiss releasing the cable whips from his ankles. Leaping off of the robot with his clothes in tatters and stained black with his lifeblood, he spreads his limbs to slow his descent. His wounds weep, stinging in protest as the brisk sea air nips at them, but he grits his teeth and forces his most convincing, arrogant grin even as the air resistance rips the last of his shirt free.

     A girder serves as his savior, a timely whip preventing his fall from becoming lethal. Keeping with his typical needless flare for the dramatic, he waits until the last possible minute, coming up at the apex of his swing and sticking his landing just as the pillar of light spears into the goliath's hodgepodge form.

     His muscles scream with fatigue, the mere act of standing akin to exertion after the beating he took. He leans upon a chunk of shorn concrete, pretending the act is merely an aesthetic choice even as he bleeds upon it. He can't hide his wince when he reaches up to wipe his forehead, nor the patchwork of gashes and burns across his bare chest--but he can try.

     "Always," he says to 21O over the radio.