Scene Listing || Scene Schedule || Scene Schedule RSS
Owner Pose
Yuli Sin     It'd been easily a week since the spiritually venerated provider figure of the community called the Hundred and Seventh Path (also known as 'Reservation 107') had left at the end of their 'holy week', and disappeared into the wilds; though no shred of Earth's original wilderness remains, they can certainly still be called that. Dubbed 'Three Chiefs' by the humans living underground in Reservation 107, the mysterious armour-clad figure whom Mikoto had originally found sitting covered in dust on a chair, decorated in wreaths and talismans by children like a village guardian statue, did say he (or it?) had 'a target in mind', and 'when I find it, you'll know'. He hadn't really specified how abrupt and unconscientious of anyone's schedule it might be, when the text transmission comes through, limited to a set of coordinates, and:

o-I found it.

    Having to use a separate warpgate this time to avoid traveling hundreds of miles, the two point pattern so far is that they have yet to emerge anywhere ostensibly useful or meaningful. Most of the time, they show up at points where travel would be frequently necessary, but here they seem to just dump one out onto some new fantastical visa of nonsense in the middle of nowhere, and apparently sometimes different from week to week. This one drops you outside of the dense, near pitch black, and incredibly confusing glass jungle --probably to some relief-- and near to the coast of some landmass or another. You can hear the slow crashing of waves to the east, though the tang of salt in the air is barely present at all, replaced with something closer to sizzling charcoal.

    All around you are rolling slopes covered in bone-white grasses over hard, ink black soil, occasionally studded with clusters of things resembling prehistoric tropical conifers, of the same stark plastic hues that resemble looking through a military infrared camera, with bright orange lights blinking and running up and down their stalks. Occasional fields of things vaguely like flowers wave in a stiff breeze, glinting platinum and iridescent blue-black. The ground is broken up by huge, steep gradients of craggy 'rocks' composed of interlocking hexagonal crystals, sort of like the famous Giant's Steps, but almost perfectly regular, and tightly tessellated, refracting the sun into eerie rainbow scattering, which make up roughly a third of the landscape.

    The coordinates take you further to the east and down towards sea level. The air is humid, and water gathers around your ankles where it refuses to cling to a single blade of clinical white grass, but it tastes of charcoal and aerosol and vapourized solder, with a faint electrical tingle, rather than being lung-vomiting mercury and lead sandpaper. The route takes you down a winding ways to the multi-tiered cliffs of crystal, behind several meters of which you can finally see natural rock and sand, as if frozen in ice, and to a set of natural caves half-submerged in the water. One in particular, yawns open in almost archetypical folklore lair fashion, dark and tall and fanged with stalactites enough to easily imagine it being inhabited by a man eating dragon. The walls are chalk white almost all the way to the ceiling, like all the salt had been drained out of the water and covered every surface like moss.
Yuli Sin     Three Chiefs --that being the guy in old and abraded powered armour in a more sensible shade of white, with crisp green vector markings and a polarized blue visor, is cleaning up the remains of something vaguely like a small camp on the decline leading to the shore, though like none you've ever seen. He has multiple heavy weapons attached to his body at various magnetic points, and a home made woven bag and belt host to all kinds of supplies that he's leaving behind now, as well as a number of ropes and empty satchels. His armour is still host to several braided village charms, small floral adornments, and calligraphy talismans stuck on, having apparently declined to remove them.

TACTICAL LINK: Unit 117; Callsign-Lambent Corona
o-took your time.
o-you want a 'heart', you have to get it.
o-there's a big one in that cave.
o-I have my eye on it for critical parts that I'll need soon.
o-you can have the core processor if you stay alive.
o-don't break it.
Staren     Staren is here. He's a robot today, although his 'armored human' aesthetic is instantly recognizeable as unlike the robots of this world.

    It still kinda creeps him out to see Earth like this. This can't be allowed to happen to his Earth.

    Friendly faces are such a welcome contrast to Machine Hell that he's moved to give Biteblade a hug and smile. "It's good to see you again. This is gonna be our best hunt since Etria."

    No way does he try to taste the water. Nanomachines coating his surface get in tiny microscopic fights with the locals to keep them from getting inside him. He hopes it's enough
    Staren's words are transcribed across the text link, in case that's more convenient for Three Chiefs. Also, everyone here is offered tacnet access, and if they don't already have appropriate gear, their choice of combination of compact computer, AR goggles, and vacsuit. Staren doesn't hand out weapons because if someone showed up without weapons to a hunt, what the hell can you do. Also he doesn't know what's effective against their target yet..

    "Good to see you, too. A big what, exactly? What intel do you have on this beast? Its defenses? If certain weapons don't work well, it'd be good to know that beforehand... also how it's armed, and so on."
Penelope Vasquez      A whine like a flourescent lightbulb fills the air for a moment, before a minimalist Tron-like motorcycle, and it's rider, are disgorged from the warpgate closest to the coordinates. The bike itself is what's emenating the noise; it rolls along near-silently, aside from the hum. The rider is one Penelope Vasquez, clad in her usual gear, none of it visible underneath her massive black full-length trenchcoat, which splays out to either side of the bike's saddle. She glances around with quiet, curious satisfaction at the alien, artificial environment- those Elites she knows get quiet nods of acknowledgement, the others only a calculating, assessing stare before moving on to the sights of the landscape. As the group moves, the bike rolls slowly along with them. She digs a six-pack of brewskies from one of the baskets near the rear wheel, and tosses them to those wanting without hesitation. Seems someone's treating a hunting party as a literal recreational party. She doesn't seem to notice the acrid stink to the air. Just like home.

     As they approach the saltwater cave, she dismounts, and ventures forth. She doesn't have a radio for 117's words to crackle into; they ring through her wire, right into her head. Her response is the same, mouth unmoving as she thinks- though everyone else's radio rattles her words.

     108-0: Nice to meetcha too. I assume anything with a heart worth having needs the heart ripped out the chest. How we intended to do as much without breaking it?
Sumiko Mikoto arrives with the rest of the group, hitting the ground in her ~Magical Girl~ outfit, because well...this place is dangerous, they're expecting a fight, and being unprepared is dangerous.  Things had NOT been going well for her lately, but she was here because she actually wants to be here, instead of needing to be here.  

Leaping from stone to stone down the side of the hill towards the shoreline, she finally lands.  She gives a wave to Biteblade, who she is becoming fond of, and a nod to Staren (who is still neutral to her.)  She doesn't REALLY know anyone else, other than Three Chiefs.

Mikoto still has the mask she was given by the Villagers and is wearing it because it's both useful, and respectful to them.  She rather likes them, and they've been nothing but kind to her.  She's been more and more interested in their way of life.

"I'm just going to talk unless we're actively sneaking, 'kay?" She says towards Three Chiefs, "Sorry for the delay, had to uh...help clean up a mess at school," She says, with a bow.  "So the heart is our problem, you call dibs on certain parts, don't break it too much, and don't die.  I think I got it," Mikoto says, confidently, the blade on her back moves to her shoulder as she rests the flat of it there.  

"Ready!"
Starbound Flotilla "Hmmmm. It would seem our awoken friend has located his target."
"Good. Get deploying."
"Can't bust out the full stuff though. We gotta not break shit."
"If you're thinking the local wildlife is something we can go easy on..."
"Have to be careful. But bring hunting gear, not military gear!"
"What's the difference for you?"
"...Shut."
"Hmph. Not hesitating to escalate when it's necessary."
"If it turns out to be."
"/When./"

    The Starbound Flotilla are here! Riding through the surreal wilderness on their hoverbikes, they're armed and armored in that usual style. They pull up and disembark. Biteblade is the one leading them today; she seems to be the one who's most active in this world. She /immediately/ hugs Staren back. "Hihiiii, cat friend!" She calls out. And then, to Three Chiefs, "Hey! Floran brought big ssstab for big one!" She brings her bow off of her back and unfolds its compound structure dramatically. "Ssstart now? Go tear out heart with big ssstab?"

    Penelope asks how to get the heart out, and Biteblade jumps at the opportunity. "Isss carving prey! Ssstab every vital around, lever ribcage open, sssplit mussscle layer, lever ribcage open..." It gets a little graphic, but she at least seems to know what she's doing when it comes to scavenging stuff out of a hunt. "Mossstly, kill head and not heart. Easssy!" She begins to bounce up and down on the soles of her feet eagerly; unless she's told not to, she's just going to barrel into the cave, arrow nocked and ready to blast the first monstery thing she sees in the face with a heavy tungsten bolt. Seft is the one to operate the Flotilla's cave scanner, trying to chart paths and keep an eye out for ambush points or any power signatures or suchlike.
Eurys Somebody's stumbled her way here. Eurys, the ghost girl with black hair and green eyes, wearing a skirt jacket, floats off the ground, moving at a rapid pace across the terrain. As she sees and approaches the others, she gives a wave to Staren, having caught the Gist of what's going on from what 117 says. As he talks, she nods, and decides immediately that she's all in.

Staren hands out gear, which she takes! She's unarmed, but it'll be fine, she can punch things. "Hello! I'm Eurys, Princess of Hope!" She waves at 117, and then looks up to the cave. "So that's where we gotta go? But- stay alive, what if we're not alive?" Eurys is concerned. Hopefully someone can reassure her.

Eurys also immediately waves towards Mikoto, who she doesn't know, because Mikoto is also a magical girl, and then, when Biteblade sprints off, starts trailing off after her slowly. It's time for adventure!
Steve Rogers      There's only one God. Steve Rogers said as much last time, to strange glass thing that called itself one. Tony had said it was nanomachines; Steve had just thought it was something that needed to be killed.

     It was beyond him. That was nothing new, though. Everything these days seemed to be. Since he woke up he'd been assailed with strangeness. Aliens. Boat ghosts. Glass dinosaurs. More and more he was beginning to wonder if it would ever end.

     Occasionally he wondered if he really wanted it to.

     And yet for all that it was beyond him he still knew what had to be done. There were people in need. That never changed. So Steve Rogers helped them. That never changed either.

     The magical girls get more of a stare than the alien, the cyborg, or Staren. Steve is used to high-tech people. You don't hang out with Tony Stark, an actual literal cyborg who wears power armor, and feel weird about that. You don't fight actual real aliens and hang with an alien pretending to be a Norse God (or something like that) and feel weird about that. But magic? Doctor Strange still put him off. Nazi wizardry still put him off. Little girls in skirts? That was *weird shit*.

     Still, he's a very composed stare-er. Very military. "Captain Steven Rogers, United States Armed Forces. Call me Steve, or Captain Rogers; Mister Rogers is somebody else." He's also got a nice smile, does the six-foot-two-sixty-pound slab of all-American muscle. And his eyes have just the tiniest hint of green.

     He's got the shield in one hand. "Alright then. Take out the head and don't break the heart. Shouldn't be too much trouble."
Shepherd There are entities who are interested in examining and cataloguing the meaningfully active areas of the Multiverse. One of them happens to have chosen this time to arrive along with the expedition team, specifically Steve in this case.

The Shepard proxy unit is very obviously inhuman, a floating pyramidal structure inverted, a rotating sphere on top of it with an array of conical spikes rotating around it in formation. Flaeless geometry rendered in classic mirror-silver sheen. It emits a pleasant, rhythmic thrum as it hovers forward, immediately testing the environment. The spikes float outwards, beginning to take small samples of the minerals and flora, while others emit scanning pulses to further analyze the various traits of the environment.

It doesn't take long for the Shepherd proxy unit to enter the caverns, trailing behind the others. The proxy pauses for a moment, probing the power armor. Power source, apparent gear, estimated output, any unusual modifications, and potentially any interface or wireless connection points.

"Greetings. I will be assisting in the local efforts to subdue dangers to the people here." The entity states. It naturally receives the radio data, but it chooses to not respond that way at this time. For now, it seems content to float behind the others supportively.
Yuli Sin     For whatever bizarre reason, Three Chiefs doesn't use the radio's audio channels. If someone has a text to speech interpreter, that's fine, but he solely and exclusively uses text or image signals; no voice.

o-predator.
o-a big one.
o-no point calling it anything else.
o-it's a new type.
o-first saw it maybe six months ago.
o-haven't killed one yet.
o-should be a learning experience.
o-semi-aquatic, so gyrocs, autos, lasers, supercavitators, maybe vibros.
o-don't know for sure.
o-usual armour materials, probably honeycomb and reactive.
o-also point defense.

    He doesn't seem to have helpful specifics for Staren. Referring to things in those semi-military terms is already a massive departure from the naturalistic or animist ways that the normal people here seem to go address their environment --and why wouldn't they? Might as well call a spade a spade. A golden lion is a golden lion. If he's hoping for anything technical though, he's out of luck.

o-take that off. he says, seemingly regarding Penelope's trench coat, with zero further elaboration.
o-then don't be in the way. he says to Eurys. The helmet turns to regard Steve inscrutably through the polarized faceplate, then turns back without a word.

    He doesn't seem to want to stop Biteblade. He's packed away some sort of burners and rectangular black devices and brushed away some silvery trash and poured out some iridescent liquid, then removed a rifle from his back that looks almost like a single massive block of solid metal with some faintly rounded edges and an indicator screen. Interlocking, embedded pylons release down the forward half of its length, with a suitably dramatic sort of 'shotgun pump'-style crack-clack, splitting the weapon slightly in half, elevating the top and its display, and leaving an empty channel down the middle. He starts trudging down to the shore too. His footfalls are extremely heavy.

    The surroundings are even more of an obvious fuckfest to Shepherd with his analytical spectrum. There is zero hint of any organic compound in the area. There are hundreds of different strains of nanomachines coating most surfaces instead of any kind of bacteria or microflora, and the kinds drifting up from the sea are completely different. The air quality is at least otherwise incredibly pure, and the ground is free of toxic pollutants altogether. What appears to be seawater is distinctly lacking most of its salt content. Most of his surroundings appear to be exotic allotropes of carbon compounds and some alloys smashed together out of a dozen different metal structures for some hyper-specific properties. There are signs of natural, expected Earth terrain all sort of buried beneath it, with no real differences inflicted on it.
Yuli Sin     All he can immediately tell about Three Chiefs is that it's definitely a suit, and not a robot, but there are very minimal organic vital signs anywhere inside of it. It's also very old. A very, very old suit. The techbase is also completely different, using advanced but comprehensible and sensible micro-fusion power, piezoelectric movement augmentation, hydrogen and electromagnetic thrust, collapsed ultradense metal armour, and all sorts of neat shit, but none of it is the bizarro mishmash of 'who even thought this up' scattered around the terrain. It's definitely high specification military-grade stuff, with expensive computer chips in it that are mostly in working order, though there has evidently been a lot of wear and tear on it and many components have been re-fabricated and replaced over time.

    Altogether though, nobody has to go cave hunting for very long. Though the water is very un-salty, the chemical content in it is like even more acidic and irritating brine, comparable to concentrated soda pop that you wouldn't want to leave anything in overnight. Splashing around up to the knees in it, the moment for any attempt at surprise is lost as soon as the cave scanner is activated. The beast curled up in its daytime lair is immediately alerted to the scanner pulse. You can hear the grinding and smashing from deeper inside as something is spurred into motion, and then hear it accelerating at you at a frankly frightening pace, as if you'd just stepped out onto active train tracks.

    What comes crashing out of the dark is something essentially quadrupedal, in a configuration vaguely like a lizard's, albeit without real feet so much as just clusters of articulated spikes. It has a lengthy, segmented tail which thrashes and carves up the ground behind it, and a shorter, serpentine kind of neck that gives it a look sort of like a prehistoric sea reptile, matching the elongated and 'horned' head. It's also much bigger than one. Well over twenty meters. As it shifts from the dark to the sunlight, the plated parts of its glassy exterior polarizes stark white over its black internals, giving it an austere, military air, despite the fact that it moves like a living thing. Parts of its back raise as metallic spines, vibrating threateningly and releasing a loud hum as it moves. Clusters of orange optics light up in a ring around its head, sweeping semi-visible sensor beams across the area. Its head could be a cockpit for its size, though instead it splits open into a set of grindmill jaws like the inside of a car shredder, and it 'roars' somewhere between 'deafeningly audible' and 'intense waves of system crashing static and garbled junk data'.

    Anyone who isn't wearing a full environment suit can literally feel prickling, electric heat on their skin when it looks at them. It doesn't even slow when the group comes into its view. Something crackles, then the roar of jet thrusters fills the cavern. Its claws retract, its legs spread out, and it comes shooting across the water at you at freeway speed, easily flattening anyone still in its way, before it brings the spikes back out and slithers up the sheer cliff face like a gecko. Curling around at the top, it bears one side of its tail towards you in a wide semicircle around its entire body, glowing orange ports opening up along its entire length. From its high vantage, it then sprays a rain of intense energy weapons fire on you as a massive area saturation attack, flash frying the knee deep water into a cloud of superheated steam and splitting the rocks into jagged, molten furrows.

    Yeah. Big animal. Like bear hunting. No difference at all.
Starbound Flotilla "Stick and move. I want a tight formation."
"What does a loose formation look like?"
"Yours. Try not to antagonize him too much, aye?"
"Fair 'nuff."
"The water is hostile to what we would know as life. What is it welcome to?"
"Nervous. Something is on the move. That's going to have an answer soon."
"Yeah! Yeah yeah yea!! Come on!! COME ON!! FLORAN GONNA SSSTAAAAAB!"

    Biteblade rushes forward to meet the thing, but winds up needing to dodge to one side, as the thing tries to flatten her! Rolling and flipping, she suffers a few of the impacts of the lasers, before she can rush under Seft's shield.

"Bring it down into range!"
"I'll bring down heaven!"
"Shoot, shoot, shoot! Tear roof off, yeah!"

    Biteblade, Albert, and Pavo each open up with their respective weapons, barraging the ceiling with heavy magnorbs, rockets, and thick tungsten bolts, meant to either knock the beast down or at least deny it footing on the ceiling. That's when Seft, George, and Moonfin intend to rush in with axe, gauntlet, and katana, intending to slice, electrify, or crush its legs enough to prevent a similar abuse of the ceiling -- at least, not without some prep-time. Biteblade rushes to join, meaning to leap and pounce onto the thing, to mount it!
Eurys Eurys nods when told not to be in the way. "Okay!" The stare from Steve gets another wave. She's probably sixteen or seventeen, at least. As the group enters and the giant horrible monster raises its metallic spines, throws sensors, and spawns electric heat, Eurys takes a breath and looks up at it. "Hey, monster! We're taking your heart, okay?!"

Even as she stings from the heat and the crackle, the monster comes blasting forward, and Eurys' eyes widen, as she suddenly leaps to the side and prat falls. She narrowly misses getting trampled, rolling up to her feet and dashing outside.

When the monster fires energy weapons, Eurys is reminded of Gojira, and doesn't panic as much as she otherwise would. As the lasers flurry at her, she runs away at top speed, prat falling again and rolling out of the way of laser fire, refusing tot ouch the water or molten ground, and barely avoiding getting hit at all. Standing back up, she resolves herself again, crouches on the ground...

And then Eurys leaps upwards, straight at the giant monster. The ground cracks beneath her feet as she lunges towards it with superhuman strength, a prismatic-pink energy glowing around her outstretched fist. "HOPE FIIIIST!" She shouts, as pure hope moves to slam into the monster's head with the strength of a truck collision, or perhaps closer to a train.

Though Eurys hasn't planned her landing, yet. Woops.
Shepherd Shepherd promptly disables and breaks down any nanotech that attempts to make contact with its own mass. There will be no attempts at usurping its own nanotech control mass today, hopefully. The AI listens to the analysis and considers several options at this point. The opposition sounds to be quite heavily armed and heavily defended.

    The analysis is filed away in the growing assessment of this world as it floats along behind the others. Three Chief's build suggests an origin of a standard and mostly sensible military production design, especially with the signs of it being repaired repeatedly. You don't make glitzy show pieces with hard to source parts for active field duty. It might attempt to make conversation but the situation breaks down far too quickly for that.

    "Opposition activity detected." Shepherd states completely unnecessarily as everything shakes and shudders about. The appearance of the entity is everything that Three Chiefs has described and more, it seems. The laser rain punches into and right through the entity, making a burning hole that rapidly closes with the scent of scorched carbon and metal. The synthetic entity moves to hang near Three Chiefs, defending his position as the spikes fly outwards like bits, clashing together and folding in on themsselves to merge into a mirror-sheen cube. It hangs there before the beast, spinning, a low hum and whine growing as something within it charges up... And then it breaks momentarily into sixteen smaller cubes, each shrinking to reveal the ball of electricity that has gathered there, a potent arc that rapidly follows an ionized trail that launches towards the beast like a tracer. A moment later, there is a sharp CRACK as the creature is dosed with a powerful electrical shock.

In the meantime, the AI is also beginning to apply its sensors to the creature, working to analyze its makeup and verify the composition of the beast's weapons, and more importantly, if it can isolate the creature's motive systems or processing core.
Sumiko Rogers looks at Mikoto all funny, "What?"

To Eurys, she smiles and gives a wave, magical girls gotta stick together, yo.

There is a woosh as the creature storms out of the cave.  It was made aware of their presence; but hey, in reality, this wasn't going to be very long of a hide anyway.  The feeling of the thing's predatory sight made her uncomfortable, but not because it was scary, but because of something, it was doing.  It did not feel good and put Mikoto on edge.

Mikoto leaps back, trying to get some distance, as the laser fire comes.  Her blade comes up, trying to cut into the beam and split it around her.  Unfortunately, she was a bit too late on the draw, as the closest points of laser not only heat up her blade but split and burn the air around her causing some no small amount of burn directly to her skin.  It hurts, but it could have hurt a whole lot worse.  

When she was clear of the blast, she spins the sword in a wide-angle around her, forming the magical circle on the ground and thrusts the blade down into the circle.  From underneath her, the ground shakes as a large, and I mean /large/ snake burrows out of the ground underneath her, letting Mikoto ride on its head.

She leaps off when it comes near to the creature, aiming to leap onto the creature's back, while the snake attempts to wrap around it to fight.    Mikoto trying her best to stay fast and nimble, instead of trying to challenge the thing directly.
Steve Rogers      Steve doesn't show any particular discomfort at being regarded by a faceless man, or Shepherd. That's basically Tony and his AIs, after all. Half the time he's staring at that faceplate. Half the people in his life might as well be faceless, too, for all that they keep secrets. He lives in SHIELD. SHIELD is all about secrets.

     He just offers his hand for a handshake. If it's accepted, great. If not, he moves on with his life.

     The bizarre landscape reminds him unpleasantly of the new world Manhattan. Not literally, but figuratively - a place of steel with colors unfamiliar where most of the things that move aren't really alive. The noise of the monster is even moreso - the honking of a thousand car horns all at once, and the fear of the unknown that settled in when he ran into Time Square and saw not home but the future.

     The giant robot lizard is also unpleasantly like Manhattan, though in the abstract "alien invasion" sense, not a regular feature. Although-

     The thought is cut off. The monster is on them. The eyes prickle with radiation, charging, firing, swinging its tail. Steve rolls out of the charge and over the tail; when the bombardment comes down, Steve's shield comes up to absorb it, as much of the energy as he can. The air around him turns into steam. The rocks turn molten around him, turn to craters, turn to lava.

     And there's the man in the star-spangled suit with a primitive shield in the middle of it all, on a rock that's slowly melting, untouched, with a shield glowing with power.

     Alright.

     The rock collapses under him. Steve leaps off of it, the shield thrumming with energy. He runs over falling, melting segments of rock, racing fearlessly towards the vantage point. He leaps up and grabs the rock, superhuman agility and superhuman strength carrying him faster than it has any right to. At at least one point it looks like he's almost running up the cliff-face before he jumps to grab another handhold.

     He swings up, one-handed. He propels himself above the monster.

     He comes down on it with intent to drive his shield into its back and make himself a big fucking target that the robot can't ignore. He's helped by all the energy gathered in the shield - which, on impact, is going to detonate then and there, and will probably hurt him as much as the monster, but hey. That's fine. He's used to that. It can't be as bad as Thor.

     That's what he does, after all.
Staren IL: What's a gyroc?

    Staren frowns behind his visor at 'usual armor materials' -- that means lasers are probably a bad idea, from what he's seen of 'fauna' around here. That's okay, he still has particle beams, missiles, railguns (albeit not top-tier ones) and crazy tech weapons. He removes the sniper rifle from his back and puts it away in his bag, though.

    When they face the beast, Staren doesn't wait for it to do its boss intro, he just starts shooting! The cannons on his arm fire twin beams of high-energy particles that superheat whatever they hit (including some unlucky air molecules between Staren and the target.) They're less focused than most energy weapons of his world, designed for a close-up punch, but that just means the beams are 'only' fully coherent out to 500 meters or so.

    Staren fires at its roar, unable to feel pain from too-loud sounds at the moment, flies over the water and to the side to dodge out of the way of its charge, and then the amber sphere of force appears around him as those tail ports open -- a good thing, too, the field flashing as the lasers hit it, absorbing it like a champ! Which is to say, only one of the discs on Staren's armor emits a shower of sparks, rather than two or three.

    Staren glances around for anyplace 'safe' to land, then drops the forcefield and fires another pair of beams! At the moment, he's not aiming at any particular part of it, just seeing how the materials of its body react to his shots. Hopefully he can fill this thing with energy faster than it can dissipate it...
Yuli Sin     Shepherd doesn't have to do much nanomachine management. Little to none of the nanos in the environment seem to be designed to interact with his chosen shell. Nothing approaches the gray goo terror scenario, lying around to infect people. Sure, most of it is very unhealthy to ingest, but they all seem to be tailor made to perform some specific environmental function. They seem less 'deployed' and more like they just grew there, like an entire micro ecosystem of machines where there isn't even bacteria to be found.

    Steve gets several extra seconds of staring at his outstretched hand. When he finally gets a very brief, altogether too-firm handshake, he'd get the feeling that he wasn't being appraised, so much as it seemed like Three Chiefs was refiguring out what to do again, like he hadn't seen one of those for a very long time.

    Either way, the fight is immediately a loud, chaotic, landscape-devastating fuckfest within seconds of starting. If this is what 'a predator' is like, then it's probably no wonder the landscape seems to be engineered to rapidly recolonize itself. The consolation is that Steve's shield handles his part of the barrage just fine, so by estimation of the fact that it should usually deal damage, the surroundings aren't going to be vibranium tank hatch hard. Of course, what is? Still.

    It's just less fortunate that he doesn't get to test it on the giant machine monster because just as he closes in for the blow, the whole thing practically glides out from under him, whirling its tail around and smashing the shield directly to swat him back, with far too much generalized grace and speed for a massive robot.

    he Flotilla's concentrated fire on the natural rock causes it to melt and crumble immediately, removing the creature's foothold and sending its considerable mass plummeting. Small thrusters studded in its carapace fire and flip it over in midair, twisting front to tail like an uncanny, mechanical cat falling from a tree. Eurys leaps at its face, fist glowing, Hope manifested. Her punch collides with the sculpted side of the creature's upper head, dents the incredibly hard white plate, begins to crumple it, and then the entire thing explosively purges off before the shockwave spreads to any of the internal machinery, slamming her with a flying car door launched off into a cave wall and leaving the black layer behind.

    Staren repeatedly blasts it with its beams as it falls and then lands with an earth shaking crunch, each shot striking the exterior, leaving grey-white scorches and seemingly 'shattering' on the armour, spraying off smaller particle streams into the surrounding rocks, though repeated fire on the same point starts to melt potholes into it, like wearing away some coating or another.

    It turns on him straight away, just as Mikoto leaps to the fore. Her snake distracts it, since it's the snake that crashes into it and tries squeezing it to death, causing the metal to creak and groan in the giant serpent's huge muscular coils, until the monster wrestles its neck to the right angle to bite down into it --then a bloody whine issues from its mouth as weaponized 'teeth' shred into its substance and violently chainsaw it through, followed by the muffled light and sound of a point blank explosion to take the rest of it off. Mikoto landing on its back is, instantly, hit with a bolt of electricity coruscating off its raised spines, like she'd just walked up to an active tesla coil.
Yuli Sin     The creature's torso just short of the shoulders pop, split apart, and expose the tips of what are probably definitely twin mounts of trio autocannons aimed low into its front arc. There's an electric spin up sound, and then Staren, Steve, the Flotilla, and Shepherd are bulldozed by a fusillade of hundreds of rocket propelled rounds tearing visible heavy shockwaves through the air, screaming fire and thunder from multiple barrels as the 'anti-personnel' weapons laser paint them and track their movements on swivels, chewing up everything behind and around them.

    The lightning blast catches it dead in the chest, coursing through the exposed cannon systems and obvious damaging their motors, as well as peeling off layers of polarized white exoskeleton that bleeds rainbow refracting molten 'glass'. It creates an opening for the Flotilla members to close in and begin chopping away at it with their powered melee weapons, having more success hacking into it with blades and powered blows. Metal and allotrope cracks and crunches and squeals under the combined assault, purging off layers of armour as it becomes too damage, then Biteblade laps onto it and plunges her daggers into a wound, severing some kind of tough artificial muscle and spraying her with translucent 'blood'.

    The monster screams a wave of pressure and garbled static, then ploughs the rest of its way out of the cave completely, skidding along the surface of the ocean water, kicking up huge plumes of spray, and then ascending to the shore to regain the high ground. Lightning writhes between its back spines, threatening to fry Mikoto and Biteblade, where they can see multiple rows of tiny missile ports opening along the upper flanks of its shell. People with electronics suites get alerts for various target lock signatures on them.

    There are a frankly worrying number of weapons Shepherd can detect that still haven't been used. Additional lasers, a second set of autocannons, reserve feeds of missiles designed to reload after multiple volleys, some sort of energy projector mounted into the head, long power feeds through the neck, and independent generators for each claw and tooth. There are thickened sections of low scanning penetration that look to contract and expand to cause manual movement, rather than any sort of piston or motor, and a number of small thrusters drawing power from a central power core nestled deep in center mass. There's also a second core of high electronic activity further to the breast, of uncertain purpose.

    Three Cheifs springs into action as the creature leaves the cave, flexing once and then leaping up the entire cliff face at one bound, destroying the ground previously underneath him. He circles around the mark to one flank, and begins dumping rifle fire all along its side to hit the exposed missile ports. The rifle's automatic boom is absolutely deafening --it vibrates in the ribcage as it spits scorched pieces of metal from its ejector. The physical rounds trigger secondary defenses, causing pinpont accurate, invisible lasers to vapourize many of the bullets out of the air, exploding into little flash blobs, though multiple of them score deep rows of punctures along its side, and blow up several of the mini missiles while they're being loaded.
Steve Rogers      Well.

     That's a problem.

     The shield goes off and does nothing to anything. No, it really sort of just makes the blow worse - as he goes to block it, it detonates, and sends him flying into the ground. He hits hard and rolls twice, narrowly avoiding the magma, the Flotilla, and Staren. He's probably broken a rib. Not ideal, but not life-threatening.

     Steve gets back to his feet because of course he does and immediately the monster starts screaming and shooting. The rocket-propelled rounds are bad. Steve goes into the middle of them, knocking as many of them aside as he can with the adamantium shield. It turns out he can knock a lot of them aside. He cuts a path through the hazard field with stern eyes and well-placed ricochets. Bullets bounce into each other. His shield stays up, twisting only at odd angles to enable his trick. His head stays down. His vitals are guarded. It's not a flawless path - he gets shot more than once, blood spraying gratifyingly behind him as shots go through his shoulder. Most of the worst of it he avoids. The shots to the legs he cannot.

     Oh well. Life as an Avenger.

     The creature starts trying to run. As Three Chiefs springs into action, so does Steve. Wounded legs pump like train wheels. The creature's trying to run. The smart thing to do is try to cripple it.

     So Steve tries to cripple it.

     Arms that can bench press a car fling a shield that can absorb anything. It's a longshot, but so is every shot Steve Rogers takes, and that's never stopped him before. It's aimed at the creature's legs - a full ricochet bounce of the hardest material known to man, sent to knock its legs out from under it or at least do some serious damage to restrict its movement and piss it off at the man with the shield more than the rest of the party.
Eurys Eurys impacts, and then the armor is blasted off, knocking Eurys upside the head and into a cave wall. Good news is, she's extraordinarily hardy, so she's not flattened or crushed or overly hurt, though it is very painful, as she yelps on impact. Rubbing her head as she lands, she has orders from Steve. Stay down on the shore and fight the monster there is how she interprets them.

So, Eurys charges up more of that hope energy, this time into her legs. Running towards the monster, Eurys leaps again, and shouts frenetically. "HIYAH!"

With a basic jumping kick, energy coalesced around her foot, Eurys moves to kick it in the chest, trying to break away plating and find and expose the heart they're looking for. And while she's doing so, she decides she wants to know more about their enemy. Is it just a robot, or something more?

Focusing on the beast, she looks for a mind, and tries to pinpoint what inspires it, what sources of hope it has. She doesn't expect a ping, but is willing to try anyways. It doesn't hurt her at all to try!
Sumiko Mikoto feels a tingle in her feet and uses that as a queue that she shouldn't be there any longer.  Flipping off of it's back, and aiming to land behind the creature.  The snake fares...well, it does not fare at all.  The chainsaw mouth cuts the thing's head off and it hits the ground, fading into magical girl sparkes.  

"Well, that's bad..." She says, with a frown.  A large summons was going to be a bad idea.  Instead of large ones...

She thrusts the sword into the ground again, aiming to summon a swarm of rats that attempt to scurry up the creature's legs, aiming to try and get into ports that open up, into places in the beast that might be natural openings and do the things that rats love to do.

Chew on everything.  Wires, important bits, aiming to try and get jammed in gears.  Pulling the blade out she fell back, trying to get distance again and trying to plot out her next move.
Staren     The autocannons rapidly chew through Staren's forcefield, knocking chunks out of it like it's some kind of transparent but very dense stone -- two more of the emitters go out, leaving it it less than half its original size.

    It runs.

    Staren switches from wings to thrusters and gives chase, assessing his options. It has reactive armor and can partially deflect particle beams. But what about a much heavier 'particle beam', like a shaped charge warhead?

    Before he can even try it, the beast answers that by vaporizing Three Chiefs's railgun(?) rounds before they reach it. Damn.

    Well, he's got the RAISERs, but they'll probably only catch it off-guard once at best; is now the optimal time to use them?

    Staren flies up the cliff face now that he's outside. Three Chiefs's attack gives him another idea: What about overwhelming its defenses so that others' attacks have a better chance?

    As he flies over the beast, Staren pulls two guns out of his bag. They look like high-tech automatic rifles with drum magazines. He unloads them both full-auto at the creature -- one is a caseless firearm shooting armor-piercing rounds, the other is an ultralight railgun (as in 'could be carried by someone without superstrength.') To add injury to more injury, he also fires their underbarrel micromissile launchers, releasing pair after pair of what are effectively explosive-tipped gyrojet rounds.

    "Keep it up!"
Shepherd     The nanotechnobiome (is that even a word? It is now) of the area is actually fairly fascinating. Shepherd might have to spend some time on analysis of the environmental effects. Terraforming of this nature and scale isn't something it has methods to use, and well, it still has an entire industrial and post-industrial ecology to clean up to optimize and correct...

    But later. There are priorities. Like those heavy autocannons. The AI harmonizes, "Deploying kinetic defenses." The cube shatters, creating a ring which is the intervening space is filled with an interlocking hexagonal layer of energy projection. The proxy doesn't even move, encouraging the thing to hurl rounds into it as a wide field barrier pops up, a hexagonal deflection field that less blocks the shots and more rapidly bleeds off their kinetic propulsion. Rocket propelled or not, it basically ruins the attack arc and results in the space about three feet in front of the proxy being blasted to bits, shattered fragments of ground punching into the thing and disappearing.

    The analysis information comes back, and Shepherd immediately begins highlighting danger points and locations of weapons, power generator, and the all-important processing core to anyone who happens to be able to take a tactical AR feed via radio... Which is probably 'Staren, the Flotilla, and Three Chiefs'. It's frankly horrifying to see the kind of death dealing that someone has packed into that much space.

    The interface bits split back apart once the autocannon salvo ends, and they sweep in amidst the cacaphony of target locks. The cubes reshape back into spikes, the tips glowing white-hot as they jab in for the rocket launchers, attempting to rapidly jam their firing mechanisms to sabotage the number of incoming attacks and begin removing combat options for the enemy while the point defenses are occupied.
Starbound Flotilla     Click-CRACK! Six distinct pylons of hyperglass pop out of the backs of six distinct armor suits. Lightning crackles between them. Seft's work, here, shines. The Flotilla move as one, and they move with such speed and ruthless evasion that not one single one of them is struck by the autocannon fire -- at least, not without a shield or blade intercepting it. Even Biteblade manages to flicker and dance along the body of the beast and ervade the flickers of lightning.

    "Activating. Hyper Maneuver!"

    "Hey, we got him to say it this time!"
    "Shut up and fight."

    They run in parallel of the monster, Biteblade leading like they're a hunting party. "Run! Run! Fish left, robot friend right! Box it in!" Seft brandishes her axe, Moonfin brandishes his katana, and together they try to box the thing in towards Steve. Let's hope he can take its legs out, and that Eurys can get her heavy kick in, before they need to switch to scaling the cliff. "Human friend! Go go go, in with Floran!" George, who has half-finished ascending the cliff face with a grappling hook, leaps into a grapple atop the thing as it passes by!

    He and Biteblade work together on what comes next: A concentrated effort to grip the head of the beast. They can recognize Shepherd's information feed and its importance, and they intend to exploit it. With dagger and gauntlet, they grip and try to SNAP the neck of the beast, to crush power feeds within and disrupt the long flow of its power, to hopefully limit the dangers of those weapons. "RooooooOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! DIE DIE DIE, PREY!!"

    Albert and Pavo haven't caught up. Albert because he's less mobile, Pavo because she's covering that. "Boy scout!" She calls out to Steve Rogers. "They need those calls of yours!"
    Albert agrees. "Gear." He says, simply, and tosses him a high-power grappling hook that should let him catch up without having to inconveniently scale the entire cliff or whatever. Pavo grabs Albert and ascends as fast as she can to catch up with the fight.
Yuli Sin     Chasing after the creature at superhuman speed, Steve's flying vibranium disc does about what one would expect and cleaves into the non-plotonium metamaterials, chopping into multiple layers of armour and slicing into something that sparks and erupts fire, once several explosive bolts go off at once and throw armour shrapnel everywhere. It unfortunately throws the shield off course from a neat rebound, though not off into the horizon. The leg shudders and spasms, then locks up.

    Suddenly losing a good chunk of its ground mobility, the sea-dwelling monster is kicked straight in the chest by Eurys, crumpling in further layers of now-overheated and soft semimetals, erupting smoke and steam where her shoe touches and cracking down the middle like a red hot spoon shoved in ice, and finally exposing the glassy structure beneath. Weird phantasmal rats run and climb into the briefly exposed missile ports, essentially committing suicide by chewing into the pencil-sized warheads, but causing fire and electricity to belch from the holes --enough at once to send the monster reeling to the side. Flying morphic cuboid spikes stab several more in similar fashion, but by then the unflinching beast has sorted out its movement again and launches itself itself back down to shore, grinding into the pitch black sand and skidding away from the rest.

    It finally gets to launch the missiles from its remaining integrated silos. Dozens of smoking lines fly into the air then cut hairpin sharp angles back down, breaking up near the ground and showering the whole area with white hot cluster explosives, each pea sized sub-warhead creating a car-sized explosion on impact. A second set of larger, beefier, faster missiles swerves in towards Staren and Shepherd, and as they obviously lock on, both their feeds are suddenly slammed with massive amounts of externally forced data corruption and gigantic amounts of electrostatic radiation and distortion, turning visors fuzzy and radars haywire even for the Flotilla. It probably coincides with the fact that its spines just built up a huge pile of electricity and then released it all into a giant, omnidirectional pulse, nuking all the electronics in the area except its own.

    The Flotilla boxes it in again and George and Biteblade aim for the neck, being the sensible soft target. In this case though, like the entire rest of the 'natural' monstrosity, that doesn't seem to be the case, as their weapons hack into thick, ridiculously dense layers of some almost liquid glass with gel-like properties that arrests their weapons well before they reach the critical feeds inside. Biteblade is attacked by the oscillating vibro teeth filling up its jaws to be shaken and thrown, and George is aggressed by the powered claws coming to swat him off and crush him underneath them against the ground. The tail sweeps out behind it as it turns, laying a three sixty degree attack on the Flotilla, and spraying concentrated lasers at Steve and Staren in that window.

    Three Chiefs dives off the cliff edge at that point, thrusters flaring in his own back to drop-slam the thing with cratering force, sending it sliding on the shore. Lasers slash into him, and crack against a shimmering barrier of energy surrounding his body, letting him grab the spines barehanded and wrench them out of their sockets with superhuman strength. Staren adding his firepower to the mix starts to overwhelm the array of bristling laser diodes on its back, plucking hundreds of bullets and dozens of missiles out of the air, until they start landing all over it and blowing off chunks of its carapace in smoking carpets of wreckage.
Yuli Sin     Slithering backwards through the sand with remarkable alacrity, the monster locks its claws into the ground like pneumatics, stiffens its neck, and points its opened maw towards Shepherd and Mikoto. The inside of its throat glares molten amber, and then just an instant later, the gigantic machine rocks backwards in the sand, flattening the water around it with the shockwave, when a colossal, skewering lance of condensed plasma rushes over them and surges into the cave, instantly causing it to implode and melt shut.
Starbound Flotilla     George is slammed back by a rogue claw. When he's crushed underfoot, he shouts out, "Woah woah woah! Just a second!" And once the 'foot' comes back up, it finds George has evaded a brutal crushing with a partial mining. Him poking his head up out of the gap has an almost cartoony look.

    Biteblade wrenches the teeth away and keeps from being chomped, but suffers some brutal impacts along her arm. The Flotilla around her are battered back, but holding ground! As the creature melts its own lair, Biteblade decides to dig in. Enough riding around. Time to Dogma this Dragon properly, so to speak. Pulling away from its mouth as it recoils from the impact of Three Chiefs, she immediately lunges at his impact site, and begins plunging her powered dagger into the carapace, trying to strike at an unfocusable range for the active defense.

    If she can carve out enough of those things, hopefully it'll let the firepower pour on even more, now that it's starting to get overwhelmed! "Ssskin the kill! Tear out hide! Ssstab the throat! Kill the prey!!" She roars as she does.
Eurys Eurys is able to expose the glassy interior, and she cheers. Her emotional reading determines it's basically just an animal - which is super fascinating to her. But then the beast skitters away, launches dozens of missiles around the area, and in the middle of her cheering, Eurys isn't fast enough. The missiles hit her dead on, blasting her backwards into the cave wall again, battering and bruising her corpus and causing her to scream out.

Eurys' response, as she slides to the ground and takes a few moments to get up, is to manifest a pair of wings. Prismatic pink butterfly wings sprout from her back, as she launchers herself at the monster again after the massive energy blast is sent out. She aims for where she dented the head last time, trying to throw an unenergized, but still superhuman punch to try and further crack through the dent. Precision is the key here, trying to ruin the head as much as possible to further in killing this thing.

"You're kind of a jerk, Mr. Robobeast, you know that?"
Sumiko The mouth of the lizard points towards Mikoto and Shepherd.  There is a widening of her eyes as the beam charges...there was little she could do to get away in time, maybe if she didn't back up.  Too late now...

But she needs to live.  The will to survive burns in Mikoto, the will to see tomorrow, no matter what it takes.  In the face of death, she refuses to freeze.

Her blade stabs into the ground, just as the beam fires.  Spikes of jade shoot out of the ground, attempting to block the attack as it smashes into it.  The energy surging over her like a rock in a powerful stream.  She can see the cracks forming in the jade.  

It wasn't enough...but she...

Strength surges through her, and the speed of a blue hedgehog aims to aid her.  Together, she swings her blade forward at great speed, aiming to smash into the beam repeatedly, aiming to keep swinging as the energy overcame the jade.  

At the end, when the energy fades, there was only smoke remaining.  Or at least, that is all that could be seen at the moment.  Until a burst of green just streaks out of the smoke, aiming to try and thrust the blade right towards the lizard's mouth, attempting to strike at the source of the baleful light, before zipping out again.  

The blade swings repeatedly, all across the lizard.  She aims for joints, weak points, openings...anything she can get her blade into before appearing on the other side with the blade stretched out.
Steve Rogers      That worked. Not well enough but it worked. That's all Steve can ever ask for. Murphy's Law and all that. Soldiers know it well.

     Laser fire rains down on him, and all Steve Rogers can think as he runs is that he's not doing a very good job holding its attention away from the rest of the party.

     His legs are pistons. His arms pump like the Terminator, a reference he only understands because they made him watch it to explain the Nanomachines thing. He runs, and at least once, he dives and rolls, tanking the pain of bloody shoulder and bloody legs to avoid the death from hot laser. At last he rolls into the shield in the nick of time, plucking it from the rock it stabbed into and wheeling around just in time to deflect a shot that would've gone right through his heart. Instead it bounces off and burns his cheek - a wound, but a wound he can deal with. It only narrowly missed either killing him or burning out his eye, after all.

     Steve pushes onwards. He pushes onwards because that is what Steve Rogers does. He runs forward, directly into the lizard, and brings his shield right up into the monster's mouth and slams his knee into its jaw as hard as he can.
Shepherd     Shepherd knew that the worst was yet to come, but it was not sure how long it had until it would be deployed. There is a terrible miscalculation in that fact as the rampant overkill begins in earnest. The bombardment crashes down around the AI as the larger missile fires towards it. The missile itself is perhaps less concerning than the EMP that the thing wields, beating Shepherd to the punch. It blames needing to use a smaller power generator. The EMP crashes into the heavily nanite-based being, disrupting it intensely as it immediately begins to melt into a puddle, the material sloughing away and unable to reorganize to perform Stupid Nanotech Manipulation Tricks in order to defend itself. Even then, the missile itself blasts it, splattering it across the environment and forcing into view a softball-sized black sphere with a single red eye that flickers and reorients itself, the sighting visible like a laser designator as it tries to pull itself together.

    It barely gets any time. The massive maw opens, and the overwhelming plasma blast roars, scorching away the majority of Shepherd's body as the cave is melted closed. In the aftermath of the blast, little more remains of the AI except for its apprently exceptionally durable core. The scorched and partially melted thing rises up, floating there. But what can a little softball do against that monstrosity? "Critical damage sustained. Threat matrix updated. Engaging high-level subdual measures." Around the core, blue-white objects begin rapidly phasing into view: glossy black chunks of metal and various internal components in preformed designs, each swiveling through the air as the core turns, quickly welding them together at high speed. The construction takes shape rapidly, forming into a squat crab-like walker design. Perhaps notably, there's no room for a cockpit. This is because it drops inside the machine, docking inside as it closes up around the core. A larger red eye flares alight as it whirrs and straightens up, emitting the same harmonized, half-autotuned voice as before. "Engaging."

The crab-walker leaps forward, propelling itself on booster jets before it strikes out with a a heavy tri-sided claw, attempting to grip and latch onto the beast with vehicle-crushing force. A moment later, the pile bunker in the center fires, attempting to breach the creature and deliver gigawatts of debilitating lightning in a surge intended to overload the machine's power distribution!
Staren     Staren has to fly wildly and blindly to try and escape the missiles, firing some of his own behind him to superheat the air and detonate some of them -- even with the forcefield, the explosions send him tumbling through the air. He switches to wings again, blindly arresting his momentum and waiting until he can see again.

    After overwhelming its defenses, Staren gets hopeful: Could this mean missiles will work now? First he has to weather the lasers, though -- the forcefield gives its last absorbing them, leaving Staren in armor that's scorched and dented in a couple places from the earlier explosions.

    Staren holds out his arms, and the missile racks pop up on his shoulders, and he fires! A half-dozen micromissiles airburst to release pencil-thin lances of heavy plasma, homing in around the head -- several missiles from his shoulder racks also fire, but he can't just bombard it all over with his allies meleeing it, so he tries to target them so as to heat up large sections of the creature without frying his allies -- it's still going to be uncomfortably hot in the area now, but hopefully that means overloading its heat dispersal methods too!
Yuli Sin o-it can't hear you.
o-she isn't listening.

    Eurys indeed gets no real response to calling the feral robot a jerk. Her fist collides with the portion of its head that is exposed carbon black, and she feels the optics around it pop and shatter from the diffused force, showering her with sparks and bits of broken crystal. Its head snaps sideways, its neck sways, drizzling translucent 'glass blood' with the forced motion, and then it turns to smash her out of the air with its tail, throw her against the cliff wall, and then blast her with a more mobile, lower yield, yet still massively overheated plasma blast with so much mass that it feels like a cannon shot and not just an energy blast.

    It then turns its head all the way around to look at its own back. With the spines that are almost definitely 'evolved' e-warfare modules getting wrecked, it retracts the rest into its shell with a set of sliding *shunks*, clearing the way of handholds while it charges up a more serious blast to sweep the two off of it. Seeing it, Three Chiefs turns is visor back to Biteblade, lunges forward, flares boosters, and tackles her straight off its back before she can really get her daggers in, his personal shields flaring blue-white and unstable as even the backwash of the near miss is lethal enough heat to trigger them. Rolling hard on the ground, he outright picks her up, then throws her back at the monster with over the top strength.

    He aims and fires another fifty or sixty mysteriously overpowered shots from his thundering heavy rifle into the creature's rapidly worsening breast, then rushes up to the leg grabbing George. He flicks his hand and clenches it into a fist, and the armour on both sides of his wrist ignites long, triangular blades of energy that curve to meet ahead of his knuckles and extends into a singular 'sword' several feet long. He swings it to carve away the creature's talons, freeing George at the same time as it showers him with molten metal and toxic steam.

    It doesn't do much about this, because Mikoto has occupied its attention. The super speed magical girl is all over it with her own blade, hacking and slicing and slashing away at the myriad damage points opened up all over it, flicking that weird crystalline blood hither and thither, scalloping away layers of ablative and reactive plate, shaving off metallic foam and glassy black heatsinks and insulators, and gradually flensing it to death, its movements slowing and jerking. Her sword swinging for the emitter deep in the back of its throat suddenly ends up with her blade being caught as she plunges it in by the monster's jaws snapping shut. Freshly repaired autocannons pop back out. Barrels spin. Steve Rogers flies up to kick the underside of its jaw, and the flex in the metal causes Mikoto's sword to thrust into something vital, igniting some module or another that causes an explosion to vent out of its smoking maw.The crab walker clobbers it in the side of the head and shoots electricity down the entire neck powerline to cause cascading flashes to rumble all the way down its neck, faintly visible from the outside as muted orange blossoms of light.
Yuli Sin     Both of them are shot for their trouble. The lasers lock on to them, and then hundreds more rounds shred the air towards them. The monster vomits unfocused, roiling plasma fire as a flamethrower back and forth over the Flotilla members, Mikoto, and Shepherd while the guns rake the sand. New clusters of cannons are swiveled in from inside the monster's carapace to target the air, and hails of AA fire pummel Staren, along with a reloaded wave of missiles descending on 'everyone in general', as the laser designators of the cannons swivel, track, and mark targets. Three Chiefs tosses some sort of magazine or another, slams another one into his rifle, and starts taking burst shots at the missiles that fall on him and those anyone close to them, picking them out of the air like skeets, then jumping out of the way of the remainder, the collateral explosion finally disabling his shields completely with a flash of electricity and a beeping warning siren he doesn't seem too concerned about.
Eurys "Oh. Well, he's still a jerk!" Eurys replies, and then pauses. "Wait, who's 'she'-"

Crunch.

Eurys is sent flying backwards into the cliff wall for the third time, and is starting to hate it. As her bruises get worse, the energy blast fires. Eurys quickly leaps off the cliff face, narrowly moving over most of the blast and only getting partially scorched by it, but it burns imprints into her outfit and causes her to yelp again as her flesh is charred, quickly repairing itself but not the pain.

They need to end this. Eurys starts charging up her hope energy again, as it surrounds her fist, and then turns into a beacon of pure hope. It's brighter and larger than before, as she's channeling more energy, and Eurys dives at it again.

"Come on! Eat this!"

With her wings still there, Eurys flies at it again, swerving around missiles and only getting hit by the sides of explosions instead of full-on again, and aiming to /land/ on the head, where she starts pummelling. Fist into metal, over and over again, until it dies. That's her goal. If the tail comes up again, Eurys tries to hold it back with her other hand long enough to keep punching. "Yyyrrraaaah!"

Despite the 'anger', there's a large likelihood she's actually really just having fun.
Staren     Staren fires some of the missiles he held in reserve to try and counter the ones raining down on him, but fails to take out any big groups. He tries and fails to dodge the AA fire. Explosions and flack pepper him from above and the front, and it all comes down to the metallurgy and engineering of his armor.

    Which is pretty damn good, all told. Staren's pushed this way and that, but afterwards the armor is barely intact -- Scorched all over, with holes blown through here and there and some plates missing entirely (exposing his metal 'skin' underneath), but he's not out yet.

    It may be time to use what he hopes is his ace in the hole, though.

    Staren drops his guns and draws forth two more, a sidearm and a longarm that look very sci-fi, black one-piece construction. Staren aims at the head and fires two little pellets of energy, tuned for 'just enough' penetrating power from what he's seen so far, and a whole lot of explosive power.

    He really hopes this works.
Sumiko Orange blossoms of light rain down at Mikoto.  Unfortunately, this time, she had overextended herself, putting too much into the offense that she couldn't get a proper defense out.  Lights burn the area around her, including herself, with only the most dangerous of the shots, ones that would end her life, being deflected by a blade at the last moment.

Burning, seared by laser fire, and bleeding, she looks up at the beast looming over her.  She swings the blade again, attempting to create some room with pure force of arms.  This is followed up by the blade sending spikes of jade up from the ground, aiming to impale the limbs of the thing.

Each attempt trying to hold the thing in place, so that someone else could land a telling blow.  
Starbound Flotilla     George is freed!"Hey, thanks tons, big guy!" He shouts, as he goes scrambling away. His shotgun is freshly in his hands now, might be a good idea to stop messing around with melee from the look of it.
    Even Biteblade turns the tackle into a weird sort of hug. "Yeahyeahyeah! Thank Chiefsss! Now throw Floran back! Throw Floran back!!" She gets her wish. "YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAH!!"

    Back to stabbing. Stabbing, stabbing, shooting, stabbing, mostly stabbing, untilll... The tides turn a bit. Biteblade is thrown from the body towards the rest of the Flotilla, and then huge gushes of fire and volleys of missiles streak towards them. Yet again... "Activating. Hyper Maneuver!" The whole gang flicker and zip between licks of plasma fire, somehow finding gaps of cool air between them. With careful but lightning-fast maneuvers, they shoot or slice down missiles from mid-air, or step cleanly out of their explosive range.

    "Bring it down! All ranged, go go go!" With Moonfin handling the rest of the incoming munitions, Seft, George, Albert, Pavo, and of course, Biteblade, each open fire with, respectively, a heavy laser pistol, a combat shotgun, a rocket launcher, a set of magn-orbs, and a massive, heavy bow, just dumping raw dakka into the thing to mulch it aggressively now that it's running out of mobility and seemingly, somehow, totally untouchable with that lightning crackling between the hyperglass pylons of their armor.
Shepherd     If Shepherd had pride, this would be a humiliating experience. It just was not prepared for this kind of battle, and didn't bring enough firepower to the table. The beast had no problems escalating as much as it needed to in order to do what it needed to, while Shepherd was not. Thus, the advantage was with the beast, whose technology was a match for the AI's once it deployed something strong enough to get through the proxy's defenses.

    As it is, this is an intenely painful learning experience as it gets a dose of just what kind of threats exist in the Multiverse and what they can do to anyone who crosses them. The intense, straightforward attack was something the beast could understand and deal with, and because Shepherd did not bring it down with that strike, it could make the AI pay the price. The volley at this range, without any fancy tech to stop it, tears through the prefab armor and shreds the internals. The air is filled with the sounds of crackling metal and shattered, whining servos as the thing collapses immediately, unable to contest the fury of the flame and bullets sweeping over it. There is a blast of explosive bolts, and the core is ejected from the walker before it falls over in a pile of melting slag and broken mechanics.

The black core flies off, speeding back towards the Gate as it attempts to collate this data for further analysis when it's not getting shot at.
Yuli Sin     Eurys keeps pinballing back at the thing's head, and this time her flurry of fist blows to the gradually more and more dented and damaged and stabbed and burnt and crushed cranial area results in scrap and sparks flying out from under her knuckles, now slicked with viscous, slippery translucent goo of some variety, and licked by tongues of white hot fire. The tail comes up again. It is batted away. The monster opens its maw, charges up one big blast, and then releases it as an unfocused, concussive, fiery explosion in all directions, because that's all it can do with the line of capacitors so thoroughly wrecked. This probably hurls Eurys into the cliff a fourth time.

    Jade spikes rush up from the sands underneath it and shallowly impale it in a score of places, lifting its front half up off the ground where further spikes *actually* impale its armour-stripped chest and jam into its hacked and mangled forelegs. It wriggles, spins up thrusters, and starts clawing with its rear legs, metal groaning and pinging, followed by a sharp jade snap, then two, then a fuckton of raw Flotilla firepower being dumped into it all at once while it's still completely pinned, sending chunks of second, third, and fourth layer armour flying through the air, dispersing into steam, setting off ripples of reactive explosives and gushing vapourized insulator gas, leaving the whole thing mostly a patchwork of blackened underlayers, cracked and scorched silver, and melted or spiderwebbed glass.

    Twin golden raiser shots stab into its head one after the other, caving perfect holes into the monster's damaged 'skull', and then going off inside with a tremendous flash of radioactive light that causes the battered head to turn orange and molten and splatter across the shore like a smashed watermelon, dispersing a small mushroom cloud of vapour from the stump.

o-don't let your guard down.

    The target lock signal suddenly renews itself. Headless, immobile, with broken legs and skewered guts, the seemingly totaled monster revs its autocannons again in all directions, and begins walking lines of automatic fire back and forth, raking and strobing the terrain in all directions like a laser rave party, only having its gun optics to go off of, and so using the eighteen different cannons to focus and switch attacks across the whole party. The last round of missiles is dumped from its ten or so remaining launch catapults, splitting into exploding sub-munitions and double carpeting the only areas remaining unexploded.
Eurys Eurys is able to bat away the tail and repeatedly batter the head. This is good. An unfocused fiery explosion is not good. It blasts out into Eurys, crashing her into the cliffside again.

This time, the cliffside partially crumbles from how battered it is and from the super-strong teenager ghost flying into it, collapsing Eurys under rubble and leaving her almost unconscious. However, before she can be defeated, she rises back as the salvos are released and blasted into her. This should take her out. She should be down.

But hope never dies.

Eurys pushes forward, ectoplasm dropping from her mouth where she was hit, the ghostly fluid showing she's been badly injured. She fades her wings again, and slowly, begins to approach the target, even as cannons rip into her. She tries to weave in and out of them, and gain speed, to rush straight towards the chest.

It's already cracked. She's going to crack it even further, preferably with the help of the others, and rip that heart out. And then, once the phantom adrenaline runs out, she's probably going to pass out, because being a ghost does not mean you're immune to being knocked out or passing out.
Sumiko The entire sky seems to fall towards Mikoto at this point.  She was tired, pushing her limits...but at the same time, there was just a slowly widening grin on her face.  A shadow falling over her face as she brings the blade up.  Maybe she should leave?  However, she refuses.  She refuses to die, she refuses to run...and this only left one course.

Her blade sings as she swings it, catching cannon fire and simply deflecting the attacks around her.  The entire ground near her erupts into explosions, even as missiles fly.  However, missiles could not easily be cut without blowing her up, so a quick jump towards one allows her to use her stolen speed to run up it, and leap up.

As it explodes, she is already diving towards the head of the creature, aiming to swing the blade in a wide arch, aiming to send it through the neck of the creature at any cost.  
Starbound Flotilla     Even the HYPER MANEUVER has to break down eventually. The Flotilla's efforts eventually start to wear down. There's just nowhere to step that isn't full of damage. Albert and Seft take the brunt of it -- Seft, on her shield, Albert on his body as he gets between Pavo and Biteblade, and the ongoing dangers. With arms spread wide and his broad-shouldered back as a kind of shield, he keeps them relatively safe from the worst of it, but suffers in turn. "Ghhh-- It's headless! Tear the heart out!"
    "Alert. The ghost is trying to breach the casing! Help them!!" Seft calls out, as explosions rock her shield.

    "Star Two, cover Biteblade!"
    "Hmph. It would hardly be a loss, but fine."
    "Floran isss running!"

    Moonfin leaps ahead to cut down a number of the incoming munitions, swiping a broad open space for Biteblade to leap through. George and Pavo rush to draw away fire, finding their own cover and maneuvering as they pull targeting away from Biteblade. And Biteblade rushes in to strike! With both daggers out, she joins Eurys. Looking up, she notices Mikoto Shimizu's efforts incoming, and times them under her breath. "Two, one, and..."

    When that blade comes down, a fraction of a second after she's got her fingers in and wrenching the thing apart as best she can, slicing at anything that looks like it's keeping everything together, and trying to expose the heart for someone to grab -- her, or anyone else!
Staren                                     *BOOM!*                                    
                                   HEADSHOT!                                    

    It's not over. Of COURSE it doesn't keep its electronic 'brain' in its head. It probably uses some kind of distributed system.

    Staren's just about out of defensive tricks. He frantically matter-manipulates some cover against the lasers and cannons, but missiles?

    They blow the most defensive parts of his armor the rest of the way to pieces. His visor is so blackened he has rip it out of the battered helmet. His metallic skin below the neck is now bare -- when in pristine condition, this body's shell is a mix of red-painted metal and transparent metal displaying mechanical internals, but with the damage sustained so far the see-through parts are blackened and scorched -- as is much of the rest of him, 'skin' warped and dented by the weapons turned against it.

    What can he do?

    Hope to outlast it?

    Staren goes back to the old reliable particle beam cannons. At least it's lost a lot of that armor now...

    Staren's targeting software tries to pinpoint lenses that indicate optics -- Staren aims for those, trying to melt them into uselessness!
Yuli Sin     Already on its last legs (how is this thing designed to recover from this situation even if it were to finish off its opposition and escape anyways?), the ridiculously heavily armed synthetic beast can't take much more combined fire. Emptying most of its remaining ammunition reserves, with the power supply to its energy weapons critically disrupted, the nameless 'feral' species of robot has no further means to defend itself when its gun optics are picked off one after the other, partly by Staren's beam fire, and partly by Three Chiefs circling at a distance, swapping out his rifle for an equally oversized, weighty, sleek and high power handgun, putting explosive rounds in each sight with methodical precision.

    Its remaining torso superstructure is hacked and punched off, and the insulating membrane inside its chest cavity is sawed and torn open, finally culminating in tearing various red hot cylinders and injectors out of the Shepherd-identified power core, and basically tearing the fusion chamber itself out in lieu of any of the stuff that's liable to fatally explode if torn free all at once. Finally, the giant beast collapses to ground with a huge, rumbling crash, the lights dying in its body, save for those caused by rumbling flames, unable to actually melt their way out through wherever there isn't a smoking breach already.

    The 'heart' is kept nearly adjacent, and doesn't seem to be meaningfully plugged into other system. This one is about the size of a basketball, and sort of a glassy orb in which a mass of liquid blackness pulses and ripples, remaining suspended dead center from any angle. Orange lights prickle in it like embers, rising and submerging beneath the core's surface. There's a constant, low level aura of digital static and broken micro-signals around it, as well as trace alpha and beta radiation, but it's astonishingly difficult to guess what this particular 'organ' is even *for*.

    o-not bad.
o-could have left a little more than that though.
o-it's not much to carry now.

    hree Chiefs moves back up, snapping his weapons to their hardpoints and producing that triangular energy blade again, at a shorter length this time, settling down to start, quite literally, gutting and butchering the beast for useful parts still inside.

o-if talking to that one is so important to you, that should do it.
Sumiko Mikoto comes to a stop on the opposing side of the boss, and while it goes down, she falls to a knee, the blade stabbing into the ground.  Breathing heavily, she takes a sigh and reaches into her pockets to pull out a grief seed.  Yeah...she was going to need this.  

Moments later, as her body catches up, trying to heal her, the seed is touched to her soul gem and giving her more time on the multiversal stage.  Pocketing the thing, she turns around as the ungrateful Three Chiefs complains.  

"I'll try harder next time," She says without complaint, looking at the core they found.  It was kinda pretty, "Well, there is the core.."
Eurys As they rip the core out, Eurys cheers with all her heart. That's not much, because the adrenaline is wearing off. "We did it, yaaaay..."

And then, she collapses. She's not going to die (again) or anything, but she's going to need a few minutes, and maybe a lift.
Staren     FINALLY.

    Staren walks up to observe how the beast is cut apart, and what it's made of. He'd certainly like some samples to see what this thing is made of, but doesn't really have his eye on any particular part. Watching Three Chiefs dissect it will be fascinating, though.