Scene Listing || Scene Schedule || Scene Schedule RSS
Owner Pose
Lilian Rook     "Come on out now. We're not going to wait here all day y'know. There are some people here who can't wait to meet you." The accent is perfectly generic pan-American, instantly forgettable. The distortion is bad enough that there might be two levels of it. Like speaking through a fighter pilot's helmet radio first, before being processed by the PA. "It's going to rain any minute now. Don't you see? I guarantee it's warm and dry inside."

    Heat signatures up on the landing pad. Radiation senses and spy gadgets ping from an invisible laser sweep of the terrain. Focused in a general direction, but not accurately directed at anyone just yet. Bryce motions down, and Katrina mutters something about 'probably on infrared.

    "Get over yourself, Rook. Your caddy boy squealed about you already. Remember? Blue team misses you. Hahaha!"

    Lilian has barely spent much more than a handful of Samhain family gatherings with Bryce, and yet reacts to his motion with non-thought bordering on simultaneity. It's easy to forget, but the motion is military, and Lilian has aspired into the organization that came after him for years. Pulling Tamamo down while tugging on Katrina, Lilian vanishes near flat against the hillside.

    ''Ms. Rook? Infrared is just heat, isn't it?'

    The wordless affirmative spurs on Rita's creation without immediately realizing why she'd ask. The look Lilian gives the clone is one that is forced to contain all the sound she'd like to make, were she not too well-trained. Katrina claps her hands over her mouth. Bryce frowns, and his hand hovers over the cap of the 'Night Road Flare'.

    But the intended attention is drawn. Rita's observation of Lilian is close enough to the real thing that the correct equipment notices the instant multiple sensors change over to their active sweep; several from the helipad on high, many seemingly from the perimeter of the ski resort slash mock town itself. The double-grainy voice of the woman on the other end of the PA system goes quiet, but the continued electrostatic crackle means that someone is communicating over encryped channels; locally, though not so close they can be sensed. 'Secure tactical channel?' comes from Bryce, Lilian pausing and nodding affirmative.

    'I could... No. No. These people are ruthless. Just like my brothers. Miss Tamamo is right. Provoking them like that would only be a mistake.'
    'These people are trained killers with top-of-the-line equipment, and they won't be put away with a well-placed shot and a wish. I should know.'
    'James. They'll definitely acquire the fake Lilian. I'm going to make for the closest building, and unlock that facing door.'

    It's implausible to think that multiple teleportations go undetected, but it'd be naive to imagine that NAZCA would expect Lilian to come alone. Many Elites physically present are already known quantities by now.

    Xion is bathed in the warm flourescence of an interior lodge-front; still connected to main power. The lock is stiff, but clicks open just fine. Discarded leaves rustle on the front step. Trudy appears close behind the concrete back side, facing a parking lot, intentionally oriented to be obscured from the elevator line. The asphalt is old and cracked but it couldn't have been swept that long ago. Looking through the back window, she can see the same as Bond, as he slips through cover and insinuates himself indoors: the lurching recognition of a clerk behind the counter, followed by the drop at noticing its blank crash-dummy face.
Lilian Rook     '>Arthur: Figure out the nature of the situation'

    There are countless sites to place small-scale installations without obvious evidence as to their purpose. The number of security cameras all over is worrisome, and more so for being completely in keeping without all especially paranoid upper-middle class resort layout. The electrostatic crackle of high-frequency communication is bothersome. Nagging, even. There must be a few bands; but only one of them stands out to him, but its gut similarity to . . . a deep space communications dish? Unshielded. Somewhere on the peak, away from the helipad.

    It'd be weird for there to be heavy defenses here, of all places. It's a clear shot to the helipad, but a useless area; preserved for the same reason that wooden shack of a temple is. But something still feels weird about it. Like he rolled one number short of an obscure knowledge check he had to make. Something about the early autumn leaf litter surrounded by all these fine trees, and the way the only clear lot has seemingly been lightly maintained, yet allowed to grow over just such that it can't be securely seen from up the peak.

    Bond's computer sweep verifies that the tree cover from the place where people would obviously go in and out of the mountain is thick enough that a diligent security force would defoliate it. He nearly trips over a metal-capped hole drilled into the cement on the way inside; empty.

    'Oh, wait, we're getting trash talked.'

    The comm crackle-whines as Lilian struts out into the open. A delay closer to thirty seconds than ten. Even the laugh you hear, dry and joyless, is so thoroughly devoid of any hint of the speaker's place and time; as if you could fail to place an accent, and be slightly frustrated for it, by hearing sarcastic giggling. "Aren't you cocky. I knew that from your file already, but seeing you strut like that tells me that our intel is just too dry." says the woman on the line; less enthused to see Lilian, rather than more.

    "Look at you. You're on our turf, caught trying and failing to sneak in through the back door, and you brush it off like you're so above it all. It must be a full time job maintaining that superior attitude in front of everyone. I bet we could shoot your belt buckle off, right now, and you'd act like you dropped your pants on purpose."

    The line pulses harsh static. Bryce jumps up and lunges out to grab Katrina. "Condition one. Toast the bitch."

    Window shutters draw back on snap motors in the clearing around Lilian. Tungsten rods shoot up from tiny holes in the terrain. Bryce cracks the cap on the Night Road Flare. Katrina shrieks at being grabbed. The mock resort floods with blinding sickly-blue light, and creates a second set of shadows.

    Rita's tentacle decoy is flooded with a human-fatal blast of gamma radiation. The spill-off cooks the woods on the border of the ski resort. Trudy, behind meters of concrete, is spared, as are Xion and Bond indoors, should they have the sense to get down. Lilian disappears with Tamamo, and appears on her back in a spray of broken glass on a diner floor, eyes screwed shut, breath held.

    Everywhere from the road to the elevator line sprouts scores of pole-mounted devices from those narrow holes drilled in behind just about every corner. Geometric scramblers, each no bigger than a golf ball, overlapping each other in layers of redundant coverage. Radio noise blasts every bandwidth, flooding out from the helipad level. You can barely pinpoint the activation of larger, stationary posts, like back at the Urban Center, triangulated around the peak. All runes, spell circles, leylines, spatial links, are now drawn Wrong; erroneous and inaccurate, distorted by static. Heat signatures go off at the helipad. Launch flares and smoke contrails paint three separate high-velocity descents down to your level.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: RADIATION!!

    Arthur manages to swear several times rapidly on instinct before his forebrain realizes what he's detected, and the minute it does realize, he's already screaming, "RADIOLOGICAL SPIKE!!"

    Geometric scramblers hit him with full force. Radio noise knocks out a lot of his coordination, and even his more communicative game menus are lagging out. He stumbles, for a second in disorientation. Just a second, though. Geometry is one of his key tools, but only one. There are others, and one of them is what he puts to use as he rocket-blasts out of the treeline:

>Arthur: Strife!!

    "HEY *SHITHEED-MARTIN*, YOU WANNA TAKE A RADIO-SWING LIKE THAT, I'LL FUCKING MICROWAVE YOUR THYROID UNTIL THEY'VE INVENTED A NEW TYPE OF GHOST FOR YOU TO WALK! HOW ABOUT YOU GET HOOVER'S DICK OUT OF YOUR MOUTH AND COME DOWN, TAKE A REAL SWING, INSTEAD OF *BUYING YOUR BALLS FOR THREE TRILLION TAXPAYER DOLLARS* YOU FUCKING--!!" Arthur's voice manages to boom at a truly unbelievable volume. He finishes it off with an invented slur for automated-weapon operators (a loose equivalent is a sort of middleground between the words 'chairforce' and 'scrub' in the fighting-game sense).

    It's less for their benefit and more for his. He has to go loud instantly. While he can't make portals beyond the most incredibly short-ranged ones right now, he does this: A slam onto the ground that immediately ejects a number of stars, enough to blanket the area in daylight-esque heat that makes it incredibly difficult for those missiles to land. Those shining constructs, however long they last, immediately begin gushing streams of high-heat hostile starfire into the windows, intent on burning out sensitive particle-accelerating devices responsible for that level of radiation.

    No radio. But he's got shout power. "POINT ME AT THE--" The word again. "--AND I'M GONNA HARVEST SOME FUCKING KNEECAPS, SEE HOW FUN SITTING IN THE CONTROL CENTER IS AFTER *THAT* SHIT!" He's finally got some stand-up-and-fight faces to the anonymous alphabet soup that has been haunting his attempts at heroism in this world, and *boy* does he intend to make plenty of that gamer frustration into their problem.
Rita Ma      Rita catches the group's flinching at the Lilian from the corner of her eye. She swallows and forces herself not to look directly at it.

     The decoy's tentacle-umbilical can manage sixty feet at a stretch. Rita hops between buildings to follow it as it strides forward, staying cloaked whenever she's out of cover and trying to huddle behind dense material where she imagines sensor shadows might be.

     "and you brush it off like you're so above it all."
     Oh, thank goodness. They're falling for it.
     ... Hey, isn't that a little too mean? Why's everyone hate Ms. Rook-

     - - - -

     Decoy-flesh sizzles in the flash just like the real stuff should, and Lilian convulses and collapses in convincing pain just before disappearing.

     The pain looks convincing, of course, because--

     Fifty feet away, in the corner of a hotel room, Rita surrounded in a glowy spherical forcefield clamps both hands over her mouth to keep from making any noise. That field absorbed the latter half of the flash; being behind cover absorbed another bit; what's left is an ugly sunburn and rising nausea. She draws the formerly Lilian-mimicking tentacle in, lethally crisped; amputating and regrowing it makes it come back weird and bubbly, so she amputates it closer to the base, and that time it comes in smooth.

     "I'm okay," everyone-but-Petra hears echoing in their heads. The voice is Rita's, dim and foggy, crawling up the ancient hindbrain rather than coming in through the ears. She isn't okay, but it's close enough for military. "They think Lilian's hurt. See if they overextend?"

     If anybody 'thinks' back at her, she can hear them too. This, fortunately, isn't magic.
Trudy Grimm > "I bet we could shoot your belt buckle off, right, now, and you'd act like you dropped your pants on purpose."

    The witch's regular smile is gone. Something about this person's voice and attitude bothers her deeply. That earlier comparison to the rotten elements of her family is feeling more apt with every passing syllable. That laugh in particular hit her-- in a different way.

    Acting mirthful as a way to cover something deeply unpleasant. In both cases; hatred. Though even Trudy must inwardly admit that both cases direct their hate differently.

That person hates her... while I...

> "Toast the bitch."

    She doesn't get to finish that thought. The crackle over the radio comes through the crystal ball held deep in her sleeve as more like the crackle of a bonefire. This noise draws the witch back from the corner just as the command is issued. She's in the process of reaching into her sleeve with the rods are exposed and the entire plaza she had just been observing becomes consumed in a blast of blinding Cherenkov blue that sears the plants just a pace away.

    She shields her face out of reflex behind her sleeve. She feels the heat, batting at it and finding no flame to extinguish. Her hand goes to the Grimoire but stops, recalling the warnings from before about careless or casual magic usage. Instead, the witch doffs her jacket and drops it into her shadow; soldiering on in a white vest for the forseeable future.

    Stepping back along the wall; Trudy's shadow remains where it is. It grows, and from the inky depths emerges a leather-clad hand covered in segmented tekko. The horns of the kabuto emerge next, signaling the arrival of one of the Samurai Brothers with his great sword across his back. Turning once emerged, he helps his other half out; a similarly clad armored warrior with a yumi bow and a quiver of spear-sized arrows at his hip.

    Trudy points. The brothers nod.

    Devices intent on scrambling magic should have a much harder time defending against sharpened steel; The first to act is the archer, unslinging his yumi and slamming his left foot down into a forward stance. In a single fluid motion he draws an arrow with two fingers, nocks it, and pulls the bowstring back to full draw. He takes only one heartbeat to aim; then releases. The bow snaps so hard it reverses in his grip, hurling an arrow the size of a polearm at one of the triad of larger scrambling devices surrounding the distant peak.

    The second to act is the sword-wielding Brother; gripping the o-dachi across his back and surging out into the open beneath Arthur's artificial stars. As he draws close to the nearest of the helipad-level scramblers, the strike comes in tandem to his draw; a modified iaijutsu from a back draw rather than the hip. Only after slicing the first disruptor does his foot strike the ground, immediately shifting his trajectory towards the next; rolling the momentum of the first strike into a second cleave. Foot down, kicking up dust and charred grass, hurling himself at the third. There's overlap in their range, and a great many of them.

    The warrior with the sword will only stop if forced to do so. The warrior with the bow is already drawing his second arrow. Trudy remains behind cover for now, evaluating her next move.
Xion An invoked fear repeatedly worried about - that the little location was the target of a bombing, and not some showdown - quiets out of Xion as she transitions across terrain. One portal, irising between treeline and near building, lets the Nobody backstep into the pooling darkness and emerge in an equally-empty if unequally-unlit flourescent-cast pale inner entryway.

Fingers work the door handle, and then push inside, shoulders hunched and fist wrapped in a readied keychain--

'There's nothing *here*!' Xion longs to say, pantomimes saying to no-one as Bond traverses terrain, and continues her lock-averting tail through the entryway of the fake Lilian. Piecing over shelves and sliding across countertops quietly, the Nobody pauses to look - spooked - at the crash test dummy.

They're so going to get bombed.

It is not that long later, a mere thirty seconds or so, before the voice reacts to decoy Lilian, states 'toast that butch', and Xion throws herself down behind a low wall while cursing the window over her back. Radiation blasts out, lighting up the outside, but doesn't shatter glass. Instead, Xion quirks her hands up from covering the back of her neck and looks around, feels around, feels--

Woozy. Instinctually Xion grasped, touched, connected to places in a large zone around her, felt them with many hands, touched them with fingers of feelings and soft-brushed with a placing-in-space and constellation with every other thing. Key to her ability to snap here and there and find the particular portal-holes was this touch-sense, perpetuated out from her person.

The cacophony from each of the jammers threw this sense off completely, pausing the Nobody in a sick moment of getting her head on straight. Denied a quick jump-about, and with her once-sure senses filled with the soup and stew of un-knowing, Xion reaches towards her own chest for answers close to the heart.

Fingers pushing past the limit of her lapel, the noirette Nobody draws two medallions glowingly from with her own chest and readies the first in hand shakily - aqua blue with the homunculus Viviane's face. The second, behind and resting in palm, black and honeycombed gold, with a smug Binah.

The buildings leading to the helipad are hit with a sudden rolling fog-bank, an expanding sphere of groundpattering rain-and-fog to hide moving shapes and heat signatures. From inside the fogbank, a trio of zipping small pale lights punch through, balls of glowing color - red, gold, white - with stained-glass wings in avian style.

The trio of 'fairies' hunt and seek a matching of the missiles fired from above, one to one. While Xion does a bit of woozy urban exploration to make her way through fog-shielded buildings higher in the Definitely Going To Get Bombed little town, her three Binah-borrowed fairies go to find three matches:

One seeks to find a missile match,
    but if it does, their touching produces a tremendously oversized and explosive reaction.

A second seeks to find a missile,
    to gobble it up, and send it 'Nowhere', hungry.

The third just seeks, seeing, sensing.
James Bond James. They'll definitely acquire the fake Lilian. I'm going to make for the closest building, and unlock that facing door.

    Bond nods. His passage to the building she indicates is methodical yet urgent, fraught with tense pauses spent waiting breathlessly against trees, his eyes often checking the reflection in that corner-checking gadget he'd brought along.

    The duffel bag is a burden of the worst sort--necessary, despite the way it forces his gait to preventively accomodate its urge to sway.

    His boot hits something, on the way inside, and a deathly quiet falls over him, for perhaps a second--there isn't the telltale 'click' that he was expecting, nor does there seem to be any sort of other indication that the hole is what his mind immediately concluded it would be.

    At the end of that serpentine path, past the hole, he crosses into the building and his grip on his weapons--the gagdet knife and the suppressed pistol--relaxes, just slightly beneath 'white-knuckled.'

    Both are snapped-to, when he spots the clerk, his eyes briefly full of cold intent, his brow furrowed in silent interrogation/demand--until a silent sigh drops his shoulders and sees him lower the weapon.

    So it *is* one of those towns. But it couldn't be left over from all the way back then, could it? It'd be newer. Pre-Onslaught. What on earth would they be testing all the way out here? If it were still being used, they'd have gotten rid of all those trees at the mountain complex.

    Bond's eyes flick towards Xion, his expression silently asking her the same thing he turns over in his head.

You're on our turf, caught trying and failing to sneak in through the back door, and you brush it off like you're so above it all.

    Bond heads behind the counter with the 'clerk,' moving the dummy aside and setting the bag on the countertop.

It must be a full time job maintaining that superior attitude in front of everyone.

    The bag opens. Inside is a spread of tools and contingencies. Bond unscrews the suppressor on the pistol and sheathes the knife.

I bet we could shoot your belt buckle off, right now, and you'd act like you dropped your pants on purpose.

    Out comes a black carbine, to which the Walther will today play second fiddle. It's a shorter, more compact form of a rather ubiquitous marksman rifle. A magazine is crisply snapped into place, and a suppressor fitted for the carbine is screwed on. Bond's hand hovers near an ambidextrous charging handle--

The line pulses harsh static.
Condition one. Toast the bitch.

    Of course.

    Bond flies over the counter, hitting the deck. The motion is as fluid and as thoughtless as bare instinct, made almost on reflex.

    Why bother with keeping the entrance clear when you can toast the entire place with the flip of a switch?

    He hits the floor and pulls back the charging handle.
James Bond I'm okay. They think Lilian's hurt. See if they overextend?

    Rita? I didn't know you could do that. Yes--let's wait. If nothing else, Lowell should get them to come make a visit in person.

    Bond holds up an index to his lips, as if to say to Xion, 'whatever you plan to do, do it quietly.' Reaching into a pocket on his fatigues, he procures a pair of goggles with lenses as black as midnight on a moonless night--there's no way that he's going to see anything with those. As it happens, that's the point.

    Slipping them on puts him into a different world--the world as it's 'seen' by cave spiders, vanishingly rare sorts of fish and other creatures that spend their whole lives without ever knowing the warmth or light of the sun, who dwell in places where eyes are a dimly-thought of ancestral appendage, if not evolved out of entirely.

    The scope on his rifle is replaced by something similar, designed to interface with the goggles. Sight by way of echolocation--through walls or trees, boots crunching through leaf litter or over cracked asphalt generate hazy-white person-figures on the inside lenses of those goggles, ripples spreading out to guide him in sweeping pulses towards the origin points of those footfalls.

    Arthur's yelling is a constant, like the splash of a waterfall against rocks. The launch flares from the helipad cloud his 'vision,' too--but it can be navigated around, as can the motions of Trudy and her warriors. Keeping track of the ghostly figures whose profiles he doesn't recognize and following the ripples on his goggles, he creeps back to the counter, reaches for the bag, and slings it over his shoulder.

    They'll be doing cleanup now. Looking for us in the places we might've survived that, and either killing us there or trying to flush us out with whatever that was at the helipad. God willing, this place holds for just long enough. Spending this advantage wastefully is as good as waiting for them to find and kill us. I just need to wait for the right one--either the one giving the orders, or the one they look up to.

    He pauses. The hissing of that missile is gone--and another paints the vision on his goggles in staticky clouds before dissipating.

    Well done, Xion.

    It might be a hand-signal, picked up by the rustling of fabric. Maybe it's a pregnant pause, or, between bootfalls, an expectant look. None of them are surefire ways to pick off a commanding officer or the 'heart of the team'--but they're the best Bond will get on this short notice. His own creeping paints the obstructions around him in bits and pieces. Slowly, methodically, he navigates his way through the darkness of the building. Up, up, pausing, at the whine of a security camera he can see detailed in scraggly white lines before he crosses its line of sight.

    He waits for its slow sweep in the opposite direction, crossing briskly under it before ascending the stairs and finding his desired vantage point--a spot next to what the goggles paint as a window, thin and sonorous.

    Eyes on the target, Bond gently toggles the fire selector, looks through the scope--amplifying the detail of the goggles in much the same way a 'normal' scope would for binocular sight. Center mass.

    The glass shatters, bullets raining down on his victim amidst the rain of glimmering shards. He remembers well, how resilient they were, when they'd come to try and disrupt in Siberia. He doesn't hesitate now like he did then--even though it means his position is compromised.
Petra Soroka     Cognitive dissonance can't really stop Petra from looking out from the corner of her eyes at the Lilian-clone as it walks out of the treeline, conveniently attached to nothing and no one visible. Magic just does that kind of thing, so it's normal, and anyone could've made it. Even Petra could do something similar with herself, just by shoving Qetra out into the clearing and baiting people into shooting her, if that were called for-- and if it wouldn't almost certainly make Xion unhappy. Having gone through two whole arcs vis-a-vis her own perspective on Lilian since last encountering the Letter Agency, she can't trust her own memory of how *they* see Lilian, besides as an enemy and target, but she's at least expecting a measure of... wary respect. Being Lilian's enemy (in a normal way) is *scary*, and surely an advanced government agency is intelligent and emotionally-stable enough to recognize her eminent capability and treat her cautiously for it.

"Toast the bitch."

    Before the blue light even registers in Petra's senses, she instinctively reacts to something far more telling. Bridging the cognitive association from blue to Cherenkov glow to dangerous radiation requires military-grade reaction times Petra simply hasn't trained. What she *does* know is that when Lilian blinks away with Tamamo, danger is about to come from *somewhere*.

    Behavioral mirroring is a spinal reflex for Petra; she's tackling Cinder before a conscious thought completes in her mind. Silver washes over the pair-- trio, including Angela within the Eggpack-- spilling and blossoming in a dome to shield them from the harsh blue un-heat, sealing them in shadow against the ground for a handful of seconds. She was expecting a bomb of some kind, waiting until the ground stopped shaking as a signal for when to get back up, but instead it's uncomfortably deathly silent until Arthur's shouting leaks through the seal.

    Prickling electromagnetic afterglow greets Petra when she peels back the shield and awkwardly scrambles over Cinder to get out, accidentally bumping her with the Eggpack as she does. Woozily nauseous in a way she can't spare the time to linger on the violatory frightening nature of, she gives a hand up to Cinder, babbling while rushing over with her to cover inside the nearest resort shack. "Oh my god, I can't believe even the future-CIA jackasses are the same old shitty misogynists to Lilian. Not even clever ones either. They don't even know that Lilian would figure out a dozen ways to keep her pants up before anyone even noticed anything; not like that one time that she stripped me on live TV and I had to hide under a table."

    Petra is girl-scale, which is trumped by heat-seeking missiles. Back pressed against the concrete wall, she twists the rifle-bayonet attachment onto the end of her transteam gun, simply trusting in her dear allies that she won't be vaporized in high-explosive hellfire in a matter of seconds. Staring blankly face-to-nonface with a crash test dummy slumped over sideways across a bench, she immediately forms an adrenaline-fueled sense of cameraderie.

    "Um-- ratbots won't work. Can't rely on the Silver, since it's being fucky too." Radio static doesn't blot out the cybersynaptic connection within the metamaterial, but it's numbing like pins and needles, clumsily roiling and contracting in the air with turbulently uncoordinated movements. "So I'm just doing it raw, I guess."
Angela "What is Blue Team? How unimaginatively named though I suppose our groups have little room to comment--" Angela says. "What is this woman's deal? Is Sarracenia in charge of this Agency? Is that why they're more concerned with your attitude than your actions--"

There is a flash of radiation. The Eggpack's connection, already struggling from that first EMP hit, shudders--r
"KHhhhhhk was that? Khhhhhhhk is everyKHhhhhhkkk OkayKhhhhhhk hkhhhhhhhhhhhhkkkk...."

Angela's visage in on the Eggpack screen flickers and goes completely dark.

And Back at LobCorp, Angela says, "Lilian? Petra? are you there? Can you hear me?" Only static answers her. She swears furiously and throws down Hook's hat so she can kick it and goes on a vibrant tirade against the Letters Agency in English and then, like an irate autoresponder, in Spanish. She grabs Solty's teddy bear and bites it in frustration before remembering the bear did nothing wrong and sets it aside.

She presses her fingers into her desk. Then she slams it with both her fists.

She has no option but to wait and see what happens.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait. Every passing second is a thousand where she doesn't know how well her closest friends are doing, how much they're suffering, if they're okay, if they're alive. .277 repeating hours passes with every instant.

MEANWHILE

Cinder feels Petra collide against her, going down in an instant. "Oofhh! Petra--!"

Petra reacted so quickly that Cinder hadn't quite realized she was about to get toasted! Cinder does know, at least, to stay on the floor with Petra on top of her until Petra gets up and offers her a hand. SHakily, Cinder takes her hand and lifts it back up.

For a moment, Cinder thought she was about to...

"Th..thanks Petra..." She sees the Eggpack. "Oh--shit shit--is Angela okay?" She remembers Angela is not the Eggpack. "Oh gosh she's going to be so worried..."

''I can't believe even the future CIA-jackasses...''

"Yeah." Cinder agrees, launching waves of flame towards those weird pole-mounted devices from Fourth Match Flame. "Maybe they really are secretly run by Sarracenia--or at least like some mirror equivalent-- Carassenia." She's mostly accustomed to this rhetoric coming from Sarracenia, not unlike Angela herself.

Cinder realizes that fire blasts are bad when heat seeking missiles are about and CHUCKS her sword to take cover near Petra.

"This...haha...got real bad real quick." Cinder manages weakly.
Lilian Rook     Cherenkov blue sputters out. Pavement sizzles in the immediate vicinity. Browned leaves blow away in the wind stirred by simultaneous multiple launch. Katrina screams "Li--!!" somewhere in the woods, and is whisked away by the spatial flare that consumes her along with Bryce. Spatial senses get seasick at nearly the exact same time; too close to tell. Delicate electronics fry and pop in the face of stellar light. The roar of rocket exhaust shudders the windows.

    Half a dozen flares break off from the desceding heat blooms, and accelerate zigzag into the core-sampled cityscape. Most swerve directly into Arthur's decoy stars, and adjacent buildings erupt into opaque geysers of mud and pulverized asphalt. A handful land in the vicinity of Lilian, barring the approach of rescuers, then all but one are intercepted by Xion. Shrapnel adds fresh pockmarks to the building facades, and car windows crack from heat. The combined sound makes your teeth rattle in your skull.

    The contrails cut out from the descent still in process, and then aerial heat wash scalds your skin. The ground rumbles in waves from three nearly simultnaeous impacts. The fog swells and silently crashes upon itself, and from within it, you hear voices, transmitted by loadspeaker, not radio. No surprise, given wireless comms are near worthless now.

    "Negative confirm. Ripple trashed."
    "No joy on package."
    "Skosh on rifle. What state?"
    "Tiger."
    "Tiger."
    "Bracket me and resume commit."

    One of the Brothers destroys several microjammers in quick succession. Trudy barely feels the pressure let up on her rune magic. Cinder causes a handful more to smoke, crack, and burst into flame on the spot, and it doesn't get much better. They're essentially undefended; little more than a mechanism to deploy and retract a disposable unit; but the sheer number of them is designed to lethally waste time. Many are hidden in awkward areas. Rooting them out under fire is designed to be normally infeasible.

    The second Brother fires an enormous arrow over the fog cloud, out over the forest, halfway to the mountain peak just ahead, where the transmission center of a broadcast pole is located; and a terse flash of ground fire intercepts it at a hundred meters.

    "Bandit targeting autocat. Birds away."
    "Splash. Blow through."
    "Still blank."
    "Confirm goggle then float."

    For a short while, the enemy exists within Xion's defensive fog cloud, placed ahead of their advance, and thus can't see the Elites scampering to defensive positions outside it. The security cameras are definitely capable of outing them, but there's no way to wirelessly connect to them right now; they've deprioritized digital electronics since last time, given the hacking that went on. However the same largely goes vice-versa; within all those dancing lights and false-positive shapes, the enemy is just as hard to identify.

    Save Bond, who has the one early preview of a direly discouraging sight.
Lilian Rook     The impulse to check the zoom on his goggles comes, then goes, replaced with sinking cold reality. The human shapes he locates are far too large, and far too irregular, to be what anyone could possibly have hoped for. Echolocation paints him a fuzzy picture at best; distorted along as many anti-sonar craft-angles as could be managed, but what he's looking at is undeniably metal. Thirty feet. A hundred tons. Three of them. And not the outdated G.D.F hulks rusting in the desert out there; seemingly not even related to the quadrupedal all-terrain vehicles of yesteryear, developed to spearhead into Antegent terraformed territory.

    As far as he knows-- as far as Lilian knows-- humanoid robots aren't a thing, and weren't ever going to be, and yet he's looking at them. Instead of a team of nine elite operatives, the group is facing down a squadrum of urban warfare-sized mechs. And though everything about the silhouettes he perceives are almost disturbingly human, for some reason, something about them still naggings at him; something that begs chilling, quarter-minded recollection of the Ekanamsha.

    The lead machine is obvious at least; the woman's voice is coming from it. He can see it visually examining Rita's decoy.

    "Fuck. It's not her."

    An edge of genuine tone-- something other than forgettable blandness-- bleeds into the broadcast, sharply curtailing operational code for a few more moments.

    "Confirm? Gait recognition and IR were positive."
    "She'd have staggered off into the woods a mile and a half from here and collapsed in a ditch. Somewhere hard to find. Signal for help and wait for anti-rad meds to kick in."
    "System is confirmed effective on India Tangos."
    "That's not what I mean you stupid piece of shit. If her guard was this sloppy a sniper could do it. I don't believe it. Not a Bravo Hotel. Especially not Fenrir."
    "Confirm?"
    "I said commit!"

    'TAKE A REAL SWING, INSTEAD OF *BUYING YOUR BALLS FOR THREE TRILLION TAXPAYER DOLLARS* YOU FUCKING--!!'

    The fog cover tears at one edge. A massive shadow limned by a blinding fireball. A hundred tons of eerily organic metal barrels out of the common clearing and accelerates at Arthur. Heavy calibre machine guns turn his surrounding world into a beehive and leave him choking on dust. A flash of something else register to him as magic. He sees thrusters fire sideways, and a house-sized machine skates semicircular around him. "Cut the chatter, Lowell. You're making this fun."

    Aggro drawn. A mechanical fist the size of his entire torso lashes out at him. Arcs of lightning leap from its surface without even touching, but it's being grabbed that's worse; the geometries at work are a deadly curse.
Lilian Rook     Lilian, two buildings away, clambers up off the broken glass-strewn floor, holds her breath in the wash of ash and dust billowing through the window, and staggers to catch herself on a diner counter. She gags once, then dry retches, and then coughs up a stream of sickly clear fluid. Her breathing is laboured, even though she forces herself to her feet just fine.

    "Tamamo . . ." She reaches out her hand, both to help the other woman up, and to silently request and accept the charms that kill moderate levels of radiation poisoning. Hope springs eternal.

    Drawing Night Mist just after, Lilian taps her radio, realizes slightly too late that it won't work, considers calling out to confirm, and then bites her lip bloody. "I'll . . . I'm going to confirm that Bryce and Katrina made it out. I'll join up in just a second."
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Cut the chatter.
>Arthur: Wait, who is this again?

    "COME OVER HERE AND CUT IT YOURSELF, GUNFUCK!" Arthur hollers, bleeding and manic and enduring all the shots he can while rocket-dodging those he can't. A hand lashes out during the impacts, and snatch him. A deadly geometric curse. How many times have dark geometries been used here? Radiation? While cooking in the palm, the thought crosses his mind. One Witch of Time, Lilian. One Seer of Light, Sakura. One Heir of Mind, Nika. One...

    One...

>Arthur: FOCUS!!

    A jolt of geometry in his chest. His body distorts, glitches rippling along his skin while his HEALTH VIAL darts in various directions. "GHHHH..." He grips the fingers. "Alright CHAIRFORCE ZERO, you wanna play MY GAME, you don't bring that HEAT outside of the RING when you wanna keep your KNEECAPS AT THE END!" Eyes light up. Sudden gravity slams his feet into the ground hard by forcing the hand down, getting him only partially out of the grip and into more of a wrestling stance. "HaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!" He roars, spittle and blood arcing from his mouth as he musters the loudest and most determined battle-scream he's done in months, maybe years.

    Spirographs trace along the ground. Grids stretch from his feet, arcing into the surrounding terrain but distorting badly at the soles of this giant machine. His eyes shine deep green, the machine's thumb held in one of his palms and a middle finger in the other, going geometry-versus-geometry. "HHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!" His effort roars. But-- it's not defensive, is it? No, he's still bleeding from dark geometry, his HEALTH VIAL'S points of GEL are draining badly. If this is a defensive measure, it's faltering badly.

    It's not. It's a building attack.

>Arthur: Hit her with everything you can.

    "FUCK YOU, MURDERER!"

    This person's the one supporting the slaughter at the Pendragon settlement, and to this day, he's still not over it. The word is spit more venomously than any of the offensive gamer slang he's slung. It's the only warning they'll get about what comes next.

    The grid and spirographs burst in light, retracting rapidly into his feet and blasting through his fingers like a magical pile-bunker slamming into the hand. The counter-geometry is an impact heavy enough to provoke the sort of shockwave that'll rattle every building nearby, the kind of blast that leaves deep craters and shocked systems. If this isn't the target's specialty, their aspect, they sure won't bring that kind of geometric heat much longer. But if it is... it's a hard contest, aspect against aspect.

    Something in Arthur's gut makes him know: He needs to gauge exactly how far this enemy's Aspect goes, and he needs to endure everything it takes to learn that.
Trudy Grimm     The Kyudo Brother's arrow does not make its target, shredded by the inordinate amount of gunfire necessary to shoot down something that small moving that fast. He lowers his bow, arrow still nocked in the string and not drawn back, as if considering the best way to approach this new challenge.

    Shadows begin emerging from the fog Xion produced. The Kenjutsu Brother slides to a stop, his o-dachi held low, his entire body tensed like a predator prepared to pounce. It's the first of the great battle machines that cause him to rise up to a more neutral stance, bringing his blade up to rest over his shoulder armor. His brother, the archer, shifts his attention to the more immediate concern of Giant Robots.

    Slowly, the sword-wielding samurai turns where he stands, the faintly glowing green pits of his eyes resting on Trudy in the distance. His free hand raises, pointing at the lead machine as the pilot examines what's left of Decoy Lilian. Impatiently, he excitedly emphasizes the point a few times. The archer turns where he stands, then, looking back towards their shared master.

    The energy of I Want To Fight That transcends speech.

    The witch closes her eyes, lifting her hands in a shrug and shaking her head. She then gestures in a 'get on with it' sort of way.

    The pair waste no time at all.

    The archer pulls a second arrow from his quiver, nocking it alongside the first. He plants his lead foot and place his weight on it, then leans back as he draws the yumi to its full weight in one smooth motion. His chosen target is the lead machine.--

        --The sword-wielding samurai kicks off. His o-dachi slides back across his back into its holstered position though he keeps his right hand on the tsuka. Using the fog as cover, he closes in on the lead machine.--

            --The yumi bow is tilted sideways just before he releases the spear-sized projectiles, a maneuver intent on placing them both along the machine's sight line. If his aim is true; it should soundly pierce both main optics at once.--

                --Within five paces, the swordsman leaps not for the mech's face or even its chest; but for its left leg. In the same instant that it has to react to being shot in the face, the swordsman slams his full weight into the side of its knee joint. Using this as a springboard, he hurls himself up higher. It is here that his blade leaves the saya. Gripping the hilt with both hands, he brings his full weight down on the right leg just above the thigh while it's off-balance, right where the armor plating must end to allow for movement in the knees.

    Behind her concrete wall, Trudy crouches near one of the ruined magical geometry scramblers. She collects one that had been severed cleanly from its power source by her minion, lifting it to her eyes for a closer look.

If I intend to unravel this, approaching it as a curse might be beneficial, or perhaps...
James Bond     God damn it.

    Bond's irritation is evident in the sharp draw of the zipper across the bag.

    Rita, if that new trick of yours works both ways, listen to me. They're not on foot, so don't fight them as if they are. They might not even be here in person--I need you to tell whoever else can hear you that they're in 'bipedal armoured fighting vehicles.' Walking tanks. Try to hit them from blind spots and don't commit to anything if you're not sure it'll destroy them.

    Click. The underbarrel grenade launcher slides neatly into place. Bond waits for the whine of the camera around the corner before advancing towards it again. A faint sound, like the passing of a wasp, plants a directional charge into the camera, gently 'splutting' on impact.

    He then leaps from the window, a rappel line spooling from the watch to control his descent in several short hops. If they're actually making use of those things, I can, too. Bond's boots gently press down onto solid ground. A twist of the bezel on his watch sets off the charge, destroying the camera. That ought to be enough to register 'movement'--and in a vehicle like those things, it's easy to fall on the urge to just point and shoot thoughtlessly.

    Bond's superhuman physique carries him at a sprint, safely away from his former vantage point. Where would something like that be most heavily armored? The leader--she sounds pretty confident. Bored, almost. I bet the cockpit's reinforced. The legs... probably the second-most--don't want your trillion dollar hardware guttered by an unexpected ditch.

    As a gambler of more than infrequent occasion, Bond has a complicated relationship with luck. Let's try the arms. The forms are distorted, as might be expected--to attack something like that from far above or far below would be the next expected development of any nation unlucky enough to meet one of these in the field.

    Thoonk.

    Bond sends a grenade sailing through the fog in a deceptively lazy parabola, aimed for where he can best imagine the connecting point between the arm and the torso to be. He doesn't stop to watch it sail, or even to make the shot, continuing his superhuman sprint over to the next building, and then the next past that. Too obvious, otherwise. The rifle lowered, he ignores the beads of sweat trickling down his temples as he navigates to a different menu on his watch.

    A mechanized glass-cutter silently traces a circle on a ground-floor window. A neat, person-sized circle of glass falls outward, gently caught by Bond before he dives through in anticipation of another pulse. A crouching roll is his landing, and he creeps upwards, up the stairs-- Another goddamn camera. But this press and fade offense is how it will have to be--there's no fighting that kind of thing head on. Not for him, anyway. He waits, watching the device through the wall for its gaze to turn away from his entry point, before creeping beneath and along its sweep to find another vantage point and load another grenade into the underbarrel attachment.
Rita Ma      Rita? I didn't know you could do that. Yes--let's wait.
     "I couldn't," she brain-whispers back. Something near-misses the human brain, an iceberg looming through the fog. How she commands monsters becomes a little more comprehensible.

     Looking for us in the places we might've survived that...
     "Right," she thinks for everyone's benefit. "Stay on the move, but keep low until you see an opening."

     And the moment her heart stops pounding so badly: "... Ms. Katrina? Mr. Bryce? Are you still there?"

     Rita barely disturbs Xion's fog as she hops from rooftop to rooftop, invisibly circling around NAZCA's inferred position. Her regeneration's hissing steam blends right in, only briefly flaring her on infrared.

     "'Bravo Hotel'... do they mean 'Bloom of Humanity'? That's such an ugly way to say it. And if Ash was 'Jormungandr', then 'Fenrir' is probably Ms. Rook, right?"

     "I can't see them yet, but Mr. Bond says they're in 'bipedal armored fighting vehicles'. Maybe if we--"

     The thruster-flare is definitely something she can see through the fog, and the gatling rounds are a hundred times louder than rain. Her gut drops. Who-- "Arthur!"

     A concussive beam of light introduces Ash's mech to her, aimed for the vague shape of the head and cratering the building behind them. 'Blind spot', she hopes. Rita knows better than to stay in one place after throwing her weight behind that, and breaks for the woods.

     "Not many of them, but they'll be tough. Ramp, saturate them with targets? Already proven we can stop their missiles." Thinking to herself, but it still leaks out. She has just the thing.

     That radiation blast reached the woods. That means tons of dead or dying wildlife. That means--

     Once she's at the forest's edge, Rita pours something viscous and pink out onto a dead deer, then keeps moving to seed more. Cinder would recognize it.
Petra Soroka     "Ange, Blue Team's the name for the bunch of fucking cracked-out cybersoldier freaks from NAZCA who came after us last time. When we--" Cinder's alarm is what alerts Petra to the absence of Angela's soul within the device, exorcised by exotic radiation. She, similarly, forgets for a moment that this isn't actually harmful to Angela. "-- *Shit*, she's gone? I totally forgot that could even-- like, I forgot that she wasn't basically just here with us. Is there any way I can... I could take it apart and see if I can slap together some new connection but..."

    Sitting on the ground inside her makeshift bunker, Eggpack already swung off her back with her nails wedged in the access panel, Petra pauses with an uncomfortable expression. "... I guess, it's not like... we *need* her here. Maybe it's smarter to-- to not die, first."

"Maybe they really are secretly run by Sarracenia--or at least like some mirror equivalent-- Carassenia."

    "Man, you know, the City really pisses me off sometimes," Petra grumbles while carefully lining her extended transteam rifle up over the very edge of the windowsill. Rather than flailing at the sea of geometric disruptors to trim them down in her vicinity, she tries to control her breathing even in the midst of the booming explosives that manage to connect with the ground. Slow, steadying exhalations and a low profile give her a stable platform to survey the side of the mountain through her tacky plastic rifle scope, but it also means her low responses come in staggered chunks. That, and suppressing her dizzying nausea.

    "... Like, what the fuck is the deal with women there. You know? ... ... There's no gendered clothing, no obvious oppression; half the time going outside makes *me* feel... ... hyperfeminine, and that's really fucked. I don't even think there's a *wage gap*! ... ... Not to mention that everyone's just, like, randomly fine with *whatever*. ... ... With... you know what I mean. ... ... Everyone bitches about it, but it's practically a ...in, out, ... like, liberal utopia, or something, compared to the world I'm used to."

    "Oh, damnit. They have mechs. *God* I wish I had a mech instead of this dinky little gun." Petra lines her sights up with the shadow within the fog in her respiratory pause, launching a sparking bolt of concussive electricity into its side. The glittering black steam ejected from the gun, hopefully, serves more to obscure her location amidst the other dust and smoke, than it does give it away. "What was I talking about? Oh, right. ... in, out... fire. Um, but lately, I've kind of just started thinking you're actually the normal ones. I always thought Sarracenia was so normal that she barely even warranted having an identity. Which is exactly why I hate her. But you... blame her just, whenever seeing someone shitty. Maybe it's just Lilian and me who're fucked up by thinking this sort of thing is normal."

    Toku guns make a decent matchup against oversized urban warfare machines, but this is an episode that demands expenditure of a CGI budget that Petra simply doesn't have. Scorching blasts of charged energy provide decent supporting fire while venting more sparkling smoke, but after a few more, Petra abruptly pulls down from the window, shoving the Eggpack onto the warped reflection of Qetra in her morphmetal after a moment of hesitation. "I know I've been on that a bunch lately, sorry. It just makes me feel like I want to die. I think we pushed our luck enough here though, so let's-- let's fucking, skedaddle."
Petra Soroka     Petra briefly wonders why the fuck she said that. Ducking back out the door, she glances back to the fallen crash test dummy again, and has to succeed at a will save in order to resist scooping it up and carrying it to safety too. In a moment of panic, she blurts out to Cinder while running over blistered-dry leaves, "Oh, god. Does radiation make you stupider? I don't think I can handle getting stupider."

    Arthur's shockwave sends her rolling to the ground, and she has the sense to tuck her knees to her chest to better regain control of her movement even while stunlocked by wet retching. Staggering onto her knees, she plants the bayonet of her rifle in the soft dirt to lean on, spitting out bile before talking to Cinder some distance away from the mech fight. "Getting caught and-- fought head-on by them the moment we got here is *literally* the worst possible situation. We're not even pressing them hard enough to force them to-- to do whatever the fuck Ash does, probably, unless they do something with all this weird tech. Fucking hell, I hope they're not an anti-psychic anti-magic techy person who's nominally meant to be on Lilian's side but instead helps her enemies. That'd be really fucking embarrassing."

    "If I could get close..." Petra squints at the inhuman humanoid shapes fighting in the clearing. "Those kinds of machines are always, like, filled with a billion redundancies so that they can have a whole fucking Powerpoint presentation about how unconquerably safe they are, but it's always just a bunch of nonsense meant to sound good made by people who don't talk to each other. If it's anything like the Kana, then it's probably stupidly defended against whatever they're most afraid of, and not defended at all against stuff they don't think of."

    "So what are they scared of?" Petra starts counting off on her fingers. While Arthur engages in shounen battle-shouting, Petra hangs off to the side attempting to monologue her way through the opponent's powerset, despite the placebo bimboification of the radiation. "Tradition-type magic that they have on this world; that's the anti-geometry stuff. They're scared of Lilian. There's a lot of Antegent that do mind-fuckery stuff, but neither of us do that anyways. And they're not going to skimp on armor, because it feels good to have a lot of armor."

    "... Okay, I think I got it. I'm thinking." Petra flips open her compact mirror and pulls out a singular ratbot and a brick of explosives. A quick cutscene of tool-application to the ratbot's innards, and she cuts it off from her radio controls, setting it to beeline towards a single target, explosives affixed to its underside. "Go on, brave soldier."

    Silent in the air, insignificantly tiny and cloaked from detection, Petra sends the ratbot on its final mission: slamming into the weakest point in the mech and detonating itself at point-blank range.
Xion Xion's head swims terribly badly, magic and connections pumped full of mud and dissonance from each of the jammers. She wants to reach past her fingers and cannot, leap from point to point in the mire of disconnection and cannot for lack of islands and inlands and anylands that bear weight.

Running through buildings with summoned Keyblade in hand, the dark shape of Nobody moves with a drunken speed. Rolling over shelves and snaking around corners with weaving steps, Xion moves on visual motion and mist-sight, hustling along fog-choked fluorescent halls. In her right hand is a keyblade with a twisted pillar of gold honeycombed with black patterns along the blade and featuring a triangular tooth seating an eye in rough stained glass and a fuzz-or-feathers basketing about the grip, and as she approaches a door she swings the blade through the door and shoulders through. When the twisting golden tip passes through the door, it opens the material of the door like a wound, gashing apart like clay before the brute-mark of the 'Fairy Tech' logic that Binah had fought Xion with bounces through the door and snaps it open without the intervening steps.

Sliding out of the building cover into her own fog cloud, the Nobody breaches just moments ahead of the falling missiles bombing out the area she had just occupied, hounding her hustle with shrapnel.

Xion's floating fairy-eye, free from intercepting missiles, spots the trio of hostiles drop into the fog bank after the split-apart barrage and again as the mist parts once more around Bond's exploding grenade-shots, giving Xion an idea where she's going, at least.

Not confident enough to chase down the trio of walking tanks, and doubly so with her fog cloud working both ways, Xion hangs back as the Rita in her head echoes, frowning the whole time.

No joy??
She has something to sort the letters of their alphabet soup.

Darting closer as the fog soups backward into the explosion-emptied zone from Bond's bombing, Xion pulls the same earth-brown medallion she had summoned to smooth out the tracks of the rover earlier - Hiromi's - and left-hand fastballs it towards the ideally-unsteadied or at least distracted mecha-legs.

Where it-
    -tink!-
        -ktank!-
            -ktonks down onto fog-wet earth.

Xion, sensing her time is up, starts to beat tracks out away from the robots, circling back into the fog.

When the medallion bounces to the ground, it tumbles into the surface like an unfortunate cell phone dropped overboard. Immediately the ground rumbles and shifts, beginning to roil and swamp out into weight-unsupporting wet mud.

Above, the third flying fairy summoned from her Binah-blade rumbles and rattles, separated from its two companions. As many things sourced from the City when alone the construct becomes. . . sad.
Angela ''Oh god does radiation make you stupider?''

"No clue!" Cinder says. "What's radiation?" She jogs over to catch Fourth Match Flame and return it to her hand before looking back to Petra. "Yeah uh--Never actually fought in a war? And this sort of feels like a little closer to war than I'm used to--" She has been to neither of the two wars Lobotomy Corp got involved in and even then, neither war is exactly quite like this one, which also isn't a war, but the amount of security and trouble heading their way makes her feel like it's effectively one.

She considers the City being shitty.

"I mean there's some gendered clothing--" Cinder retorts. "Ceri wears dresses, I know that for a fact, though not usually while working...? I mean Angela wears a skirt, though I guess that's a little weird because like--she's kind of barely from the City if you think about it--" She glances over to Petra and obliviously and innocently asks, "The wage gap? You mean like--the wage gap between CEOs and managers and like--agents like me?"

''I've kind of just started thinking you're actually the normal ones.''

Cinder frowns doubtfully. ''But you...blame her just, whenever seeing someone shitty.''

"I dunno if I'm ''blaming'' her it just feels like a lot of the same stuff she's saying--I mean I know I said the mirrorverse thing but I was mostly just trying to pep myself up--"

''It just makes me feel like I want to die.''

"I..." Cinder doesn't know how to answer that, for this. "...I'm sorry... I ... I don't--I know sometimes I don't understand everything quite like--"

As Petra unleashes the ratbot, Cinder moves to the side, trying to keep the mech's attention off of the ratbot by throwing another firewave at it.
Lilian Rook     "Blue One; SEADS that confetti. Blue Two; stay popeye and take monitor."
    "Blue One, affirmative. Confirm pure."
    "Confirmed. Ordering post-attack skate and shadow of Black Four."

    At least one of those callsigns is dead. The nameless survivors have simply been shuffled up to their positions. Which means that the operatives involved have experience fighting Elites-- fighting you specifically-- and they show it.

    The fog breaks on the movement of a second machine. Matte black and overly segmented, eye level with the second floor, shaped more like a figure doll wearing tank armour than pure milindustrial hardware. It leaps up the side of a parkade and mantles the roof level with eerie athleticism, its mech-scale rifle still tucked to its chest. Lines of light course down its left arm, coalescing at its palm, and colourless lances of unmistakably magical energy rapidly strobe from it as it turns, skewering miniature suns and destroying their demidivine fusion cores in rapid succession. The giant gun slings under its right arm, and it turns and sprays a scything line of cannon fire across both of the Kenjutsu Brothers.

    The third machine remains in the fog, but shortly after the second has shot down several of Arthur's suns, a curtain of vertical launch missiles sheet upwards into the air, and hairpin bend right back down with their second stage of acceleration. Special equipment is required to see the laser dots painting several targets, but only close attention is needed to see how several missiles are delayed in their orbits until something can be acquired. Four of them alone streak after Rita after her beam, breaking up into a looser grouping to catch her. One elsewhere pivots and smashes straight through a window to strike where Bond had disabled a camera; and collapses the floor.

    "Fox three, no spike. Lost contact; need ID."
    "Negative. Working. Jackal down for thirty; laser on."
    "Negative! Merged and pushing!"

    Rita's concussive beam scores a direct hit on the lead mech's head from stealth; and then shatters into individual fragments, thirty smaller blasts spray through the side of the streetfront behind it and into the forest. The machine rocks sideways, pavement mulches under the side of one foot-- what should be impossible load on its joints-- and snags hold of Arthur only just barely; a loose grip. Its armour appears visually unmarked. Bond's grenade quietly reaches its mark, and confirms it; it detonates early, on thin air, the fireball spewing across a short-lived screen of light-etching. Lilian never uses them, but the resemblance to common magical barriers across this world is unignorable.

    "Status!"
    "Clean! Clean! Aegis is Joker! Commit! Commit!"
    "Tag! Black Six! Black Two! Heavy engaged!"
    "Target has raygun on lethal cone!"

    Toku bolts fire into the smoke; two flashes of positive impact on the hiding mech, then the third and fourth go wild as it relocates deeper into the haze. A noble ratbat vanishes into the melee; and goes unshot.
Lilian Rook     'FUCK YOU, MURDERER!'

    The machine squeezing the life out of Arthur, directly attacking his spirit with a maelstrom of scorching magic, only 'pauses' in the sense of not executing a further action for the second it takes to say "Kill yourself you squeaky-voiced prick." almost automatically. Maintaining leverage for a moment longer, the pilot uses Arthur as a human shield against the lasers and blaster bolts as he's crushed. "Life is cheap. Yours is worthless." One of the shoulder mounted machine guns trains directly on Arthur's face.

    Two more arrows are launched; neither is intercepted by gunfire, confirming that range localized to the main scrambler towers. Both strike the same screen of defensive magic, between Arthur and the mech's head, before being able to reach the optical array; and the glow itself obscures the second brother's approach. A burst of gunfire misses him by a hair. The samurai's flying kick reaches armour on its own, insufficiently threatening to trip the integrated ward, then the drawn blade crashes into crackling threads of irregularly intersecting magic.

    The ward-lines have warmed from white to yellow-orange, like a heating filament, but the pilot responds immediately, unlimbering the mech's rifle and firing it under its own elbow, directly across its chest, at the samurai twin. When he leaps off, side thrusters fire immediately, and the mech shoulder tackles him in mid-air. "They're fighting fucking gorilla. No champagne until we have grand slam on escort." the woman's voice hiss-crackles.

    Then Arthur's magic surges back out, and it crashes into the mech so hard that-- no, the war machine staggers backwards in sympathetic mirror of its pilot. Hard vocalizer static turns to microphone-peaking laughter as he pushes and pushes into the enemy system. Familiar green light surges through countless integrated circuits, flowing naturally through innumerable channels in the superstructure. "That burns!" comes through the speaker, sliding away from perfectly bland. "The Hotel fucking Tango Oscar preps are gonna love this!"

    The light-lines summoned by repeated impacts keep flickering in and out of existence. Yellow-orange to amber-red. Arthur smells smoke, and hears groans of mechanical stress. The pilot assesses in the instant after the samurai had saved Arthur that the window to finish him off is too short, and physically pitches him into the ground with a transsonic vapour cone. For an instant, the sound of the metal groaning cuts out, green magic is driven from the circuits, and the whole arm articulates smoothly, just to flatten him. "LITHOBRAKE THIS!"

    The ratbot detonates at the mech's legs. The ward doesn't activate. Armour crumples and turns molten. Stabilizing thrusters fire on lightning reactions, but then the ground crumbles away from the Hiromi medallion, and the mech's twisted armour jams in its knee, sinking past the calf into divinely-created mud. Following blasts strike its weakening barrier.

    "Buddy spike! Going gate!"
    "Negative! Bump up and secure kill! Tag and add new contact!"
    "Confirm! FPF ready at your discretion!"
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Lithobrake this

    He slams hard into the ground, body lined with bruises and scrapes, shit-eating grin as wide as his eyes seem right now. "YOU FU--" He starts, then just as quickly stops. It's like his BGM got cut, slammed dead-on with the fist right in the middle of his bullshit retort to the pilot. When the hand pulls away, it does so with Arthur limply half-stuck to it, like a smushed bug. Maybe some of that intense damage got to him while he was being used as a shield, judging by his somewhat vacant eyes, and took him out of the fight for good.

    No-- there's no clock. No sound of ticking, no lethal indicator on his HEALTH VIAL. He's okay, he's just really, really out of it, blank-eyed and dazed by impact when he falls clear of the fist -- or is it dazed by something he might have learned in the exchange? It's gonna take him just a moment to recover, or at least an opportune shout from an ally.

    No rads on the meters though, from Arthur. Looks like radiation doesn't make you stupid! Repeatedly getting the shit beaten out of you by giant robots, that one might.
Lilian Rook     With all machines in play, you're finally met with the full pressure of vicious counteroffensive. The lead machine becomes a maelstrom of fire and dangerous thruster backwash as it begins struggling to extract itself, yet remains a constantly lethal danger. Not panicking in the slightest, the pilot sights the rifle and locks on to Xion's retreat immediately, estimating her retreat with astonishing accuracy and pouring thunderous gunfire into her position as she runs.

    A missile pod flips up from the other shoulder; six distinct motions from the camera assembly in the head precede an equal number of high-speed interceptors being fired, two of which arc down on the samurai pair, one on Trudy behind cover, another on Arthur, one chasing Xion by active steering, and somehow yet another at Cinder as she throws another wave of fire at it while it can't move, pushing its wards into the red. The mech draws a holstered sub-arm from one side, and fires it akimbo at Cinder; explosive rounds the size of her forearm; first to drive her off, then to lay down suppression towards Petra, each shot taking out chunks of building big enough for her to crawl through.

    An allied machine breaks off a headlong charge at the lead, swerving a sickeningly sharp right turn that should snap an unaugmented pilot's neck, and clearing around a storefront with active use of its arm and fingers, as if a skilled freerunner were wearing a costume. It fires as it turns, chasing Xion from a second walking angle, and then pivots and fires at Bond's camera sabotage on the spot. He can read the lingering hesitation in its body language in the moment after, before it folds out a coaxial grenade launcher of its own, and puts a bunker buster round through the side of the building, attempting to bring the whole floor down on him.

    The machine in the fog is running out of concealment, and yet moves on to seamlessly switch tactics. A laser transmission rapidly bounces between it and the other two, and then it ploughs into the five floor lodge from the other side, turning it into a collapsing heap of lethal rubble on top of everyone around. The familiar glow of NAZCA-grade 'exo-energy' weapons ignites from one wrist, and it slashes its way out of being caught, then charges-- into the woods? It's not accurately following Rita's trail, but it has the direction right. Both machine guns, the rifle, and several grenades, fly into the foliage after her; the shooting is completely blind, but it's loaded some type of 'daisy cutter' canister round, and is thoroughly showering a broad area with enough submitions to mow down trees.

    Lilian appears out of the treeline as it closes, fully armoured, and a flashy blast of black-gold magic ignites the entire frontal half of its ward, turning it briefly sideways. Her sword strikes the same wards as all the others, turning it yellow hot, and then she blinks back away from the energy blade.

    "Black Two, faded. Visual on Fenrir! Bracket! Bracket!"
    "Go clear! FPF one!"

    For just an instant, the scrambling coverage cuts out completely. The device in Trudy's hands is inert. In that moment, something that bothers her swims murkily into focus; that if prevents wireless communication at all, then it shouldn't be possible to remote control. Nothing inside it uses electromagnetic technology or magic. It's a third thing of some kind. Which means--
Lilian Rook     The coverage comes right back up immediately. Far in the distance, you see the launch trails of heavy duty long-range missiles climbing high above your interception range. Following it is the misty thump of what sounds like artillery. Heat signatures are lighting up on the helipad again; craft warming up for takeoff. Artillery descent imminent, followed by missile strikes, followed by close air support?

    "Fox one is at gimbal! FPF at azimuth!"
    "Blue One, Blue Two, break, break! Hard cover and cloak! Resume at my signal!"

    Two mechs are using their urban-appropriate size to take cover in heavy construction nearby, but the leader is staying out in the open.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Up on the feet, don't slack.
>Arthur: Caelton's dead are still counting on you

    "...G-get..." Arthur whispers. "Get... over here..." He shakes the daze out of his skull. his eyes flutter open as he's sighted in on a missile. "Get over here..." He manages to get to his feet.

    That missile closes in. Shining green lights up in both eyes. The emptiness in them lasted, in the end, no more than twenty seconds, probably.

    "...AND *KILL ME YOURSELF*, MURDERER!!" He takes off, darting around the missile and forcing who-knows-what-kinds-of-maneuvers if it wants to pursue. He's on that rocket-broom again and he's kicking it into high speed. He's not privy to Trudy's insights. But he recognizes that this, what he's seeing here, is an aspect akin to what he saw in Lilian, Sakura, and Nika. The way that the machine moved when its electronics were burned out, that total humanity. It didn't make a sound when it moved, not a single sound at all, and it moved perfectly. This isn't space, is it? No. This is something different. This is *self*, this is the tool becoming the body becoming the identity. This is the spear as a part of the map of the arm, encoded in the basis of the mind, then spun out into who-knows-how-many weapons.

    That's why the camera-head whipped around that way so easily. That's why the arm moved like that. Why remote weapons worked when there was a full-spectrum radio scramble. The way she recoiled when the machine was attacked. The line between tool and body is so much lower for this person.

>Arthur: Find a way to use this

    He rushes her down, hoping her immobilization sticks and that he can impact her hard. It won't matter if he's blocked. It won't even matter if he's warded, actually. He just needs contact, surface-to-surface...

    "THIS IS *MINE!*" He shouts, pulsing energy into it just as he smashes with his broom. Valid energy. Useful energy. A spike of sudden capacitor regeneration and energy reserve restoration. Not enough to be tactically relevant, but enough to throw off estimations. "AND *THIS* IS *ME, NOT YOU!*" He bounces off, slamming through the lower molten section and pushing his hands through the slag up to his wrists, boosting now-useless rockets. "AND THIS IS *NOTHING BUT A TOOL, NOT WHO YOU ARE!*" He whirls around, flanking, trying to blast spare power optically into a targeting system at the head that shouldn't have many more missiles left to make it dangerous to buff. And another subsystem, and another, over and over...

    This isn't an aspect of Space. He was being stupid. That was a useful tool. But this person, no, there's no reason they should have an aspect of Space. This is a Knight of Heart. A person who fights using their self as a weapon, or infusing themselves into weapons. And the one way he can get around that is to disrupt their sense of continuous self, to disorient their continuous extension of the homuncular neural map into everything in this environment that they know.
Rita Ma      Four missiles track after Rita, and the treeline shakes as she kickoff-zips ahead of them. Red blossoms against the background of green, each blast cutting it closer- one, two, three, and--

     Four. The last missile, plunging like a falcon, catches a glob of blue acid on its way up and airbursts early. Close. "Fine," she broadcasts again, but her thoughts sound breathless.

     The daisycutter rounds of the mech rushing after her are tougher. At mecha size, that's enough to hurt her; she's got better things to do than turn and fight, her regeneration's a limited resource, and the crackling spherical forcefield she sometimes pulses is reserved as a panic-button for how badly it reveals her position.

     With sparing use of that, heavy use of her cloaking and speed, and occasionally just tanking a splash, she muddles through. That's all she needs to do.

     In her wake, dead wildlife sizzles pink. The ones she'd touched earlier have already transmuted, sloshing off to convert more.

     She's about to take a nasty splash when Lilian emerges and fires on the mech. "Ms. Rook!! Did you find them?! Katrina and Bryce?" she thinks, but under it is a texture like indistinct radio chatter the next channel over.

     It becomes clear why in a second. From the remaining treeline, grisly pink jelly-creatures lunge to cling to the staggering mech's leg, gradually eroding its shielding on contact. Their sloshing bodies form crude limbs with animal bones and daisycutter shrapnel still sticking out of them, but despite their roughness of form, they move with the discipline of ants.

     When the two subordinate mechs cover behind buildings against the incoming artillery, it becomes clear just how busy Rita's been. A small army slops in to squeeze their safe positions, bolstered by the roadkill of their indiscriminate attacks, and ooze like disturbingly agile slugs or skitter on stolen half-digested bones to overwhelm. Eventually they start dropping from rooftops and emerging from manhole covers too- mechs are versatile, but they aren't known for covering multiple angles.

     "Someone else handle the artillery," Rita broadcasts, looking down from her new spot on a high rooftop as swarm overseer. "I'm pressuring them." She doesn't even seem to bother cloaking herself- if they want to take their attention off the swarm, she seems to be saying, that's their mistake.

     Watching the oozes, she reflects, but doesn't broadcast, on the tactical bliss of working with monsters you can sacrifice instead of friends who have to all survive.
Trudy Grimm     Trudy, ignorant to having been spotted by security cameras while pondering the scrambler in her hands, becomes the target of a parabolic missile attack. Fortunately for her, the blue-faced Kyudo Brother is ever-observant. An arrow drawn. Only now does his posture change as he whirls around. The yumi in his hand creaks as he draws it to full in an instant, then lets his arrow fly.

    The projectiles collide above the witch's head, sending her sprawling amidst a rain of flaming shrapnel. She lets out a shout, scrambling amidst the fiery debris and her own blood, snatching up the trinket as she makes for better cover-- the building she was hiding behind is currently a Death Disco, from the look and sound of it.

    Her mind races. It's no magic that she recognizes, and thus likely not magic at all. She doesn't know technology very well but what little she does understand isn't making any kind of sense. If it's something else-- she'll have to ask Lilian or Arthur or... Could this magic-scrambling nonsense be a manifestation of Ash's wish? An aspect of it? As her scrambling finally regains footing, the witch slows, then stops to glance over her shoulder at the machines, elites, and her own ascended undead.

    As the Red-themed Brother leans into his damage and gets more brutal, the Blue-themed Brother has spent the last of his arrows. The missile intended for him impacts solidly, sending the warrior scraping noisily across cracked pavement until he comes to a violent stop against part of a shattered concrete wall. He rests there, smoking, clutching that ancient yumi even as he sinks into the shadows from whence he came.
Trudy Grimm     The Kenjutsu Brother's sword bites into, but fails to penetrate the wards around the mech's leg. This seems to surprise him just enough for several high-caliber rounds to blast into his back. Whatever lungs he has must surely be obliterated, if not the rest of his internal organs. But the warrior still moves.

    He releases his sword and allows the cannonfire to hurl him forward. The machine shoulder-checks him mid-flight, sending him sailing across the compound. Tucking, he braces his helm with both forearms and hits the ground in a roll that spreads a nasty, black smear across the pavement. One tumble, two, and he's on his feet again to arrest his motion.

    The mane of his helmet, or perhaps his own hair, has been disheveled by the cannonfire nd now surrounds his head and shoulders as a wild, scraggly mess. Black ichor oozes between the segments of his torso and shoulder armor. The dim green glow within the pits of the eye sockets of his crimson oni mask remains as steadfast as ever. As he straightens his posture, he rolls his left shoulder with several pops and cracks until he can move it reliably once again.

    Yeah. The Brothers are getting fucked up and they're clearly enjoying this. Or, well, at least one of them is. Blue doesn't emote nearly as well as Red, as is common in these sorts of duos.

    Already the Kyudo brother draws a fresh arrow, his armor pierced and holed in places. There is no blood and, as he sets his stance again with a dry creaking sound, no break in his warrior's resolve. He has not moved one step since he first fired on the mountaintop, and when sprayed with high-caliber gunfire, had only turned his head to shield his face with the segmented flares of his kabuto helm and blue oni mask.

    Now, his stance set and his muscles tensed, the blue-tinted archer holds up his bow, then draws it down while pulling the string back once more in that same smooth, effortless motion. He holds that stance, as if holding his breath, as the protective wards of the mech flash in more and more concerning colors. In the same instant that the ratbot explodes-- thus proving the wards have fallen-- the arrow is loosed in a motion that also feels like, finally, an exhalation. Straight for the mech's forehead as it starts to founder in the mud.

    The red-faced samurai surges forward suddenly. In the same instant, the missile bearing down on him explodes right where he was standing, adding that explosive force to his lunge while also setting several parts of him on fire. Bits of shrapnel rip through the lesser-armored parts of his body.

    Mid-leap, both arms reach up behind him into the array of poles and tattered, faded battle standards he carries. Wrenching forward with a silent roar of effort, he hauls forth a great kanabo-- the iron armor-crushing club-- and smashes it down into the foundering mech's shoulder missile launcher. His feet hit the armored plating a second later and he redirects his momentum from the swing and the machine's resistance, hurling his body into a backflip.

    Wrenching the kanabo free, the Kenjutsu Brother brings it directly into the mech's 'chin' in what might be a graze at best. His grip adjusts, feeding more of the kanabo's handle into its reach, and he brings the heavy thing down on the mech's head as one would a sledgehammer to a watermelon.
James Bond They're fighting fucking gorilla. No champagne until we have grand slam on escort.

    Good. It's starting to get to them. Still. We're not out of it yet.

    It works worse than he'd feared. It fails better than he could have dreamed. His eyes are hidden behind the pitiless black goggles, much in the way that the pilot who responds to his sabotage is hidden from any attempt on his part to gauge their emotions.

     The (almost) thoughtless point-and-shoot so easy to do with layer after layer of dehumanizing ablation between you and anything resembling the person on the other end. Bond has felt that sort of thing once or twice before--most recently, when he commandeered an old GDF hulk to do battle with another unit as they attempted to take Nika. The rumble of machinery is a kind of insulation, a gentle whisper that drive trains and transmissions and tyres and targeting systems will do the work, that all you have to see is the facsimile of your enemy through lines on a monitor. But for whatever reason--be it rookie shakes, hesitance to do damage to one's own backyard, intimidation, or some other, equally purposefully impossible-to-gauge nuance of the human mind, it isn't *quite* thoughtless. Not from this pilot.

I can use that.

     That's his first thought, as the building begins to collapse. His feet pound stairs only barely faster than they disintegrate behind him, swallowed by descending mortar. Dust settles on his shoulders and forehead inches ahead of falling plaster and support beams, a gentle but chilling reminder of his mortality; one day, he'll be dust, too, disturbed and scattered by the movements of forces greater than himself. There's no outrunning gravity--not in a fair race. He's cleared the stairwell by the time he consciously realizes what's happening.

     Glass buckles under the weight of loosed structure. Bond dives through it and stifles the snarl straining against his diaphragm for freedom as jagged shards chew up his forearms.

That's the sort of thing that won't work twice. But once is enough. He lays flat on the ground behind the heap of rubble which moments ago was an intact building. It's suitable cover, so long as he stays behind it. His own weapons won't be enough to take these things down. But with patience, coordination, and a little luck...

Coordination. It's been staring me in the face this whole time. Plastered all over this contraption, every time she speaks up.

     All he needs to do is wait. Ride the silence. Let them think he's dead. Why wouldn't he be? They brought a building down on top of him. Arthur's gone quiet. That bothers him more than he thought it would. When is he, ever, unless he's not there? Bond grits his teeth, rolling onto his stomach. Through the mountain of rubble, he can 'see' the battle playing out. Bond clips the carbine to his fatigues.

Someone else handle the artillery. I'm pressuring them.

I'll do it. With luck, they're thinking they've killed me.
Angela Fourth Match's Flame best resilience is towards physical assault--indeed it's pretty dang bad at everything else. But explosive rounds the size of Cinder's forearm would just blow off half her body.

In a half-panic, she unleashes a wave of flame out from Fourth Match Flame towards that round--it explodes moments before hitting her and she is sent flying by the concussive force hella far from the blast point, smoldering and covered in shrapnel and bruises, bleeding from her forehead and significantly charred across her body--though exactly where is tough to tell with the ashen EGO Equipment looking like burnt ash.

She lays there on the floor for a while. Did it work, she wonders, did the...what was it called again? The ratbot? Did it do its thing?

She blearily opens her eyes and squints through the smoke. No, she thinks, that monster is still going for it She stabs Fourth Match Flame into the floor and tries to push herself back up and just collapses back onto her back, wheezing.

Everything hurts.

She tries crawling instead across the earth towards Petra, hoping that the heaps of pain will fade before she gets there so she can try to do something helpful.

But right now she is just trying to...

...keep moving. Angela's gone. She can barely see anyone else.

"Don't die..." She murmurs to herself. "It'd fuck her up, don't die..."

Her vision clears up some. SHe sees some hefty amount of rubble. She crawls towards it and tries to take cover behind it, fumbling for an HP Ampule to get herself back in the game.

She tries not to think about her anxieties about just being too different for Petra, being just... unsuitable. A bad match. Someone who is ontologically unhelpful. The wrong kind of cheeks, she thinks dizzily. She has to live, though, even if she can't help she definitely can't hurt. She feels cold and she ignites the fourth match to give her some warmth.
Xion Having run out all of the Medallion powers she could think of that might help her, Xion does not get far at all with her honestly agile traversal before she picks up one of the walking tank's attention, chunky bullets scything a path through the soupy fog around the Nobody. Front flipping over fog-wrapped terrain as she races away the direct walk of fire, Xion dives into a ground-cutting mudslide.

Carried on rainwater that grindsparks off her slipping boots in teardrops of water and rolls of mist, the Nobody throws her keyblade into a tree on the path in a road planter just head where it twangingly connects and buries itself seeing-eye deep in treetrunk. Again, the archwolf's earthshaping spreads from impact-site, spreading into the road planter and rising the whole stone piece in concrete pillarage and clay below, soaking up a dozen rounds of seeking fire.

Panting, mentally taxed on channeling strong feelings and all kinds of magically jammed, the noirette summons a fresh sword - simple silver length with a crown-tooth and yellow-gold guard, the Kingdom Key - to hand with a signature 'shwink!' and her hand dips with catching the weapon's gentle weight in her grip. Leaning off her wall to push out once more, Xion almost feels confident in re-engaging when the actively guided missile drops in on her little earthshaped cover and detonates in a fog-scattering fireball.

Xion's cover is blown to a shallow rectangle of a pillar, the tree and planter atop scattered like fallen cake across the cratered ground, thrown keyblade sent scattered away. The Nobody herself is sent as a dark ripple of smoking motion at a rapid speed away from the impact site, rolling uncontrolled for a bounce and tumble before slowing and regaining her wits -- and being picked up by a second mecha's flanking fire.

'Recovering', getting her feet under her, Xion transitions from braking her roll and getting an arm-and-knee stabilization under her to springing forward -- just in time to roll away and begin action-adventure jogging away from the gunfire. It's not the first time she's had to go from waking up from being momentarily knocked out to dodging attacks, but the pressure placed on her by the NAZCA mechas is much higher than any unthinking Heartless threat.

As the gunfire reaches her again, Xion summons the Kingdom Key a second time into a bullet-deflecting dispatch slash and shifts to an evasive zig-zagging. Approaching the bracketing shooting-mecha as further ground deformations spring and geyser up around her for additional evasive earth-parkour or simple shielding, Xion scoops up her lost Eye of Judgement on the way in a diving slide.

Coaxial grenade launcher bringing down the nearby building in a wash of tumbling debris around the surface-slaloming Xion, the Nobody's fluttering fairy overhead returns the particular flavor of favor while the noirette approaches, the stolen-away entry missile hurled down from on-high as the hovering fairy-winged observer gains a large sketchily-defined black arm that reaches out to pull the stolen piece of rocketry out from the fairy's central 'eye' and hurl it covered in fake fairy-bird 'tears'.
Lilian Rook     One of the heavy fighting machines had nearly left James for dead with just the missile; doubling back to finish the job, two taps, means that when its sensors sweep ominously through the smog, electronic thrumming keenly audible, and finds no man escaping, the pilot cautiously assumes him crushed somewhere under hundreds of tons of rubble. He is, but not dead. The mech moves on. He gets a narrow view of its feet churning the muddy asphalt away from him, from his position, and the shuddering through his ribs is somehow uneasy.

    He knows the difference between the rumble of treads and the thump of military boots. Why does it feel so much like the latter? What need was there to build this thing of science fiction, when carpet bombing them would do just as well for cost? Every other step of this plan had been better considered.

    Cinder staggers through the carnage nearby, dragging herself towards Petra by force of will. A sensor sweep washes over the broken pavement, and she collapses behind the rubble just in time for it to be preoccupied by the second pass. Attitude thrusters accelerate its turn towards Xion, and it sights and fires a thundering burst with the speed and accuracy of the man inside it, hindered only by physical munitions. It pivots around the corner of the building, and advances, giving her a moment of respite.

    Then she lights the Fourth Match. Her thermal blob flares out from behind cover, and with the dispassionate swiftness of a machine, a pair of missiles are launched without knowing who she is. They sharply arc around her cover from both sides, cornerning her between them before lunging.

    The mech near the trees backs away as Lilian evades its blade, showering fire on her position. It sweeps along the forest perimeter as she rapidly blinks ahead of its walking stream of rockets and shells, slowing and accelerating, then reversing course and back again, throwing off each bead the pilot draws on her-- faster each time. It wheels behind a raised parkade and takes cover in the building's shadow as her magic returns fire. The machine hunkers down and away from the impact in line with the pilot's reflex, as a corner of the building is consumed.

    "Splash Black Six!"
    "Fox two on additional bogey! Confirm!"
    "No joy on Fenrir! Can't achieve pitbull!"
    "Post-FPF burn glint and spot Black Four, Black Five!"
    "FPF one in five. Don't get bogged down. Fade Black Two and go Buster on Black Three Black Five on mark!"

    The red brother's kanobo collides with the missile launcher on the lead woman's machine, and the casing crumples inward, mangling the launch mechanism. Warning sirens blare over the pilot's loudspeaker, caught in the background. "Fox two bent! Repeat! Purging!" Glowing optics track the kenjutsu brother's complex trajectory, the pilot predicts, and the swing that comes down at its head is caught in the machine's bare hand. There's no room to follow up-- all he needs do is let go of his weapon-- and then an identical energy blade to a fellow machine flares from its wrist to skewer him through.

    The blue brother's arrow strikes the mech directly in the head at the same time. A trade that makes the pilot's speaker broadcast a garbagled snarling sound as the mech rocks back, shielding its face with its arm.
Lilian Rook     The missile pod jettisons from one shoulder. The mech's frame adjusts as if recuperating from a heavy weight strapped to one shoulder. The machine reaches for what looked like the ammo feed, and a mech-scaled sidearm ejects from a swivel-mount dock. Rifle akimbo, it sprays at Arthur with autocannon fire while sighting seemingly random points in the cityscape with its offhand pistol.

    "Got you."

    The pistol fires silently. A stark white ray of ghastly clear energy pierces straight through the wall of an admin office, melts through six interior walls, the rear side, bores straight through the heap of concrete rubble behind it, and strikes Petra's exact location. Unmistakable for anything but a dramatic upsize of the hyper-lethal rifles used by Blue Team on foot; for now, limited to only sidearm size, for what cold comfort that actually is. The flywheel drone and violet-shifted glow it emits just after firing is identical.

    '...AND *KILL ME YOURSELF*, MURDERER!!'

    The two support pilots-- Blue One and Blue Two-- are diving for cover as the harsh missile flare and artillery whistling grows closer. The lead is focused on Arthur, yanking one leg from the mud, working on the second. "Does it look like I'm not trying?" The pilot shows no signs of intending to seek cover at all. The exo-tech handgun swings to him.

    'THIS IS *MINE!* AND *THIS* IS *ME, NOT YOU!*'

    "You--! *kkkhhsh*--"

    Arthur's screaming contact with the machine achieves only a brief overflow of its pseudomagical reserves, and that causes the thirty foot mech to flinch away from him like a hot stove. The audio terminates into a harsh mechanical scream. God knows what neural feed must be involved inside; the field agents had been confirmed as extensively implanted while in the field at the Ural mountains. The wards suddenly flare up of their own accord, without an actual threat, overheat fully into the red spectrum, then rupture, blowing out on Arthur like magical holo-shrapnel.

    With a great screaming tear, the mech's foot shears apart down the middle, and the pilot strikes him with a fifty ton rising kick

    Just before the artillery lands.
Lilian Rook     And just before it lands, something else comes shambling out of the forest.

    "What--"
    "Engaged! Unknown gorilla!"
    "Bogey dope! ASAP!"
    "Negative! No tags!"
    "Scram!"
    "No time!"

    Goopy pink death is pouring itself up from out of the cracks in the battlefield. Too soft to light up on sonar or x-ray, the temperature of lukewarm cooling flesh on IR, the plague that is Melting Love throws itself on fighting machines five times their size. The initial contacts, from points of surprise, cause wards to sizzle and flare, before being pulverized by brute force impacts. More rising from the ground are torched by waves of flame from emergency anti-personnel pods, then gunned down by waves of autocannon fire as the mechs start to back up and gain distance.

    A call of "Skosh! Cover!" indicates a reload, where a massive drum mag crashes to ground, and a wave of them advances from the forest next, searing the leg struts of the third machine. Xion's missile strikes the second machine from behind in the midst of its reload, throwing it from cover and onto the street.

    Its retreat turns into collapse as its feet melt away, then a sparking roar as it carries itself on back thrusters alone, skidding wildly on melted pavement as it fights them away with its energy blade. The city block is cast in the fiery glow of near-impact missiles; and then the airburst, as they detonate the remainder of their fuel. The whistle of falling shells is audible in the ensuing blanket of explosions. The unguided shells simply fall right through, and given only an instant to land, excavate half the area and turn it into airborne particulate.
James Bond      Rita. They've taken countermeasures against us coordinating through the radio. But they're also affected by those same countermeasures. I have a very rough idea of where the speakers on each of their armors are. If you or someone else attacks *there,* you should be able to take that away from them.

    Waiting under the rubble is tense--not the least of all because if the owner of those upscaled 'boots' decides to be thorough, then he'll be exactly as dead as he's pretending to be. The momentary pause he feels as keenly as anything he's felt in his entire life, shaded by rubble; there's a sense of chastising his own heart for beating lest it disturb the arrangement even the slightest bit and give him away.

    No other explosives come. The 'boots' trundle hesitantly away. In pitch blackness, Bond watches the fuzzy white outlines grow gradually farther and farther away. When they're smaller than they were before his decoy, Bond twists the bezel on his wristwatch. Blue light that'd be blinding if not for the goggles illuminates his would-be-grave, slowly cutting a large chunk of intact mortar in two. The laser cuts out once its work is done. The soles of his combat boots press against the uneven lid of his premature tomb, and his plausibly superhuman strength proves enough to let the light back in.

Why that shape? Why bother? It's unlike them.

    A form with a touch of the fantastical--a touch of something human, shaped though it is by military function. It's unlike anything these people have brought to bear against them so far.

Bogey dope! ASAP!
Negative! No tags!
Scram!
No time!
Skosh! Cover!

    Bond emerges from the rubble. Subtlety isn't as much a necessity now, in the chaos Rita's created. The goggles come off, his steely blue eyes squinting in the sudden wash of light. But there's no time to get acclimated.

    Xion is a hazy outline that grows clearer the more Bond's combat boots beat into the dirt. The whistling of incoming shells is a prelude to death; an instrumental swell that rises over the pounding of his heart. "The rover," he calls to her as he sprints towards her. "Now!"

     A whistle becomes an angry snarl. Bond dives for cover, his stomach hitting the ground as the same earth a scant distance away is all but vaporized, violently cratered and thrown powdered and clumped into the air. His ears ring and his bones rattle, but he forces himself up in time to make good on Xion's help. "If you're coming with, do it now," he shouts, half to be heard over the screaming artillery and half to hear himself over the persistent buzz-ring in his ears.

     He's inside in one fluid motion.

---

    It's not too different from its old GDF ancestor. As particulate rains down from the first few unguided shells, the tires spit up a wash of churned earth. Bond takes the wheel and guides it into the forest, up the mountain to the gun emplacement.
Angela Cinder makes the mistake of lighting fourth match flame but she didn't really think she had much of an option, she already felt like she was dying. Two missiles are launched in her direction and she throws Fourth Match Flame to prematurely detonate the one but the other explodes near enough to her that she gets sent flying through the air, like twenty yards and hitting the ground with a smoldering thumped. Her left arm is an unfortunate distance away from the rest of her body, and her back is badly burnt even through her EGO Equipment's durability and resistances.

The HP Ampule starts to take effect as the delimbed arm lifts up off the air, the trail of blood connecting to Cinder's stump. It shlorps back towards Cindr and fastens itself to the stump, the wound rapidly fading from the prior HP Ampule's application. The burns fade somewhat but the Ampule's effects run out before she can fully heal.

She pats her body with her hand. Pat. Bap. Fwap.

"Ahahh..hahahah...." Cinder laughs, tears in her eyes as she's alive, she's alive! She wipes messily at her face quickly because it's not over but...

Rita's army arrives and Cinder laughs again, "Ahahhh...hAHahahhh...." She manages. "You're already infected, too late now... You already breathed her in...! You're dead already, your organs just haven't liquified yet...!"

She has no idea if this is true honestly but she really wants to be in the universe it is true right now. She crawls to snag up Fourth Match Flame and leaves it UNIGNITED this time because HP Ampules have their limit.

More explosions seem to be happening. Cinder decides to run after Bond and join him in the car. That seems like a place where she's less likely to vomit out blood and, well, she also would prefer to not breathe in Melting Love herself right now even if it's Rita's Melting Love, she has a relatively strong attachment to her organs.
Rita Ma      Initial exponential ooze growth has levelled off. No more radiation-cooked easy prey. I can keep up a steady feed from here, but that's the peak of the ramp. Congregate, lie in wait, pounce en masse instead of wave tactics?

     It isn't really that articulate in her head. The part of Rita that can tally and maneuver hundreds of bodies at once is just as basal and alien as the part of her that eats people. The insights filter through dimly, behind sleepwalking-vacant eyes, as distant blastwaves flutter her hair on her lofty buildingtop perch.

     Hey, aren't those blasts getting a little close? Oh--

     She leaps backwards half a block, flares that crackling spherical forcefield in midair just before the blastwave hits, gets flung back anyway, and impacts the side of a faraway building feetfirst. Rita bends her legs. Concrete fractures around her. It aches up to her hips. Think about that later.

     "One down?" she wonders 'aloud', hopefully. That melted-legs mech didn't look like it made it to cover.

     Only, it's bothering me a little. Back in Russia, they sent way too much for what they thought they'd fight. Now they're sending even more. But it doesn't feel like the same 'way too much'. Ash hasn't shown a lot. Are they counting on her? If her secret power would help, why wouldn't they use it at the start for a quick kill? Is it something that doesn't work like that? Does it 'build up'?

     "I have a very rough idea of where the speakers on each of their armors are. If you or someone else attacks *there*..."
     "Got it, Mr. Bond." The remaining oozes, numbers fed by a trickle from the forest, covertly slink through gutters and glom together on the third story of an innocuous-looking building. It's one of a dwindling pieces of intact mecha-sized cover; exactly where they might go to recharge shields. That's the point. The slimes compress together until they could lance out from the building with a thought's notice.

     Her telepathic broadcast touches all the Elites again: "Mr. Bond thinks we should target the robots' speakers. I can get one if you pop its bubble near *that* building. And I think Ash is waiting for the best time to spring something; don't everyone get close to her at once, and be careful if she's desperate."

     In the meantime, she skates between rooftops to circle several blocks from the action, keeping an overseer's vantage while (she hopes) being juuust temptingly shootable without actually being productive to throw ammo at.
Trudy Grimm     From her temporarily safe position, Trudy closes up the shadow that the Blue-clad samurai has already disappeared into. Her eyes shoot to the Red, caught up in a melee with a half-disabled mech that is still very much a danger. His great kanabo slams into the machine's outstretched hand-- not enough to overpower, but enough for some warnings to sound amidst all the other damage.

    When he releases, he tucks his leading kogake's toe into the hoop at the end of the iron-banded club and hurls himself forward with it, using the mech's grip friction for leverage. He's going right for the face, which puts him in prime Energy Blading position. The wrist blade bites into and fully slashes through both the sode on his shoulders and the do guarding his torso, cleaving the right arm, shoulder, and part of the chest almost completely off his body.

    He shifts his weight, twisting his body around the blade such that it exits his side-- completely severing his right arm from his body. Dried, blackened flesh and bleached white bone wrapped in steel and leather drops away, smoldering, while the red oni warrior lets up approximately none of the pressure.

    His brother's arrow strikes. The machine wheels back, shielding its face. Reaching with his left hand, the crimson warrior grabs onto that forearm and vaults it. His body whirls as he does so, planting his feet on top of the mech's armored helmet. His momentum keeps him going, effectively flipping up and over the mech's head and shoulders. As he comes down its back, he pulls a straight-bladed tanto free from the collection of weapons on his back, driving it into a gap in the metal to arrest his fall.

    Feet plant on armor and components, steadying the one-armed warrior as he begins violently stabbing everything within reach that looks important. Thruster feeds, servos and actuators, and anything that glows. He only hesitates when the mech moves, using the weapon itself as an anchor point.

    The arrival of mechs had quickly transformed this cute little mountain resort into a warzone. Melting Love has escalated that into pure chaos. The witch exhales, glancing from emergent pink slime creatures down at the magic disruptor bauble in her hands. After a moment, she drops it into the void of her own shadow for safekeeping. She lifts her eyes from the battle in front of her to the facility in the far distance-- the one that the Kyudo Brother had attacked at the start. Her eyes travel further up towards the incoming artillery and missile barrage.

I could-- but I learned my lesson last time. I couldn't do that to her again.

    She lifts her hand. A shadow cast by the distant facility darkens.

So instead... A little distraction.

    She doesn't quite get to it before the artillery impacts. Fortunately, the witch isn't in the area that's been initially targeted. It's the blasting noise that has her covering her ears and the violent shockwaves that throw her off her feet that do most of the disrupting. She lands flat on her back several paces from where she had been standing, curling up to protect as much of herself as she can from rocks and debris raining down.

    When things finally start to settle down, green eyes snap open, squinting through blood. Up on the mountaintop fortress, that deep shadow starts to squirm and writhe. Bony fingers longer than a person is tall start to emerge, dark and gleaming as if carved from polished black marble. A trick very few have seen Trudy do.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Does it look like the pilot's not trying?

    "NOT DEAD YET!!"

>Arthur: Experience fifty ton rising kick

    "HRRRK!" Arthur soars up, bruised and twitching and stunned again. Thank goodness-- by instinct he would have been trying to beat up Melting Love, in direct melee combat of course. He arcs high. If this foe is the type, he might even be *air-juggled*, by an akimbo rifle blasting away. Then his eyes pop back into focus. How many times has he been stunned now? This can't be good for cranial health.

>Arthur: That one worked. Approach again

    One thing he can depend on, even in the storm of geometric scrambling, is his very very immediate physical surroundings, and the space within his own body. His eyes flare with a black glow now rather than white or green, and gravity takes double, quadruple, octuple effect, even more and more. One eye gleams green for a half-second, and a pair of portals emerge. In this scrambling, his teleportation range may be cut to merely a few feet, but it's enough for him to form a pair of spirographs that make an accelerating loop to enhance the gravity further. The way he points his rocket-broom down and activates its thrust seems almost excessive at this point.

    He "charges" it for only a few seconds, but it's enough to turn him into a gunshot from high above when the portals collapse in the geometry scrambling and he tears his way towards the mecha. "THIS!" He shouts. "IS JUST!!" He roars. "THE WORLD!!!" He impacts, shining like a star and trying to overwhelm reflexes, get a grip, hang onto the surface of the mecha and press to it with gravitational force. "CHUNKS OF DIRT! STICKS AND MUD AND ROCKS! *NOTHING* FOR A PERSON TO LIVE IN OR LIVE AS!" He surges energy. "YOU ARE TWO ARMS AND TWO LEGS AND TWO HANDS AND TWO EYES AND ANYTHING MORE THAN THAT IS FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE SHIT, DON'T BE *PRETENDING*, GET THAT BITCH-ASS BODY-IMAGE BACK INSIDE THAT *MEAT*!!"

>Arthur: Invent new and exciting forms of bigotry

    Rita Ma might be caught in the blastwave of this one, if we're being honest here. But, for what little it's worth, he's making sure to follow her instructions: Target the speakers. His power surges into audio systems, enhancing them more than machinery ought to be able to handle. Briefly, they might work as a sonic weapon. More significantly, they should suffer severe damage before it's done. Bitrate should plunge even further, provoke Arthur even more.

    Disorganizing the enemy might be ideal for retreat. That's Bond's plan, right? Arthur has gotten badly disoriented twice now, and everyone knows that you lose on your third heavy disorientation. He'd better not take another bad hit during this FINAL ROUND, and he has to hope that he's read the enemy right and attacked the right Aspect. If he's got a good read on her, he should badly disrupt her self-projection. If he doesn't... well, good chance to get away.
Xion The ringing in her ears had not cleared in long seconds, longer than the missile strike had lasted. Vexed and itchy and uncomfortable, feeling herself slurring spatially, the Nobody bobs in a deep sprint, rolling as she sweeps her swords on empty air and wordlessly emits breath in forceful expression. The gesture, of swept keytooth tips hrough air, claws the missiles from out of her lackadaisical fairy-emission and drives each down like spitefully vengeful darts.

Stinging eyes lifting in the grit-thick fog behind the debilitated walking exo-tank, yearning to chase and drive her swords deeper still into the mecha, to part from gravity's restraints and sail on sword dance alone to strike apart the threat--

--someone else's overflowing-eating-reaching threat is what multiple of the mecha are desperately fighting, flying away from, reloading and retreating from even in the middle of a soundshattering artillery barrage.

>You're already infected, too late now... You already breathed her in...!

Cinder whole-Heartedly believes the gooping copy of Melting Love is just as good as the real thing, and the belief and raw desire make it true to the noirette, grimacing as she skids to a halt in the street.

Braking her stop with the Kingdom Key's crown-tooth in the asphalt, she aborts her approach and becomes a snapping black-coated flag on the inverted pole of her blade for a moment before her momentum arrests and she stops. Still frustrated, still seethingly full of psychically palpable hate in manifold dimensions - every possible dimension of hate in a blinding moment that it transcended into 'love to hate' and 'hate to love' simultaneously...

She can't approach but she spitefully concocts a plan anyway, rising in the artillery barrage to direct her whole attention towards the collapsed highrise that Bond had been killed (allegedly) in just prior. With Kingdom Key jammed into ground and Eye of Judgement pointed at the rubble, a rubblefall in erasing reverse occurs and the roof and top floor of the building in slump disintegrates into a dance of sparkling particle-parts and a yawning 2D void to nowhere horizontally collecting it all.

It doesn't go far! Barely any distance at all. Spatially inconsequential. It reforms, slump and all, as a fresh structurefall from 'the fifth floor' overhead. Reintegrating itself in majestic crumble-apart fall, the whole of it pancakes down atop the struggling machine being overtaken by goo.

Then, the boiling emotions in Xion bubble away into satisfaction. Sword-buried and sword-pointed and shell-shocked into a whipped hair distant-stare is how James finds her, already looking in his direction with an empty brightness to her expression. Around her are craters and mud-thick mist, and asphalt holes, and a trickle of dark blood down from high in her bangs down her cheek.

He had wanted the Buggy, and she had felt that too. "Sure." Her answer comes, easy, as the triangular oculus themed Binah-blade turns to point just-past James.

Cinder, joining them, gets to see the whole of it appear mid-falling out of bleak-dripping smoke portal and materializing wash as well, carriage still wet with forest-dirit and slumping into a crater with the driver-fore wheels as the back yawns open. James is inside without further questions, so Xion yanks the Kingdom Key out of shattered asphalt and over shoulder to join him and Cinder.

"Of course I'm coming with, James," The recovering Nobody reasons. "I can't drive *myself*." Licenseless and all.
Petra Soroka     The difference in combat capacity between Petra-- ace Agent, mech pilot, supervillain, and weird multiversal battle-junkie-- and Cinder-- a normal employee sent into a battlefield with generic psychic armaments-- becomes explosively clear when the same mech-scale shells that she directs the Silver to slice in half at distance while diving behind cover, just-miss connecting with Cinder and send her flying away. It's not safe to go immediately after her, and in the fever haze of reignited tinnitus and concrete dust from the collapsing building, Petra can't get her bearings right to even consider checking on the scorched form of Cinder. Temporarily deaf and dutifully re-aiming her transteam rifle in the direction of the rumbling of the building settling into its new crater, Petra's thoughts turn to the crash test dummy she failed to save inside the rubble while she watches out for the next incoming missile.

    Combat adrenaline and the routine movements of her assumed role as a 'soldier' feel like they slow time down to a conversational crawl, full sentences forming in her mind between each pounding heartbeat. Near-idle consideration of the abandoned dummy's fate, the lethal articulation of its joints under thousands of pounds of debris, and the oddly communal feeling of the presence of numerous human-facsimiles on the battlefield, from the dummies in everyday positions, to the expressive mechs, to Petra herself, eventually shifts to thinking about the environment itself. Why, in this incredibly rare untouched oasis in no man's land, would there *be* crash test dummies like that? Surely this isn't comparable to some fuckoff-nowhere location in the desert, that the military recreationally drops nukes on in order to see how toasted the ballistics dummies get-- bringing the faux-city block down now, when faced with the existential threat of an angry Lilian, makes sense, but why would it be set up like this in the first place?

    Dissociatively, while still steadying her rifle to shoot a stray missile out of the air, Petra gets the comforting sense that the ski resort feels sort of like a playground, and the trio of mechs attempting to exterminate her are the kids it's meant for. She can imagine it perfectly, with how the scale of buildings feels custom-made for mechs, in the city park-like privacy of the isolated forest-- Petra herself had imagined romping around in a toyetically destructable environment in the Beauty of Ash plenty as a kid, playing soldier well before war was even a tangible concept to her.

    Completely baselessly, Petra feels a dim glimmer of fondness for the mech pilots, even as she covers her face with the psychoment fabric of Sound of a Star to protect herself from getting fried by a wash of heat and shrapnel from an explosive eruption in the dirt nearby. This also makes her absolutely sure that Ash is, somehow, involved with the mechs themselves, rather than being held in reserve someplace else. Her reasoning for this is the nonsensical intuition that, because Ash is the only named person within NAZCA, as well as being Lilian-associated as a Bloom, all things expressive of valuable personhood must be directly connected to them rather than the organization.

    It takes a particular kind of soldier to convey having a soul during military conflict. In Petra's opinion, which aligns completely perfectly with her actual lived experience, that kind of soldier is "queer".
Petra Soroka     Completing this thought-- which feels like it takes hours of hard consideration, but in reality only spans moments between being enveloped in artillery fire and the smoke clearing enough for her to finally detect Cinder-- measurably adjusts Petra's opinions of the current military hellzone. To the point that, when Cinder's arm is blasted off and she fumbles with injecting an HP ampoule into herself, Petra's still-dazed first thought is being vaguely upset at Cinder for getting hurt so badly. This clears up a moment later, though, and Petra nearly trips over herself scrambling to sprint the distance between herself and her disarmed girlfriend.

    It's right when she starts moving from her camp in cover, and takes her eyes off of the wrestling between Arthur and the frontsman mech, that the sidearm locks onto her position. It's only sheer primal instinct that has her flare out her Silver in a shield, like hands thrown up defensively, in the instant before impact, and the beam bubbles half of it away into glittering superheated steam before piercing through anyways. Hit by even the blunted ray of energy, through her EGO armor, Petra is thrown through the air with a strangled cry of "Cinder--!" before slowing herself to a clumsy and incomplete stop by hooking her bayonet into a tree while tumbling past it.

    EGO tattered, covered in dust and leaves, Petra struggles to her feet and fails to reach Cinder in time to stop her from freaking out-- though after dismemberment, a pat on the reformed shoulder might not have been enough even if Petra hadn't been owned by a critical shot. Instead, while Cinder scurries away, Petra provides the best reassurement she can.

    "Ah-- er, you're not going to die here, so don't even fucking-- fucking try. And if Mel-- Melting Love?" Cognitive dissonance strikes, but Petra adamantly decides to put it off until later. "If you get turned into goop, I'll scoop you into a jar, or something! I'll figure something out! So just be careful and-- and trust me! Okay?"

    Split off from one psychologically convenient pair, and not feeling up to riding in a car when mechs are abound, Petra instead traverses the ruined city block with airborne steps and rails made of her depleted morphmetal, bringing herself near the target of the most strongly directed aggression around: Lilian. "Lilian! Why are the-- do you see how the mechs are like, actually really kind of pretty?! There's no way that can be anything *but* Ash, right?"
Lilian Rook     The gradual breakdown of organized fighting succeeds, and turns the battlefield into a disorganized one. Pursued and pursuer lose meaning. The alternation of wild danger and brief reprieve dissolves with them. Nearly random chaos takes its place, and it becomes impossible to escape the omnipresence of stochastic lethality.

    Bond sprints across ankle-shattering asphalt under split second sweeps of cannon fire and the fall of nearby rockets. Cinder is forced to dodge a mech that nearly tramples her to death as an incidental after-effect of maneuvering, suddenly appearing from the smoke and vanishing back into it right after. Flashes of fire flicker and fade within the oil smog like lightning to a thunderhead. Tracers tear out the cover right near Trudy and blast her with glass and rebar, then the architecture just above collapses on top of her at the rumbling of another shell.

    The air smells like burning tar. A white hot beam nearly peels the red brother from his mount without aiming. A wave of flames directed at skittering goo singes Petra, a few feet off of flash-bursting her lungs from the heat. Arthur is slashed with anti-infantry fragments halfway through his gravity loop. Another missile blast flattens every tree in Rita's vicinity, in her direction. Red light glitters from the smoke, prefacing the optical sweep of some machine or another. Chattering cannon fire rakes from Arthur to Xion to Petra, and sprays up the walk from Cinder to Bond to Trudy.

    Red laser lines erratically swing through the dust. Anti-personnel machine guns clatter at Xion in the brief moments between buildings. Micro-missile locks turn straggling monsters to pink mist. Two more acquire Lilian by accident, chase her, are sliced warhead from fuselage, only for a random shell to go off right next to her and hurl her crashing through a storefront window. An energy beam misses where she was, and skews off at Rita by coincidence.

    The bulk of the firefall hits at once, and targets everybody and nobody. Even the mechs vanish in the hellstorm that ensues. It takes altogether too long for enough ringing to fade to reassess what's even happened.

    Machine three, bereft of legs, appears functionally totalled. It is frankly a miracle that its superstructure has even held up-- its wards were already beaten down, and its armour alone can't possibly explain how recognizably humanoid it still is-- but all of its attached systems are reduced to twisted, flaming metal. Both arms are broken at the elbows, frozen in a position of shielding the chest. The optics sputter, and loudspeakers give off noise, then it falls silent. Moments later, a shuddering flywheel sound can be heard from within, and the machine's chest violently unfolds with a percussive thump that drives it inches into the dirt. What must be the pilot's char-- or perhaps only the pilot-- is railgunned out of the battle zone at ordinarily lethal speed.

    A tactical retreat rather than a suicidally devoted last stand like last time. On their own doorstep, too.

    Machine two is still up and running. Being knocked down by Xion resulted in its ward collapsing from splash fire, and it sprints towards secondary cover while weaving under fire manually. "Blue Two is hit! Repeat, Blue Two is hit! Ordnance at shotgun! Unable to hold picket! No echo on buzzers! Suggest diverting tactical scenario ordnance!" They finish slamming the new ammo drum home before thruster flaring sideways into cover, and cycle the cannon bolt just as a hundred new lances of covert goo skewer the mech before its shields can recharge.
Lilian Rook     The pilot kicks open the hatch himself, clambering out onto the mech's chassis before it goes fully inert. He can be distantly seen evading Melting Love on his own, freerunning between mech and building with superhuman prowess, defensively torching down gelatinous limbs with withering fire from his pulse gun. He escapes to the nearby rooftop, and sprints at top speed out of the perimeter. A second one.

    Cinder and Xion join Bond out of the resort block, but the Nobody feels what the others do even at that distance; the mass release of nauseating noise in her head that signals just how many of the individual disposable jammers had been wiped out in that saturation attack. The three main towers are still operating, but they're higher up on the mountain, less than fully effective at this range.

    And Bond finds the two that Arthur had helped send away, lingering where they shouldn't be waiting to meet. Even as Xion dumps the APC back out, they're assailed with "James! Oh my god what's going on?!" "Where is everyone else? This is obviously the time for a full retreat." "What did you get Lilian involved in?!" "Kat, you should go. I'm going to provide exfiltration support." "Like hell!"

    But they have no objections to him taking the wheel, even as they clamber inside after him. Katrina wordlessly hands Cinder a rifle, then starts half-stripping her on the spot to assess her wounds. Not entirely unfamiliar magical circles are draw, briefly turning her burns hellishly severe again, then fading them back to healthy flesh, numb and prickling. Bryce holds on to one of the crew bars near the driver's seat, inserting additional plates into his carrier and removing-- a sword?-- from the rack.

    Ridiculously dangerous high-speed mountain driving takes Bond careening through the forest and into view of his target; a row of long-range guns set up under cover on one side of the mountain, nestled together with covered launchers and clustered around a jamming tower; one of two gun nests and one of three jammers. It's surrounded with turrets that should belong on a battleship for shooting down missiles; not old-fashioned autocannon rifles like the mechs are holding, but up-to-date automatic railguns-- the ones that'd show down the blue brother's arrow.

    The five board can barely glimpse a skeleton ground crew, freshly arriving to reload weapons and guarding the perimeter, before the APC comes under fire from the perimeter defense guns.

    And yet where the first two retreat, the leader's machine seems borderline unscathed. Despite lacking half a foot, it has rocketed free of the muddy trench and charged back into the active fire zone. The red brother's sword plunges into plate-gaps, carving away chunks of armour, all the way up until geodesic lines of power flicker into being in place of the wards, and a point-blank spell(?) is fired at him from point blank, right under his feet.

    A second beam attack is fired at Petra, where the first one didn't finish her off, and Lilian blinks in-and-out of the way to rescue her, hurling her aside on an adjacent street. The pilot trains the rifle on Rita, scampering along the rooftops, then suddenly aims it down, sweeping fire through all of her possible footing for the length of the block, and then firing the beam gun at her falling trajectory; nearl-light is faster than her tentacles can grab the nearest building.
Angela "I won't, I won't uh, I said I won't so I won't--" Cinder manages and then blinks twice at the idea of being put into a goo jar. She actually laughs at that, the terror fading from her face being replaced by humor. "Wings, you're so fucking sweet... Make sure to put little holes in the lid, Ahah..."

A rifle is given to Cinder. "er how do I... ... It's just point and click right?"

She realizes after that she's not being handed a rifle in order to actually use it but to keep Katrina's hand free while Katrina strips her down. "Ah--wha-" Cinder says, unused to her wounds being treated this way rather than someone just shooting her with an HP bullet. "Ow ow ow ow--OW!!" That 'OW!' is when the burns intensify before she her flesh turns healthy gain and the pain fades, though they get somewhere halfway between itchy and ticklish and numb.

"th...thanks," Cinder manages. "Uh."

She offers Katrina her rifle back. "Normally we fight with each other to cover each other's weaknesses... But we had a last minute uh personell change."

Not that she's sure Yuri would've changed much--then again, she is a Kamen Rider now.
Lilian Rook     'Lilian! Why are the-- do you see how the mechs are like, actually really kind of pretty?! There's no way that can be anything *but* Ash, right?'

    "What the fuck are you talking about?" is the extent of Petra's reward for saying so. Lilian is feeling out the release of pressure on her magic, then fully focused on assembling one of her stationary assault circles, like at the Union Busan crossing. "All you have to do is cover me! You know how to stand there and eat shit, don't you?!" Her unusually terse delivery is accentuated by the rawness of her throat and the dust and dried blood settled into shallow streaks on her face.

    'THIS! IS JUST!! THE WORLD!!!'

    "Blue One! Get--"

    Arthur drops out of the sky with enough momentum to nearly knock the mech on its back-- No, he definitely should have, but it bends back strangely under his strike, leaning so far that it couldn't possibly maintain balance, then grasps rubble with its outstretched hand to stop itself, dropping the rifle on top of a mangled car. The double-distorted speaker voice crackles as the half-armoured machine rights itself, and then buckles to one knee under the press of gravity. "Hah?! That's all you're good for?!" The pilot doesn't even appear to be talking to him. The volume cranks up and up. "Red Team is still four minutes out!! You fuckers ran this sim how many times?! I don't want to hear you two blame the machines later, do you hear me!!?!"

    Being functionally abandoned on the battlefield disperses every last trace of international brevity code. Despite the obvious tactical value of returning troops to base to rearm while the Elites are getting slowly whittled down, the harsh crackle has a tinge of indignant incredulity, mingled with a slip of accent.

    'YOU ARE TWO ARMS AND TWO LEGS AND TWO HANDS AND TWO EYES AND ANYTHING MORE THAN THAT IS FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE SHIT, DON'T BE *PRETENDING*, GET THAT BITCH-ASS BODY-IMAGE BACK INSIDE THAT *MEAT*!!'

    There it is. The mech's physical frame surges in uncanny motion a second time. Where it should still be arrested under gravitational crushing, one arm rushes up to meet Arthur irrespective of basic physics. The wrist blade ignites at full length, and the A-P flamethrower is fired straight into it, leaving a burning wake in the direction he could dodge. "Don't make me laugh! If this is how you handle one stinger then I hope you're prepared to run from the other three!" The pilot tosses the sidearm to the functioning arm, then fires at Lilian through multiple buildings. The you've-already-lost boasting is tinged with boiling anger.

    "A hotshot kid like you though? No way you are. Gonna be a hero, aren't you? Dig deep, grit your teeth, and 'power of friendship' through it all. I've got your number already." The statement is followed by multiple security cameras swivelling to face trudy, and a barrage of GTG missiles being launched directly on top of her. Radiological alarms blare at the same time, and rods bursting from the ground are the prelude to the same gamma flashes that had fried Rita's clone, hideously endagering everyone who hadn't already taken off in the APC at nearly every intersection in the resort block. Mines go off, cars explode, and a rippling wave of traps ignites all over, with the communication blackout lifted.

    The mech's left arm breaks at the shoulder. The pilot rips it off and tosses it onto the street. The shoulder stump spews dark burgundy liquid onto the road. "You've played your hand, and I've got it all tagged. Half-armed, half-ready, and half-assed is enough for you. So prepare to crash and burn in a way that finally fucking matters, 'heroes', 'cause stronger men than you have broken just like this."
Lilian Rook     Still pushing forward, on one foot and with one arm, the last of the rockets are fired into the Melting Love wall, intent on torching it before it can split up again. The whine of aircraft starts to reach your ears. One combat VTOL, then another, leave the landing pad. "What a disappointment. I thought Fenrir was supposed to be something special too, but she just blends in with the rest of you roaches. All you've got going for you is being annoying to stamp out."

    "After you, maybe I'll kill those hacks in intel for telling me that this dolled up little girl playing superhero is supposed to be my equal. No shock it took them this long to find her; how can they even tell you one-star nobodies apart?"
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Keep going. Keep going.

    Fragments and cannon fire zip around and graze a boy who lived his most habit-forming years in the hell of bullets. They slow him down, disrupt his attacks. He didn't manage his maneuver, at least not nearly at full force, and that's enough. The final round is a loss. Fireball consumes everything.

    Gravity can affect and twist flame and pressure. But only so much, really. His body's endurance is half gravity and half willpower, and the latter sort of depends on a kind of focus used to avoid vital damage and an assumption of an enemy striking to cause pain and damage, not just incinerating everything. That's why a burnt wreck is the one to descend on the enemy, and why there's an ashen crunch when the blade consumes all of space with fire.

>Arthur: THAT MOVEMENT
>Arthur: THE ASPECT CANNOT BE DAMPENED

    Skin's blistered, plenty of his robe's ash. But the boy, bloodied and bruised and slashed up, is roaring with righteous shounen willpower as he duels the giant with the battle-broom in his hand. And he loses; as much he can in this situation. He can't keep up, and he can't cut off the mech, and he can't capture. He can stand his ground, but not take more of it.

"Gonna be a hero, aren't you? Dig deep, grit your teeth, and 'power of friendship' through it all. I've got your number already."
>Arthur: FACE THE ASPECT AS IT WISHES TO BE FACED

    "SHUT UP! YOU *BET* THAT'S MY DAMN NUMBER, YOU THREE-TRILLION EGO-SMEARING *KILL-COUNTER*, YOU THINK I'M ABOUT TO CHANGE FOR THE GUN-FUCKER WHO CAN'T DECIDE WHAT HER ARM'S GONNA BE MADE OF TODAY?!" Arthur says, simply copping to his failure in this particular approach. Will this be another Blueberry Princess? Another Oda? Another First Slain? Another case of "push through it, long enough, and the old reliable strategy will work out"?

>Arthur: WILL IT
>Arthur: ARE THEY WEAK ENOUGH SUCCUMB TO THESE OLD WAYS
>Arthur: OR DO THEY HAVE THE KIND OF STRENGTH LIKE ROOK
>Arthur: THE KIND THAT DOESN'T YIELD
>Arthur: JUST BECAUSE YOU SCREAM AND STRUGGLE
>Arthur: AND THREATEN TO DIE ON THEIR BLADE
>Arthur: IN AN IMITATION OF HUMANITY
>Arthur: THAT WOULD BE OFFENSIVE TO IT, IF IT COULD CRITIQUE

>Arthur: THIS ONE MIGHT BREAK YOU
>Arthur: UNLESS YOU BREAK ANOTHER WAY FIRST

    Full of frustration, Arthur's next big swing promises to be his best and his hardest, which is all the more shame that it slams, crashes, and winds up with him pushed well back away from his enemy. He stumbles back, shifting into antigravity to keep from Melting Love and to let the momentum carry him some distance. And the last of the shit-talking hits him.

    "After you, maybe I'll kill those hacks in intel for telling me that this dolled up little girl playing superhero is supposed to be my equal."
    He just degrades into indignant swearing and blasting this time. The dialogue loses the train of righteous coherence, and shifts into a kind of frustrated barrage of insults and belittling from circa ten years ago broadband, focused on one key specific fact:

    "LEAST SHE'S STRONG ENOUGH FOR MERCY, *MURDERER!!!*"

    He has to pull back and give the machine the space though. Angry though he is, he's sort of lost the verbal duel and the combat both, against a half-armed foe. And *boy* is he fucking steamed about it, judging by how many excuses he's peppering into his insulting tirade that he's parting with.
Rita Ma      Ms. Cinder's blood is around here somewhere, but I haven't seen her. Petra's hurt but I think I saw Ms. Rook take her. That building was just Ms. Xion, then- is she okay? I don't know what her blood smells like.

     There's no room for exultation. The error bars on the situation are bigger than one death. Usually moving on instinct leaves plenty of room for conscious thought; right now it doesn't.

     Shelter behind heavy concrete for the missiles. Good. Twist and flare forcefield for the stray beam. Mostly good, a little singed. Flare forcefield and shelter for the firestorm. Good. When the pilot ejects, chase him and kill. G--

     Rita, galloping on all fours along the rooftops, is suddenly conscious of the 'ground' beneath her giving way. She twists to look at the lead mech training that beam on her just as she enters freefall. Her gut drops. Oh.

     When's the last time I messed up this bad?

     Deep nerves reach back and slam a form of antigravity from Mia's solar system, from that whale and its children. That stops 9.8m/s^2 for half a heartbeat, and the beam incinerates a 'Rita', not Rita. It looks clean, satisfyingly like the slip-up it was.

     "I'm okay," she slightly lies. Telepathy doesn't have to be honest.

     - - - -

     Rita, fortunately, isn't near the resort when the radiologicals go off again. She's headed for one of the jamming towers on the mountainside- coincidentally, the jamming tower that's a stone's throw from where the APC is pulling up to make short work of a gunnery team, even if she'll be a minute late to help.

     "Mr. Bond. I'm going to try throwing one of the towers at her. If you could weaken it at the base, give me some kind of guidance, or keep her from seeing it coming..."

     The jammers scramble geometric magic. The mechs are using geometric magic. Surely they wouldn't field a countermeasure to their own technology. But, on the other hand, maybe they wouldn't field something that has a gap in what it can counter.

     'Four minutes out' is time to start gambling anyway.
James Bond      In something like this, Bond drives the same with four passengers as with none. He can afford to, thanks to the design of the APC.

James! Oh my god what's going on?!

    "You're seeing the same thing I am," Bond says as his fatigues slowly mat to his abdomen from a dark, gradually spreading patch of blood. "They were ready for us. No security because the jammers and the guns *are* the security. The armor, I've no idea--only that it's unusually out-of-character for them." It doesn't occur to him that it might be Ash's doing.

Where is everyone else? This is obviously the time for a full retreat.
What did you get Lilian involved in?!

    "No. It's better than it looks, trust me. Even if we were going to retreat, we'd need those guns dealt with anyway." Bond grimaces as a bump aggravates the wound, stifling a groan of pain into a sharp grunt.

    Trees whip past viewscreens like the closing fingers of God's fist, threatening to crush the APC like a gnat if Bond's focus slips for a second. The ground, such that it can be seen through those abstractions, has even less distinction.

    "We're coming up on it now," says Bond after another pained grunt. "Looks defended. I want at least one of the gun hatches manned. I don't care who or which. If you're going to get out, don't expect me to stop, and for God's sake, don't waste time staring."

    Soon enough, the APC's exterior starts the worrying tink-tink-tink of taking fire. It lifts airborne and travels for a few heartstopping seconds after its wheels clear a small incline.

    The subsequent landing sees Bond's grip on the steering wheel tighten; it's the only indication that he's even aware of the danger--his expression is worryingly placid determination. Coming up within range of the turrets, Bond's foot hits the brake like a piston, his arms wrenching the wheel sideways.

    The rover drifts around the nest in a semicircle, providing any gunners a stable line of sight while minimizing the profile which faces the fire team at any given moment. At the apex of the swing, Bond deliberately oversteers into a controlled spin, dropping into a lower gear to send up a spray of dirt and leaf litter at the fire team, before peeling out and sweeping in the opposite direction.

Mr. Bond. I'm going to try throwing one of the towers at her. If you could weaken it at the base, give me some kind of guidance, or keep her from seeing it coming...

    I can manage the first at the moment. I hope it's enough.

    The engine growls like a wolf ready to strike as Bond drops into a low gear for a climb--up to the base of the tower, and the growl turns into a snarl.

     "Hold onto something."

     The APC surges forward, and Bond rams the base of the tower as quickly as he can manage.
Trudy Grimm     The crimson samurai hangs on as best he can, taking every hesitation in the mech's movement as an opportunity to stab and chop and cut even more into the machine. Wards flare to life and he forces all of his weight into the tanto, wedging it in place right before the defensive spell ignites beneath him. At last, the samurai is unseated, hurled off the lead mech in a plume of smoke and colorful flame. He hits the asphalt once, bounces, and-- disappears on the second bounce, sucked into the shadow he casts on the ground. The only evidence that he was there being the damage he's caused and his discarded weapons; the o-dachi, stuck point-first somewhere, the cast-aside kanabo, and the tanto stuck between a combat mecha's shoulders.

    Trudy rolls as damaged masonry collapses, then scrambles forward on all fours amidst the gunfire and wreckage. They destroy everything around them so /carelessly/.

    The explosions, the ruined town-slash-resort, all the ruined forestry and animals from that radiation attack earlier-- if Ash is directly involved, it's not painting a particularly good picture in her mind.

    Finally getting back to her feet, she whirls around to behold the field again. Two machines are down. The third is putting up an insanely good fight. And-- all the cameras are looking at her. She takes a step back, balancing herself for a second while racing through her options. Her eyes flit up the mountainside again-- at the void opening she had left open. Without a second thought, the witch drops into her shadow.

    A heartbeat later, she drops out of the shadow on the mountainside she had been messing with. Flame from explosions at her point of origin erupt out around the skeletal fingertips while the witch herself tumbles into the grass and dirt. Hands thrust out, she catches herself, braced, and skids to a stop before she can tumble too far. The void-black portal behind her disappears, those skeletal fingertips vanishing whence they came.

No point.

    "Ahaha~" the witch says out loud to no one, rising to her feet on the mountainside. She takes a moment to dust her hands against her thighs, "They're a little cute, aren't they? Oh, but this has quite gotten out of hand..."

    The shadow around the mech's feet-- around Ash-- deepens. Trudy can still see the machine from here. Even as it's bathed in Cherenkov-blue light, the ring of darkness remains. Gleaming black fingers wrap around one leg, belonging to a hand half the mech's full size, and yank. Without warning, Ash's mech starts sinking into its own shadow, dragged down by a giant's grip. Sparks shoot off where black-marble bone touches warding spells.

    "Shall I put you someplace where you can't cause any further damage?" the witch hums to herself as a second hand reaches out of the shadow, pinning the remaining arm to the side while grabbing the machine's waist and torso. The Void yawns open beneath the mech, icy cold to the touch like the Arctic sea.

    "Do you know if I can do this, I wonder?" she says to herself, "Do you even know who amongst your targets is even capable of it? Would you bother to learn in the first place? Ahaha~... Perhaps I am only holding you in place... Or perhaps the Lady of the Void has simply decided to drag you into Her domain."

    "I suppose we shall never know~."
Rita Ma      Long moments into the APC firefight, something long and pale and branching and slender emerges from the woods. A girl might be attached to it, somewhere in there.

     If there are still-standing guards between it and the jamming tower, pale ribbons pass smoothly through them, and they considerately fall in half. But that isn't what she's there for, and it isn't absentmindedness, but singlemindedness. "Thank you, Mr. Bond," she says-and-thinks, while a ribbon wetly trails over the APC as if to pet it. Sedately regarding the others as she moves: "I'm glad you're all alright. Ms. Cinder, you were bleeding; tell me if you need a patch-up, okay?"

     The jamming tower is leaning from the impact, now, and she glides along behind it. Half the ribbons lash around it, and half drive into the ground as pitons, and- crrrrrack- she finishes the last bit of what Bond started in wrenching the tower jaggedly free from the earth. Thirty-foot-long tendrils draw it back like a javelin, and the metal deforms under their grip.

     Loudspeakers like that, and solid feet of metal insulation, are tools to shout and not listen. But Rita can whisper past them. It's definitely unwise to do so, but she's too frayed to care.

     "Why are you so mean to Lilian, Ash? Why do you want her to 'break' so badly? Why do you hate her dreams so much? I don't get it at all." For once Rita doesn't manage to sound quite innocent.

     There. When Trudy seizes them in that great skeletal hand, and when there's an angle on the unarmored arm-socket Arthur helped expose.

     "A Bloom of Humanity is supposed to be someone special. But you sound just like everybody else."

     Something that massive can't be thrown very quickly. In its lazy arc, it sounds like an eighteen-wheeler going down the opposite lane on a freeway: a sliver of awful 'stop being special', delivered right at the personalized mech's heart.
Xion It's hard to even get in the APC without taking fire, Xion's still-ready twin keys swung in angry arcs, first Eye of Judgement up from ground and her side to, and then the Kingdom key rattles as it's swung into a second to detonate the fired rounds in deflecting-destroying arcs. Holding her blades crossed for a moment just before entry, she takes a triple tap right to the guard-center of her forced back blades and fails to keep up the block cleanly, front spatter-blasted with the flinders of a half-dozen mostly- and partial deflections.

And she has it *easier* than Cinder, already inside. Rolling into the back as James takes off with her witty one liner still fresh on lips, the ragged Nobody carries herself with an indefatigable air that is not visually borne out.

If someone specific was curious about what Xion's blood smelled like in specific, she would have at least a capable time finding out were she not one more off-odd smell in a hundred others. Trickling down the curve of her chin from drooling-dripping dark head wound, the ichorous dribble that curls like motor oil or warm molasses down her cheek pauses at the edge of her chin and wobble gravid and heavy before dripping down the ruefully short span between head and collar and marking another lingeringly-wet drop on her shredded coat.

Releasing Eye of Judgement into silvery-shwinks and pale particles, Xion moves around Katrina tending to Cinder by pulling her apart in the back of the rover while arming her, automatically trying to slide off her protective coat one sleeve at a time with her freed hand and not getting far at all with the pinned-stuck piece of clothing.

Lightly loosing the Kingdom Key into a passenger seat and balancing perilously in the transport while James begins Extreme Offroading, Xion draws and flick-clicks open a utility knife rotely, pulling the knife up her stomach to peel aside her stapled-to-skin coat and start working it off. She's faster than Katrina's aid to Cinder, in the seats, because she simply drags off the scraps of her ruined coat and the stained shirt underneath, inventories out the cloth-fall of a fresh coat, and pulls that on under the roar of the APC's cannon.

'Cleanly dressed', which is like good as new, especially with the thinning out of the spatial distortion, Xion checks Bryce with a glance and gallows-humor shallow, "I think we're being rudely taken *very* seriously. But it's going well?"

Xion and James share humor, or pragmatic battle-reality sense, but, she's still leaking from a headwound, because a quick change of clothes doesn't fix that.

> 'If you're going to get out, don't expect me to stop,'

"Why would you do that?" Xion asks, calmly reaching around Bryce to pick the Kingdom Key off the chair she dumped it in.
Xion ---

The rover drifts around the nest in a semicircle, providing any gunners a stable line of sight while minimizing the profile which faces the fire team at any given moment. At the apex of the swing, Bond deliberately oversteers into a controlled spin, dropping into a lower gear to send up a spray of dirt and leaf litter at the fire team, and Xion hurtles out of the back of the APC rover like a velocitous black-wrapped missile, fresh coat extra sweepy as her tight corkscrew opens into a stepping foot and she lands in a bowlegged skid that moves smoothly into a springing leap - over the perimeter gun fire with a flip-over opportune set of seeking water blasts that zip down to blast into soaking-smashing spheres - to get a sense of a team plan in her head.

Despite the knot of dark complications in Xion's heart about acknowledging what's going on, she has momentum on her side -- but there's *no way* Xion will fastball special ride the towers across 'town' to help, already sickened again by their antispatial proximity. Instead, she falls towards the fireteam among the fall of rain, landing bootheel down and single blade flashing silver in the sudden downpour.

"Hey." Xion carries through between single fireteam members like conversational partners as she brings a key to a perimeter gunfight. "How many of you are knights?" She asks, lunges and hooks and rolling slashes her way through her questioning. "I can't tell-" cut with the motion of the Kingdom Key. "-either." Dark, petty-bitter. She's not making herself heard across the field.

"Are you all ready to die for this!?" She asks her 'conversation partners', her attackers, her victims, their hearts and ears both. She wants to know, because it makes no sense to her, hearing it from their depths in garbled gunshot consonants.