Scene Listing || Scene Schedule || Scene Schedule RSS
Owner Pose
Silica     Silica finishes off the last of the scouts, showing several gunshot impacts and looking worse for wear because of the headlong assault on the flying weapon platforms. As the last one falls, the Cait Sith lands as well, staggering and falling to a knee before dragging herself back up, hugging a nearby wall for support as she limps along to rejoin the others.

    "I'm a little shot up, but I'll live." she answers to Tomoe, whistling Tetsu over. The Dracotiger limps towards his master, giving her an affectionate headbump then steps back at a little push. "Alright, time to do my job..." The Cait Sith straightens, lifting her hands before her and begins to chant in the not!Norse of ALO magic. "Seír fylla heilagr austr, brott svalr bani." Healing water falls like a gentle rain over herself, Tetsu, Tomoe and Riva, restoring some of their health and alliviating some of the pain from so many wounds. It isn't nearly a full heal, only an Undine could manage that level of healing, but she at least does her support-role job. "I'll need to let my Mana regen after that, I've been using a lot of Sword Skills so I'm a bit drained." she explains, petting Tetsu before Executioner starts speaking. The words make the little Cait Sith's face contort in disgusted rage, "If you want us. Come and get us!" she snaps back, likely unheard from her position.
Tomoe Tomoe has had the snot knocked out of her but she's had some time to recover slightly she's, however, looking to Silicia. She's going to be pushing herself and she's got more to do she's thankful for the healing spell and hears what the enemy T-doll has to say. Tomoe seems to make herself ready.

"You sure you're not just running a chatbot?"

Tomoe snarks back she also does want to keep the attention of the T-doll on her and rather than her allies. Still, after the earlier battle she's going to keep with them.

"Riva you with us? Silica keeps behind me."

She now makes ready for the fight that's about to play out, given the lesser T-dolls? This is going to hurt, a hell of a lot.
Gordon Freeman     Gordon finishes ripping those drives and leaves them stacked, a wordless invitation to take them later should Amon or Tony so choose. Gordon's got his own target, and he's going to focus on it. M-4's probable locations. Without a single word, he's immediately turning back, kicking open the shaft and diving down again, crashing into his own stacked benches, and then scrambling out the maintenance area and out the door at an accelerated dash, moving at a mad speed through the streets with only a moment set aside to grab up a chunk of old wood or something and toss it out to bait the snipers anew.

    There he goes, locked on hard to the coordinates and ready to tear ass all the way there. He heard that she's got M-4, or so she claims, and so she'll probably be somewhere near there!
Amon Amon's priorities here are very different from everybody else's, or so he thinks. He's already turning a wild profit with a couple of captured goons. He listens to the apparent serial killer they've provoked while surveying the bits of machinery Gordon is ripping out of the nearby computers. A questioning nose echoes out from behind his mask as they're left in place, and he makes a point of taking one of them for later analysis.

He's got pockets enough for that. The Equalist soldiers with him leave the disabled Rippers behind for Tony's drone to carry, rightfully recognizing that they'll probably want their hands free.

He stalks calmly after Gordon, assuming that the silent man knows what he's doing because all prior evidence is that he knows what he's doing. Plus, they'd come in on his ridiculous teleportation device, so... that sort of speaks for itself.

As they reach the streets, the masked man gestures for his soldiers to branch off and head to the wounded. Which leaves Amon alone with Gordon (and probably Tony), moving rapidly through the streets and... periodically throwing garbage as sniper bait?

Amon just sticks to erratic movements and a quick pace. He's good at traversing urban environments in difficult-to-target ways.
Alexis Maaka     Maaka takes off from the comms tower, knowing that area's secured, in order to help secure the remaining hot zone. She uses the rooftops, parkouring her way toward the coordinates indicated.

    Riva and the others don't look so good, which is reason enough for Maaka to pitch in. "This is Maaka, on-station and providing sniper cover." She says, hefting her HK rifle. That voice on the radio reaches her ear, but Maaka remains focused on providing cover fire while Freeman is hauling ass. "Keep talking, bitch." She mutters under her breath, keeping an eye out for enemy snipers to pop.
Tony Stark With things wrapped up with the servers - even with the unscheduled dump arranged by the local ringleader, a nonissue due to the swift actions of Doctor Freeman - Tony pages through the data streaming past him on the roof of the communcations building.

Down below, the Mark XVII being remote-piloted by Friday accepts the bodies of the insensate (and wiped) Sangvis T-Dolls, holding both in a position that would be slightly awkward for a human to carry the pair of bodies , but provides no issue to the mechanical strength of the Iron Legion suit.

"Friday, start a search for energy signatures, cross-referencing data from the comms hub for last known position of enemies, and searching for high-volume outgoing data."
"On it. Beginning sweep."

Taking off from the roof, Tony guides the Mark VII into the air and then down into the streets, snaking his way to the (expected) position of the Ringleader and the (actual) position of Riva's team.

"Alright, everyone. Once we get an idea of things, same idea as before. We can flush out the snipers and support units, and suppress the lot. Banari, Kaspar?"
Riva Banari Riva finds herself standing in the aftermath of a murderous artillery barrage. The good news is it took the rest of the enemies out. The bad news is now they can't hold the location with any certainty because all the defenses just got blown up.

Riva grumbles to herself, cursing her lack of foresight in calling for backup like that. "Thanks, Maaka. Keep an eye out for enemy sniper units and countersnipe. We're a bit short on that at the moment." She replies, and turns to face the others present. She hurts all over. Her wounds are closing as her Anima-infused body rebuilds itself, but it's slow. Slow enough that if she waited it would cause a critical delay in the mission. She's not willing to use Wuyin's method of dealing with it. She does, however, nod in thanks to Silica as she brings forth a healing rain. It helps her wounds significantly.

"I'm with you." Riva says to Tomoe, getting back into position with the other tank, and pushes forward.

Slowly. She moves a little bit towards the villa, lightly poking at the defenses and sending the Sangvis running... Then moves back and pokes in another location, and then another, taking light potshots and then fading back to work to draw out enemies and make them know that movement is not assured in the environment... And hoping to draw the boss' attention.

Stark's arrival for backup gets an enthusiastic wave. "HEY!" She calls to Tony, smiling. "I guess the cavalry's arrived, huh? Let's work to draw out the Ringleader so we can finish her off."
Gideon Kaspar     Silica, Riva, and Tomoe have a breather in the smoking remains of the bombarded plaza to recover and regroup, though not long. The response from the enemy commander hadn't been anything like 'surrender now or-'; this 'Executioner' seems not only willing, but eager to come down and get them, and they'd busted this blockade at the foot of the northeastern villa overlooking the river to try and make a beeline to the enemy's command post. Now they're in an ideal position to halt them from leaving, for the same reasons it'd previously been an ideal position to keep the three of them out, but the winding road up many shallow rises, across exposed ground overlooked by a surrounding U-shape of tall buildings is an absolute death trap to charge upwards without cover.

    At least, one would assume so. Gordon's sharp departure straight for the package, before the enemy can get to her, is marked by an equally sudden change of tone, in that when he throws the debris he picks up, nothing at all takes a shot at it. It doesn't seem to be just one particular jaeger getting wise, as Amon finds his own junk only thumping anticlimactically into the dirt, and the same wise maneuver drawing no fire around the next several corners either. The best case scenario is that Executioner has already taken direct control of the T-Dolls around the urban area and organized them into a new tactical line that fortunately doesn't have line of sight to the radio area. The worst case is they're being played.

    Maaka taking her new position with a decent view of the villa and its front grounds (sadly, a higher vantage than the mansion itself is impossible, for obvious reasons) has an eye on the enemy almost immediately. As expected, there are T-Dolls all over the upper windows, lower entrances, surrounding the courtyard, and on the roof, with scout drones performing laps around the grounds, and a skeleton crew checking out the sheer eastern cliff in case someone were to be dumb enough to climb it. There are enough that if she were to shoot immediately, she would take out a few before immediately being countersniped into oblivion once a dozen jaegers zero her position. Considering both sides want M-4 though, somewhere in the city, Executioner doesn't have the luxury of just sitting pretty and waiting for Elites to come to her.

    That's the reality Riva and Tony deal with. On foot, Riva doesn't have a whole lot of approach options. Going near the main road predictably has the result of multiple squads of rippers drowning her in fire, which she might not even bother to try, if she's putt off by them waiting for her to be well within their range this time, to maximize the probability of killing her before she could escape. The southern end is sheer cliffs and doesn't even have a view she can shoot over, so the northern end is the better bet, where she can melt into the dense forest and get a squad of rovers and a squad of rippers sent after her, scanning methodically through the woods to locate her, considering it a better idea than letting her run around as a complete unknown.
Gideon Kaspar     Tony can keep tabs on their progress through the woods pretty easily though. The standard rippers, rovers, and scouts are simple to track through their heat signatures and wireless traffic, but the ever-obnoxious jaeger units don't show up easily even to aerial sensor reconnaissance; the cloaks they're seen wearing are very much for thermal and electromagnetic baffling more than warmth. Aside from the squads hunting Riva, he can track the huge blob of forces inside of the villa splitting up, with half coming down and half remaining behind to guard the HQ; the ones from the northwest and due east plazas, diverting troops to try and pincer the position at the checkpoint they'd just broken; and several squads still roving the urban interior, retreating to fall in line with the rest of the troops, rather than circulate around in small, easy to pick off groups, which would have made everyone's lives much easier.

    The one upside of this is that it takes some of the heat off of Gordon and Amon, there are a few possible points that M-4 could still be basing herself out of, according to probabilistic modeling, and almost all of them are in that downtown section, dense with alleys, basements, sub-buildings, and such as it is. One is a cluster of generic office buildings that'd been empty even before humans had abandoned it, and another involves going underground and into a series of underpasses and tunnels that allow buses and trams to cut through the rocky rises that characterize this town. Tony can pick up a rear guard of Sangvis troops at the former, not moving, as Executioner seems to not want to let those same likely spots she know of go totally undefended. He can't pick up anything on the latter because it's very deep underneath solid rock and concrete.
Silica     Silica pets her Dracotiger, then sends him away, the giant monster vanishing in a flare of light, back into her inventory to rest and recover. "You did good, Tetsu... now it's the others turn." she remarks, summoning forth a pair of new pets for their specific skillset and their smaller size. Pina, and Hibiki, a Feathered Little Dragon, and a Flying Serpent respectively. She sticks close to Tomoe and Riva, but not so close as to get caught in any crossfire from the hunting parties.

    Instead of trying to keep pace with Riva's hit and run, the Cait Sith opts to amplify the damage caused by laying in ambush, striking out at the Rippers, Scouts and Rovers that come looking with a mix of Wind elemental spellcraft, and the breath weapons of disorienting Bubble Breath and crippling Ice Needles from her pets, before melting into the scrub and disengaging, leaving damaged or disabled units in her wake, while taking minimal damage in return.

    In a war of attrition such as this though, she will eventually lose, but that isn't the point of this exercise. They're trying to buy time and keep Executioner's eyes on them, rather than on the asset securing team.
Gideon Kaspar     Of course, the G&K commander 'on-site' is reviewing the same situation, through his own T-Dolls' network and what Tony has set up with his drones. Properly assigning the present forces to his tactical map, Gideon crosses his arms at the display for almost a full minute.

    "I have the uploads, but Executioner herself must be aware of most of these details too. She has her own aerial units, and in direct control, can presumably see through the eyes of her own T-Dolls on the grid. You guys aren't incredibly subtle forming up on her doorstep, and we should assume she knows how many of you there are. Considering she decided against pulling out the teams in the most likely M-4 hotzones, she shouldn't be fully dedicated to crushing you at the cost of letting her target slip."

    "My prediction is that once she has her troops in position, she'll come down from there herself, and go straight for each of those zones in sequence. All she has to do is march straight into them now; no matter which order she takes them in, the only way for M-4 to escape would be to gun down the units on standby at her location, which would immediately alert Executioner /before/ us. You'll have to intercept and take her out. If at all possible, trap her near her command post. Preventing her from moving freely into the central urban area will be key. Don't commit to a head on assault until you have backup though."

    "Krys, Umbra, Juliet, you're going with Freeman and the Phantom of the Opera to secure M-4. Kill any Sangvis troops you come across." "Understood, Commander." "Of course." "With pleasure!" "Ash, Autumn, you'll be covering the main echelon, but don't fire straight away. Wait until you can guarantee a decisive shot on Executioner before intervening. Switch to KEP/HE for this one. "You betcha!" "Nothing less would be worth it"

    Just as described, Amon and Gordon soon have the company of the three T-Dolls that had formerly been guarding Haguro, joining them through a blind intersection with surprising quiet, taking the three arcs that Gordon isn't facing, and just sort of letting Amon do whatever since he isn't using guns. The other two remain unseen, as proper snipers should.

    Exactly as predicted, just when Riva is deep into the woods alongside Silica's pets (drawing another two squads in), the ALO players have bottomed out their MP bars on support spells, Amon and Gordon have reached the crossroads of where to go, and Tony's drones have left the combat area, Maaka has eyes on Executioner leaving the post, flanked by no less than thirty rippers in six squads and covered by just as many scouts as her mobile force. She looks every bit as nasty as the intel photo had suggested, but something it hadn't driven home is that she's easily a head taller than all the other models as well, to the point her augmented right hand (and arm) could probably wrap its fingers most of the way around Maaka's middle.

    When it begins, she's so bold as to take the main road straight down from the villa. Those near enough to try and block it are immediately harassed by waves of dive-bombing scouts looking to clear the way, as well as waves of shots from the mansion guards up top, blasting the low ground mostly by saturation just to send their targets scattering, almost as if daring them to run away.
Amon Amon stops throwing junk in short order when it becomes obvious that junk-throwing is not really helping. He wasn't sure it would to begin with, but isn't the sort of person not to attempt to learn when something appears to be a valid tactic. In this case it's stopped, so there's no point in doing it anymore. He weighs his options to himself. There are numerous buildings high enough up to get a vantage point of the surroundings, but climbing one would definitely draw fire.

If they keep going and it's a trap, they'll be in trouble. Probably a manageable sort of trouble, but trouble all the same.

He slows down, lifting his radio receiver to communicate with his men. The back-and-forth is short and curt. It sounds like they've gotten the wounded to the extraction point. His Lieutenant is on his way back to their location with the remaining explosives they brought.

He re-seats the receiver at his belt.

A few moments later -- around the same time that the T-Dolls join him and Freeman -- the Lieutenant arrives with a satchel over his shoulder.

"We have enough for one more building." Lieutenant says, a little gruff-voiced.

The Masked Man hums thoughtfully, picking up his handset again and calling, << "Stark. Can you get us an optimal location for strategic demolitions towards the current mission parameters?" >>
Gordon Freeman     Downtown. dense alleyways, sub-buildings, basements, and other acts of architectural secrecy. Gordon thrives here. So much of his time is spent in the dark corridors of Black Mesa. Here is where he can give best. His data feed is still linked with Tony, thank goodness, which means he's able to assess the office buildings. The underground has no units -- or maybe they're just hidden? That's more likely. Well, Gordon thinks, the best approach will be to coordinate with the T-Dolls. He makes a break for the points closest to the Executioner. His shotgun is out and ready, and he intends to dive deep, make proper chaos, and charge through whatever he can find, brutally punching whatever holes he can in the defensive positions.

    He's broadcasting an IFF friendly to G&K. His logic is simple: If he sticks ahead of her, he can intercept her when she searches a given site -- likely joining the battle with the others -- which is as crucial an arrangement for things as Gordon can get. But it's all about M-4, not about killing the Executioner. The human aspect has forced his attention, even though he's not speaking well enough to explain it to Amon or anyone else really.

    But with underpasses enough for trams or cars, he's expecting a bit of openness to that too. It's why he's keeping his thumb on the pin of a grenade, and intends to make liberal use of them in clearing out the tunnels whenever he encounters danger.
Riva Banari Riva baits. She's good at baiting, because it's her business to get attention and force them to pay for it. She hurls a couple random grenades to get their attention and works her way into the forest, forcing them to deploy squads after her.

"Tomoe, Silica, cover me. I'm going to leave some surprises." From her tacvest she pulls some small packages: Preformed small blocks that she quickly rigs and places down in various places along their path, keeping them moderately hidden. A few of them she infuses with a bit of Anima, burying them a bit so the glow doesn't give them away.

"There." She says as they move. "They're going to get some surprises."

She radios up to Tony. "Call out enemy locations if you can track them. Need to keep an eye on where they're at."

The reason why becomes rapidly obvious. As soon as Riva can tell the pursuing groups are approaching, she triggers the explosives, lighting up the Ripper and Rover squads if they don't detect it. The moment they're blown up, Riva charges in, yelling with shotgun in one hand and the detonator in the other. The latter she hurls at a Ripper in a fit of defiant pique before running them down.

Nothing like a big explosion to say 'HEY, I'M OVER HERE'.
Tomoe It's time to push forward and she's not going it alone she will keep with Riva and also give Silica what cover she can, she may even swap to Mooncutter to make use to the Naginata's reach. She looks at the building oh it's a death trap she can see if they don't have cover which they could hide behind. It would be easy for someone to get cut down if they went without sufficient backup. Man to have a point like this back when GGO was just for fun? She'd have loved it. Now she seriously hates the idea of hitting a place like this. She'll love to help, for now, she's keeping with Riva and Silica for the hit and run attacks. It's the best plan and she seems to have for the moment heeded do not run off screaming thine own name.

Still she's dropped most of her support buffs, and her MPs slowly refilling. That's when they hit and they hit hard.

"Oh hell."

This is not like some of the other kill bots she's run into, this one has a grasp of tactics and this one? Seems to have been ready for them, very ready.

She's more able to keep pace with Riva and knowing Silicia's got her back is helpful.

Riva has a plan? Riva also seems to be harder to kill than Tomoe is, even if Tomoe doesn't like admitting that. She'll hear Riva's idea and gives a nod she sees where it's going. She'll move to keep Riva covered and the moment the bombs go off? She'll rapidly cast a light ray spell sending a swarm of basically homing lasers at the rippers and rover units that might have evaded Riva's own attack.

After that she's following Riva in quickly.

"You wanted to deal with some humans? Well, we're here!"
Alexis Maaka     It's been some time since Maaka assaulted a villa like this. At least with a crew anyways.

    It's a pretty long run to the villa, but Maaka's enhanced stamina and speed carry her towards the mansion, or at least a good perch to take up sniper position with her rifle.

    She scopes out the building, taking aim at the upper windows. Alone, she'd be completely annihilated were she to begin opening fire. However, she's got some backup here. Alone, she'd have gone for a more subtle approach and slip past defenses. That said, the time crunch makes this difficult. They got someone to pick up who doesn't have much time left, which complicates matters.

    "I got eyes on enemy commander. She's a mean lookin' bitch, keep wary of her." She radios quietly, taking aim at the T-Doll.

    She'll just hold fire until the time is right.

    The time is now. She opens fire on Executioner.
Tony Stark Stark in the Mark VII moves from urban area to forest seamlessly, flying under the canopy and trimming speed for maneuverability as he multitasks. Banari waves, and he waves back, landing near her.

"The bad news is that whoever breaks into their fire lanes is probably going to get chewed up. It's a shame we don't have a big, green battering ram to..."

Tony snorts, in his helmet, at that thought. "Well, we don't have him. So, we'll have to do."

He turns to look 'downrange' at the forming up brace of Rippers and, among them, Executioner. "I'm going to circle them, and come in fast. If you time it right with the operative, two fairy girls, and the sniper team, I should be able to get them all pointed the wrong way.

He lifts into the air a pair of feet, hovering. "For one of us, at least. But if they wanna sit there pointing at you and let me bomb them, that's their decision."

"Give me two minutes!" He calls, before rocketing off perpendicular to the lane of attack, skirting the forest and the hardened position to get a better angle.

Meanwhile

The Mark XVII, carrying the two "prisoners" moves with Amon's team. "There are a number of structural targets of opportunity that could contain enemy positions. Excluding those being currently assaulted by Doctor Freeman, as well, the alleys and blind entrances to the major downtown thouroughfare has a number of minor arterial locations that strategic demolition could force enemy flanking squads to divert into you. I will supply both, and leave the final tactical decision to you, Mister Amon." Friday, through the suit, helpfully offers, before going about doing so, mostly gesturing with insensate android shell-filled hands.

As he rounds the bend, and starts burning in, Iron Man goes for altitude, for a handful of seconds before using the climb to immediately ramp into a dive, breaking the sound barrier with a titanic KER-THOOM!

Barrel rolling, he unleashes a flurry of missiles to saturate the ripper squads with high explosive pain, but instead of a dive bomber that would veer off and bid back for altitude, Iron Man continues down, slamming into a squad at top speed and immediately breaking into melee CQB with heavy metal fists and close-ranged repulsor blasts.
Amon The battle swings into high gear. Amon can hear it, not-so-distant. They're probably going to need a hand with that, and he doesn't particularly want this business arrangement to be a waste. He particularly doesn't want Stark or any number of individuals to end up in a bad position, where he can't exp-- get to know them later. He nods towards the Mark XVII and follows Friday's directions, taking the crossroads they're at towards one of the specified buildings nearest the ongoing conflict.

He wants to pinch off the enemy's movement options without giving them an opportunity to reroute without meaningfully doubling back, and that means doing it not quite on top of tem, but close enough.

The Lieutenant is his only follower left who is actually with him, carrying the explosives at a rushed pace. They reach their destination -- /probably/ getting shot at in short order, and divvy up the explosives setup without a word spoken between them. They begin laying the charges along the base of the building, taking opposite sides from one another.
Gideon Kaspar     Charging into the web of underpasses that cut through the rocky circles of irregular cliffs inside the small, ultramodern town, Gordon finds that the results of the scan are a little of column A and a little of column B. For most of it, the set of roads is indeed empty, both of human occupants for the streaks of cars and trams still cluttering up stretches of underpass, and of Sangvis Ferri T-Dolls on patrol. This is because, rather that continue a search pattern, Sangvis Ferri has locked down a perimeter and stuck to it, since even if the T-Dolls are easier to pick off from within it, doing so would only give M-4 away.

    Once he reaches the edge of the marked zone he'd downloaded though, he immediately runs into resistance. When he makes contact, he can relay the enemy's position to tony and the G&K T-Dolls to add them to the tactical net, but under so much solid ground, they can't be conveniently scouted from above. He is quickly embroiled in an intense firefight on the way to an underground car park, where enemy T-Dolls have the advantage of an elevated wall and concrete bollards at the top of metal stairs, and his only approach is a straight road cluttered with sparked vehicles which have a bad habit of exploding when shot at more than a few times.

    In the northern woods adjoining the villa, the roving squads hunting for Riva are more aggressive and less methodical, pushing forward as a loose line with each member a few body lengths from the next to make rushing between them extremely unlikely, but to also not present a juicy target for a well-thrown grenade. They constantly sweep their lines of sight back and forth, alternating with the units adjacent to them, so that they check around each line of trees as it comes without slowing down. The zippy, low to the ground rovers are what plough through the brush, bouncing over roots and rocks and slamming face first through bushes and shrubs, going ahead of the main force so that should they trip over a trap, the slower units would have warning.

    That's exactly what happens. The lead wave of rovers runs right over Riva's slew of explosive packs, and the chain of detonations sets the forest rumbling as burning trees crash over across the entire swath between her and the rippers, cutting a smoking breach through the woods. The whole rover line has gone up in smoke at once, and the following homing blasts from Tomoe and the use of Silica's pets don't really need to see through it, as streaks of magic blast through the screen and cut down the straggling units on the spot.

    Since the densely forested area prevents any sort of air support, the rippers are left to drops exactly where they are, taking positions of concealment rather than cover, and starting to fire more or less blindly into Riva and Tomoe's position. Well it could be said to be blind, but the guns they're using kind of make 30 year old civil forestry a joke in terms of cover; waves of flaming trees are toppling towards them in under a minute as the concentrated beam fire blasting each and every hiding spot starts quickly leaving nowhere to actually hide, as Executioner is apparently perfectly content with /burning down the whole forest/ to either flush the tanks out or leave them stranded across a wall of fire with no cover to approach through.
Gideon Kaspar     Out at the villa itself, Executioner is just reaching the main road that leads straight through the busted plaza and into the downtown area, when a hidden sniper fires on her. Being a supersonic bullet, she doesn't get the chance to hear it before it comes, and yet the through her telescopic sights, Maaka can see the advanced T-Doll's red eyes flick in her direction right as she squeezes the trigger. A twitch of her mechanized wrist twists the massive piece of bladed machinery into the way, causing the shot to smash on its flat, and spang off as so many sparks and pieces of squashed copper.

     "Nice try, but even a Griffin piece of junk knows better than that!" No sooner has Maaka's shot landed, than return fire comes from a pair of jaegers in the upper windows of the villa, triangulating her from just the singular shot, simply because there are three of them (including Executioner's position herself) to reference her position from.

    The main guard is thus moving into battle mode when Tony swoops down from on high. The barrage of missiles is detected immediately from the net of aerial scouts, and several are shot out of the air mid-flight, picked away by choice jaegers, and then some by lucky hits of saturation fire from the ground. The rest impact into the middle of the main echelon now scattering for cover, picking off several members with direct, high explosive hits to the head and chest and wiping their blips off the tactical map.

    He's coming in at such a high burn that they barely have a window to shoot him back, and they've already spent most of their time firing on his missiles, so when he crashes into his squad of choice, he does so almost complete unchallenged in the wake of his first volley. Rippers go flying left and right, tumbling through the air on the blast wave of his impact, and being smashed and battered like tin dolls at close range, already known to be the situation in which Sangvis hardware is by far the weakest, given this worlds' lack of reason to program soldiers for swords and kung-fu.

    Or at least that's how it's supposed to go. Tony has just started making an absolute mess of his seventh ripper, sending it flying over the eastern yard and plummeting down into the river with a repulsor blast, when the group still closest to him scatters, and Executioner is suddenly upon him in the blink of an eye. The charitably termed 'sword' flips in her grip with an unnatural rotation of her giant, robotic right hand, and then comes flying at him fast enough to trigger his suit's /ballistic/ warnings, creating a leading edge of air that qualifies as a blast wave. It's not for show. This is a brand new T-Doll design /specialized/ for close combat.

    The larger benefit is that the various gunfights and explosions unfolding across the urban area allow Amon to move more or less unmolested. He actually gets by /without/ being shot, because by Gideon's order, Juliet splits off to join up with him, and has those incredibly unrealistically silent twin guns to assassinate any T-Dolls the two martial artists creep up on. He's in prime position to blow the supports on another office building nobody will miss, blocking the earliest access into the underground freeway, forcing any enemies to take a detour into the plaza the Elites have taken over already; or else he could wait and drop it on the enemies that are already approaching, and hope to crush a vanguard of rovers under it all in one fell swoop.
Alexis Maaka     "Shit." Maaka's shot whiffs entirely, and she sees several Jaegers return fire on her position. Ducking behind cover, the cyborg begins to stealthily relocate herself. She makes her move, ducking behind another tree trunk before sighting down one of the jaegers, then she returns fire promptly on the bot.
Silica     Silica pants for breath. Mana reserves tanked, the main body of the pursuit force isn't even scratched because of those rovers, and... THWACK.

    Silica takes a particle bolt to the chest, sending her sprawling from the impact and causing a spiderweb of red to blossom across her chestplate, a big, solid red 'hole' in the center of her chest from where the bolt struck.

    Tomoe would see Silica's HP bar plummet to the red from just shy of green.

    "Nnngh... ow... I can't take many more of those..." she mumbles painedly into the radio, keeping her head down and starting to crawl through the brush away from the main firing line. "I'm going to try and flank them, keep their attention on you as much as you can." she transmits again, belly down, literally dragging herself as low as possible to the ground.

    Once she gets a good distance, she turns, trying to get in around the side of the T-Dolls... her HP and MP slowly recovering naturally as she goes. Back in orange, she presses up against a tree trunk, trying to spy the T-Dolls position. "Only going to get one shot at this.. lets make it count. Pina, bubble breath on my casting. Hibiki, ice spikes follow up. Two second space." she commands to her pets, before stepping into the open and beginning to chant. Ek skýt fjórir ískaldur ör! Four pillars of ice form flanking her shoulders, then lash out at the four closest Rippers. Pina launches her Bubble Breath at the same time, adding a disrupting effect to the magic from the bubbles. Then to follow up, Hibiki releases a volley of Wind Needles, strafing the flank line with a multitude of smaller impacting damage points.
Gordon Freeman     Gordon feels like he's lived this fight. In another lifetime, in another Earth, in another coastal east-european region. He thuds his back heavily into cover around one of the sturdier-looking cars. A nearby detonation lashes him with waves of heat and pressure, and armor ripples and recoils, ablative layers searing off, but thankfully this approach is imprecise. Gordon refuses to let this arrest his momentum. He charges hard, darting about and letting loose brutal bolts of superheated metal from a heavy long-range crossbow to try to drive the enemy into cover, but getting up there will be tough. Dammit! If only he had one of those Zero Point Energy Manipulators they use in the labs! He could have made some stairs out of these cars.

    Gordon does the next best thing instead. He stops just short of heading into the parking complex at the lower, disadvantageous site. Instead he takes cover behind one of those cars until he hears a telltale spark... And then leaps atop and JUMPS! Suffering the pain of his "rocket jump", he arcs straight for the bollards.

    He pulls the crowbar out, and tries to bring it down onto and through the head of the closest T-Doll, closing in as hard as he can to slam them as quick as a person can, even throwing it and whipping it through the air at any of them that get too much distance for his comfort, swapping deftly between it and his heavy revolver, and trying to move on in a similar fashion. He cranks the broadcast on his IFF just a little more. Come on M-4! You gotta be around here somewhere!
Amon Amon nods towards Juliet in answer to her support, and stops to assess the situation once he and the Lieutenant finish rigging the explosives. There's an opportunity-- but not an opportunity that he's actually willing to take. The smart decision is to blow the building and funnel everything towards their allies. Wiping out a squad in one go feels nice, and it looks good, but the long-term benefits of assuredly bottlenecking the enemy outweigh the possible short-term gains. Even if a battle by its nature does not stretch on that long, most of the time.

He gestures for Juliet to fall in as he and the Lieutenant get clear of the building, and once they're all at a safe distance he detonates it with a thunderous roar.

"It would be a shame to let Stark and Freeman have all the fun," Amon remarks to the Lieutenant and Juliet, "let's go and join them."

It would be easier, Amon reflects, if he could use the river. The pair rush through the streets -- the ones that are cleared, anyway -- in the direction of Tony's flight path, until the ongoing battle with Executioner comes into sight.

They are too far away, even at full tilt, to get into proper range. They are too far away, but...

Amon narrows his eyes at the massive mechanical arm on the woman. He hasn't thought to search for fluids inside of these, but even machines require them. It can't be too overt, and it can't be too forceful. But maybe he can give the others an edge on the way in.

With a pulse of thought he attempts to tug on any fluids that might be extant within Executioner's more prominent limb-- not a lot. Not even enough that it would be entirely visible. Enough to test whether or not there's anything usable there, enough to make her movements a fragment more predictable and open her up to somebody else's efforts.
Tony Stark The initial expectation meets the initial response, and Iron Man crashes into the masses of Sangvis "Light Infantry" or whatever their designation is. Stark didn't get their number before bombing them to hell and laying into them with his suited fist and close-range blasts.

And so the Iron Man is a whirlwind of destruction, jetting from unit to unit and disassembling each in quick order, dispatching them like so many goons.

Tony is comfortable here. He's good at this.

And then the seas part, and he comes face to face with Executioner, and the oversized sword. Stark remains confident, as he aims both palms at the ringleader. "Look, lady, you really have an image issue. Executioner? You're not gonna win a pagent like that." He Stark Snarks at her, his repulsors whining up to shoot.

She beats him to the punch, because Executioner doesn't have to actually close into melee. The shockwave from the sweep of the blade crashes into Iron Man, leaving a long rent in his chestplate, barely missing the Arc Reactor glowing in the center of the Mark VII.

Stark is shocked and frantic as his body flushes with the cold rush of adrenaline. "Friday, why the heck aren't our defense screens soaking up any damage? Feels like I'm not wearing a suit at all!"
"Boss, the Mark Seven doesn't incorporate Repulsor defense screens."
"I knew that." Stark deadpans, now placed on the defensive while he barrages Executioner with a set of charged blasts, circling away from her leading side and that nasty, wave-cutting blade while he tries to keep her occupied.

"Well, I got her attention!" Stark announces over the tactical net. "She hits like a truck, carrying other, smaller trucks, that are loaded with swords that shouldn't work like that!"

Internally, he continues. "Friday, divert flight power to repulsors - we're gonna need to win this fast."
Tomoe The battle has only really just got started the first wave of drones was simply used to keep them busy and eat up their initial attack, Tomoe surmises even as she keeps fighting. The trash as she might put it is out of the way now as the other T-dolls are now just laying down enough firepower to pretty much render the forests cover pretty much useless. So its' time to fight she will put her shield to use which actually does do some pretty good protection of her from the fire as she is forced to move in an engage the crazy Salamand has brought a sword to a gunfight after all.

She will use her Shield to give her some more bit of protection to help her close on the enemy. She also flares our her wings and takes flight making use of the added speed to keep from getting blown away. Even then the T-dolls have done some serious damage to her and it's showing from red portions of her body and gear where their rounds have connected with her. If she can get in close enough, and then Silicia is in a bad spot she sees her status on the party menu and she punishes herself harder.

She'll drive herself ahead and cue up a sword art the moment she's in range.

"BURNING BLADE STORM"

She'll launch a series of attacks even if she can't get to melee with the T-Dolls she will be met with bolts of fire coming from her blade at the end of each strike. Something the enemy might notice is the speed of which she launches it something more akin one might expect out of a robot like a T-doll.
Gideon Kaspar     Maaka misses her stretch of turf turning into a long, shallow, blackened groove by an instant, scalloping out where she had just been prone with a close V of cement-vapourizing burns. When she stops to fire again, one jaeger is blocked off by her relocation to the trees, giving her a second to sight down the remaining one. The two end up staring at each other for an instant, sights trained on the other in turn, and both fire at the exact same time. Maaka's shot is quick enough to nail her adversary right between the eyes, punching straight through the high zoom optical/sensor visor and snapping its head back limply. She still has to contend with the streak of laser green death jerked just a fraction off course by her kill.

    Though they're thoroughly dug in on the side of a rapidly widening, burning trench of blackened trees and wasted brush, the T-Dolls in the forest still don't actually have real cover against the Elites in return. Their trees are just as easy to be rid of, and the combined fire and magic attacks from Tomoe and Silica go through them without issue. Damage spreads along the breadth of the firing line as Silica barrages it with the combined attacks of her stable of pets exchanging glowing gunfire and elemental blasts, streaking back and forth across no-man's land. Tomoe hits where they're softest, and breaks through the center of the line with her sword arts. Both Silica's pets and Tomoe herself pay for the effort though; no matter how they organize it, there's no approaching that firing line without being in plain view along the way.

    Gordon can just barely hear the resounding crash of the collapsing office parkade on the opposite side of the underground lot from him, mostly feeling the explosion reverberating through the earth, and seeing cement dust and grit shake from the ceiling, rather than picking up much of the audible sound itself. That means he's basically locked in with his group unless he wants to turn tail and retreat up the whole firing lane, but that Executioner's forces are locked out on the other side too.

    He doesn't, of course. The detonation of the vehicle's engine sends him sailing through the air just as planned. Where the Sangvis Ferri T-Dolls take aim at him, a number are cut down in an instant by Krys and Umbra popping up from cover behind him, covering his approach with a withering hail of fire that is 'suppressing' only in the academic sense. He lands on one ripper and quickly smashes it to pieces with his crowbar, staggering and sprawling those to either side of him with his heavy revolver blasts. He would be in a prime position to be shot back, but Gideon's T-Dolls are on him just as ordered, and immediately plaster the elevated parking floor around him with incendiary and smoke grenades, making it difficult to breathe, but borderline impossible for SF to shoot at him until he's close enough to use that crowbar anyways.

    Out of the smoke, deeper in, near a ticketing booth integrated in the wall, he receives an encrypted counter ping. It's a laser transmission too, which means that SF couldn't pick it up, and the person sending it must know exactly where he is.
Gideon Kaspar     Outside, Juliet pings to confirm to Gideon that the office parkade has been collapsed, sending new coordinates while rolling over a downed ripper with a soft kick, and then shooting it twice in the forehead when she sees it twitch. "Fine work so far, but what do you intend to do from here? We're far away from the main theatre, and have no long distance weaponry. Freeman is still fighting on the interior. Do you have a plan?" The questions are all asked with a certain air of professional patience and readiness, but the blonde is staring at Amon pretty closely, as if expecting to see something in particular. It's not like she'd be able to tell what he was up to even if he were more blatant about it, but the eyes on the back of his head are a little uncanny. It's like an 'instinctive nose' for subterfuge, in whatever sense that applies to T-Dolls.

    As far as Amon's experimentation goes, he runs into a fortunate opposite. The bare, oversized robotics of Executioner's sword arm are bone dry, incorporating no form of hydraulics or coolant for that scary piece, but the entire rest of her body is circulating minute quantities of something or other. It's the stuff that looks like blood when T-Dolls are cut or shot. Instead of having control over her sword arm that he has to be super careful with, he has low grade of control over the rest of her body. Unfortunately, he is noticed in return, and barely any time after he's had time to figure it out, he is under attack from a whining volley of sizzling particle bolts from a diving squad of light scouts, dropping shots on the three of them like hail. The jaeger Maaka previously lost seems to have moved to them instead, using the scouts' aerial view to take a shot.

    It'd be easy to forget that Executioner is micromanaging all of this at the same time she's fighting Tony, given that she displays no hint of it up close. The swarm of troops the advanced T-Doll had with her have now been blocked off by Amon's sabotage, and are taking the long way around, but the skeleton crew left behind, peppering him with surprise blasts at each turn and maneuver, is more than enough to be wary of. They're especially bad for constantly shooting directly into his corridor when he tries to back away past a certain distance, forcing him to have to divert and dodge back inwards or sideways whenever he might get a comfortable gap. It's all an extension of Executioner's sword.

    "Is that so? It looks to me like you have bigger 'issues', since you're not winning this fight either! Ahaha!" Even when he breaks off and begins firing at her, the T-Doll uses that power arm to cut into the charged repuslor blasts, splitting the powerful beams with her sword with each swing, and using the ridiculously oversized pistol in her other hand to blast away at him with hand cannon-grade particle blasts in return, steadily closing in on him. "That fighting style is so typical of a human! Even when you're stupid enough to step foot on the battlefield yourselves, you're so brave and flashy until you remember you could die, and then all you can do is cower and run away! You're fine with sending T-Dolls to their deaths; why not try it out yourself, huh?!"

    He's dead in her sights. Both of them know it. Her sword flips back, she winds up, the mechanical blade flashes out as a black blur in the way of the last repulsor blast, aimed to cut straight down the middle and slice Tony in half with the shockwave, and then some ~mysterious mechanical fault~ delays it, slowing her down just enough for the blast to hit her, and for computer-aided human reactions to escape certain death from the return wave. What a lucky* break.
Silica     Standing in the open is not a good plan. You should change this plan quickly Silica.

    Unfortunately, magic takes time to wind up, and cool down, so when the Rippers turn on her, she's still locked in the cooldown phase. Particle bolts rain down around her, peppering her body with red 'holes', spiderwebbing out over her avatar's outer textures, nearly washing them away completely. She's saved at the last second by Pina turning and breathing her healing mist over the Cait Sith, keeping her HP at just above the kill point.

    Silica dives for cover behind a hillock, landing awkwardly and letting the terrain absorb the damage. Hibiki and Pina, unfortunately, aren't as quick and get cut down, shattering into voxels and leaving behind a 'Feathered Heart' and 'Serpent Heart' to vanish into Silica's inventory to be revived after the battle.

    The Cait Sith is in bad shape, pinned down, and out of options. "I'm not going to be any more use to you... I'm teleporting out... I'm sorry." she pulls up her inventory, extracts a precious teleport crystal and holds it close. "Teleport, Saitama Prefecture." The crystal reacts, vanishes and takes the Cait Sith with it.
Amon It isn't obvious that Amon is the source of anything at all, but he IS an obvious threat even so. He chooses to take a risk as soon as attention lands upon him-- rushing forward, pushing to one side in anticipation of an attack and intending to rush along an adjacent building when the opportunity presents itself. His Lieutenant takes the opposite approach, splitting them as viable targets. This doesn't go great for either one of them-- they take to a building-side run as the weapons fire starts, and shortly thereafter get caught by a cross-section of fire as they come down to cross the gap between buildings.

They roll forward as they're scoured, skidding across the ground and coming to a halt face-down along sidewalks opposite of one another. They glance at each other as they push themselves unsteadily up, both of them visibly wounded along the torso.

The masked man gets up at a run, weaving 'round towards the Lieutenant. The distant words of Executioner ring in his ears-- and Amon's blood boils. But presently he has problems of his own to deal with, and he can't overplay his hand.

They have 'blood'. In that sense, they have a recognizable circulatory system.

In principle the act of chi blocking is projecting a momentary pulse of energy into a pathway and blocking it that way. Amon has never attempted to use it on a machine before, and if they weren't so... person-like, he's not altogether certain that it would. But the innumerable machines that surround and bear down upon them are very person-like.

There is a moment as they crisscross the streets that the Lieutenant and Amon synchronize their motions, and then they're off. The Lieutenant goes in low, taking a corner at a sprint and going airborne as he turns it, meeting the most immediate wave of challenges with his paired crackling blades.

Amon comes in low, sliding beneath immediate line of fire and coming up with a quick series of jabs to what he hopes are energy-conveying areas. They don't stay put to see whether or not their strikes land.

Lieutenant transitions into a roll that smears the pavement with blood, and Amon joins him in an identical motion on the other side that brings him into range of the next hostile T-Dolls. They both come in low on this one, Amon whipping an electrified bola off of the back of his belt and Lieutenant swiping along the ground at knee height with one blade.

They finish the maneuver off coming up back-to-back, Lieutenant sheathing one of his electric blades and both of them hurling grenades towards corners at opposite ends of the road they're trying to progress on in anticipation of a follow-up pincer.
Gordon Freeman     Gordon's suit alerts him of the pings and dents accumulating. He knows he needs to work fast before the smoke and heat disperses. He keeps each impact clear in his mind, crystalized in a deft comprehension of the battlefield. Each shot guides him. Gleaming, shining glasses reflect the bursts of light as he emerges from the shadows, intent on crushing their bodies with an almost predatory rushdown brutality.

    In his mind, he's trying to keep his tactics stable. He might be obsessed over one particular thing in a way that's a bit detrimental to centralizing an approach on the Executioner, but he's at least considerate enough to make sure to not tip off the T-Dolls that the Executioner is controlling by proxy. He's gotta make sure all of them are /completely/ incapable of noticing her though. That would explain why he tries to rush them, pin them down, and repeatedly bash their heads until they're robotic mulch, even the ones disabled and lacking any combat efficacy.

    He's tanking the damage head-on, letting what sneaks through the smoke wash over him just to get a little extra edge on momentum. Ideally, that'll be enough to carry him through this and will give M-4 the room she needs to get out here. He'll wait after this is done, if it can be, a meaningful invitation. But he does regard the sealed tunnel area with concern. This means that even if he does get M-4, they'll have to fight their way up and back out, they can't take the way they came in.
Alexis Maaka     Maaka has grim satisfaction as she sees her bullet nail the Jaeger right betwixt the optics. Her marksmanship is nothing short of commendable as usual. That said, her arrogance gets her hurt. The cyborg is tagged right in the chest by the retaliating laser bolt. Her suit sizzles and hisses, and she feels her suit burn as she clutches at her wound. "Ghhhhhk...gotta be kidding me." She curses herself mentally for her sloppiness, hiding behind cover once more as she tries to reload her rifle. The pain is immense, especially thanks to aggravating the injury, but she'll only be endangering herself if she doesn't get back to work.

    The cyborg slides down the incline as she makes her way near the brawl with Executioner and Stark.

    Priming a smoke grenade, Maaka pitches it toward Executioner's feet to throw her off-balance. Just in time to get her confused.
Tomoe Tomoe does a fair bit of damage to the enemy T-dolls and has managed to get in close with them where she's at her strongest and they are at their softest with support from Silica's pets she's able to make headway doing a good deal of damage. There's no banter no snark she pushes on moving to go in with her allies as they advance. She will push on even as she takes more fire but she's not walking no she's flying moving fast as she's able to.

She's taking a lot of fire now he HP on her HUD is showing she's in the yellow just before it turns red and the punishment keeps coming as does the pain. She does push however to get into the fight and she'll attempt to get in and close. She's flying in at high speed as she now attempts to put her blade into play launching into a strike making use of Maaka's grenade.

Her sword strike is diversion a feeling for the shield slam.

"You haven't been in the multiverse long have you?!"
Tony Stark The battlefield is chaos, but Tony Stark doesn't fight through the crowd of Rippers completely ignoring the chaff. He doesn't just slide around the crowd of targets like a SHUMP game plane taking ground fire - this isn't Tony's first fight in a crowd. Even as each Ripper comes at him as a concerted fighting force commanded by one mind, Tony Stark works the angles - because here at Stark Industries, we never stop innovating.

"Friday, prepare a jamming pulse, hit her with it on my mark." Tony orders sharply, sweeping cutting laser down across a cluster of Rippers in cover and boosting past them to take their cover for a moment, the pulse pistol Alchemist switches to chewing into his back and sending him bouncing into his chosen bit of cover.

"Armor integrity critically low!"
"I see it, I see it! Send me antoher suit!"
"Once the alarm went up, enemy air interception increased a thousand percent! I can't bring a replacement in."
Shotoing out of cover after a moment to let his systems cool down even a little, Iron Man breaks up, aiming his damaged chest at Executioner as the iris of the Arc Reactor began to glow brightly -- and for Executioner's sword slash to tear into existance through solid force-energy blasts.

He blinks first, aborting his attempted beam attack just to get out of the way - but it's just too little, too late.

Tony's chest takes a nearly-there hit that shatters just off centerline of his armor, shearing off reinforced armor plate like a lathe. His suit goes dark and red emergency LEDs light Tony's face as Iron Man dead-sticks, falling out of the air and landing in a pile in a ditch from the fighting.

"Friday! Friday Mark! Mark now! MARK MARK GIVE ME A SUIT! GET ME A SUIT RIGHT NOW FRIDAY!" Tony moves from 'active voice' to 'shouting into his earpiece' as he bails out of the broken and depleted Mark VII, seals popping behind him.

He only lives because of Amon, though he wouldn't know that. And, in the ditch, it's almost certainly the concerted attacks from the rest of the team, and Maaka's aggressive smoke push that buys him time in the ditch to shout his head off.

A short hop across the city, the Mark XVII lifts off, flybying the captured bodies ungently into Gideon's sniper team before snapping the sky in an explosion of speed, more literally a missile than a man-sized suit. If Stark were in it, even the dampers would have most likely still had him black out from accelleration.

Smashing, like a meteor, in nearby, the suit starts interdicting Rippers as it walks backwards, the head nto tracking the palm blasts at all. Stark sprints to the Mark XVII, practically leaping into the back as it collapses around him.

His HUD comes back online, and Friday is already cycling into tactical view mode to pierce the smoke.

"Where was I? Right! Friday, prime central RT!"

With a turn, the heavy, artillery-level chest reactor iris acquires Executioner through the smoke and flashes once before disgorging a directed beam of amber coruscating light.
Gideon Kaspar     For being caught at a long distance from the bulk of the fray, out in the open, by aerial recon and snipers both, with no guns between them, Amon and his Lt. make a frankly impressive job of skipping over those particulars and blitzing right into the thick of it. Another pair of crackling particle blacks thwack into the cement just behind them as they leap off, pelting their backs with hot gravel as they take the short and fast way down, skirting another wave of scattered, rapid fire scout blasts.

    When they come into view of the ripper squads circling around their blockage, the split second dives, rolls, and parkour take maximum advance of the comparatively slow cyclical rate of the powerful guns, only needing to dodge one or two waves of shots before closing in, where they suddenly swing from an overwhelming disadvantage to a highly advantageous position. The electrical blades are well suited to the tight squads Mister Lt. dives into, since even if he doesn't have the strength to hack apart sturdy combat androids like butter, breaking the chassis and then firing a bazillion volts into the interior is a perfectly good way of dropping smoking husks all over, and the electrified bolas are as useful as ever.

    Hoping for a direct 1:1 on the chi-blocking arts is a bit greedy, but not altogether useless. However SF T-Dolls are designed, they don't include main power lines along anything like the same chakra points as humans, but directly targeting interior joints -the inside of the elbow, armpit, etc.- with extra strong jabs and pulses has a moderate crippling effect for additional work, as it's an obvious fact that power will be supplied there no matter what the design is. It might be worth experimenting with subtly working some extra bending into it.

    Even though she has to improvise off of the silent duo's pre-prepared tactics, Gideon had ordered Juliet to follow them, and so the dual handgun-wielding T-Doll does her best, skidding down the rocks and leaping between building gaps to catch up. Where the scouts come swooping down again, she takes out a number by emptying both her magazines on the fly, sending them crashing into the ground around Amon, then turning the oddly shaped 'Welrod' covert guns over so they almost look like batons, jamming fresh mags in from her belt, before executing a handful of remaining rippers at close range. The grenades are almost a formality at that point, as the T-Dolls remaining are either the rear guard caught in the blast, already circling into the tunnels Gordon and the other two T-Dolls went, or else buzzing around the melee unfolding at the foot of the villa. "You aren't intending to run in there, are you?" Their escort asks in that same, stern, cool tone, pulling off a burnt glove and wiping away a streak of artificial blood.
Gideon Kaspar     In the chaos, fire, smoke, and flying bullets, Gordon absolutely pulverizes the perimeter forces. Of course Executioner is going to be notified they went down, but that the /Elites/ took them down, with no confirmation of M-4's whereabouts. Krys and Umbra race up the stairs, moving back to back and sweeping rapidly across the platform, putting double taps into each functioning SF unit they find to speed the process along, catching on with what Gordon is up to. Soon enough, as the unbreathably acrid smoke clears, still reeking of rubber and silicon and lithium and phosphorus in all the most throat burning ways, Gordon is able to close in on the ticket booth with Executioner's eyes completely dark around him.

    He finds it well lit, but completely, empty, with no transmitter anywhere around it. A second later, a roof panel is kicked right out and clatters onto the floor, and a young lady in a white and black sci-fi military jacket and lightweight exoframe, decaled in green stencils and bands, and wearing the G&K spec ops logo, swings down from it. She's recognizeable instantly just by the characteristic green hair streak, even before pulling the half-skull cloth down from the lower half of her face.

    "Are you the commander Persica mentioned?" she asks, her voice startlingly hushed and passive for how covered in soot and artificial blood she is. "No, that IFF . . . excuse me, designation M-4. Please call me by that name. I'm not sure if you're aware, but I'm a Griffin T-Doll under the AR special unit. Due to certain reasons, I am currently under Sangvis pursuit. If you're here for that reason, we have no time to waste." Krysanthe forms up alongside Gordon's elbow, and suddenly asks "Watchword?". M-4 seems almost surprised for a second. "Um . . . sugar cubes, right?" Krys nods. "That's the correct signal. Sorry for asking. There are Sangvis forces right behind us though, and the way head has been blocked by tactical field sabotage." "That won't be a problem. Follow me."

    M-4 puts her foot against the toll booth desk, and then hops back up two meters into the crawlspace like nothing, reaching down to offer her hand and pull the others through. Once Gordon squeezes up there, he'll find a series of tight maintenance ladders leading through an emergency fire and gas leak escape shaft, which meets a nexus of ventilation crawlways. There's a broken fan that has been hauled out of the wall and used to make space for someone to sit, with a couple of knapsacks, rows of empty magazines, water bottles, empty MRE packs, and a broken satellite communicator, lined up, which M-4 just leaves behind, stopping only to sweep up a photograph too quick for him to see. Climbing upwards, she'll lead him out of the underground, and pop out from a hatch in the ground floor of a checkpoint building dangerously close to the villa and its related firefight.
Gideon Kaspar     What they arrive to is even more chaos. When Tony's suit fails completely, he can hear Executioner closing in on him just by the sadistic, all-too-lifelike laughter, never mind the ominously stomping mechanical steps. "Hah! That's right! Just like that! Without your good little obedient mechanical meat shield in the way, run and crawl and piss yourself scrambling over the dirt, looking for a new one! That's what you humans are like; whether you're wearing the machine or commanding it from a safe bunker, this is all you can do! Don't worry though, I like chopping you up better when you're still soft!"

    She's practically on top of him, and more than any other skynet ripoff can be said for, this one has murder in her eyes. Everything about her, down to every nuance of her expression, is all too eerily lifelike, tripping every single tribal brain psychopath alert meant for other human beings. She raises her sword, and then Maaka manages to bean her right in the face with a smoke grenade, briefly distracting the T-Doll with a roaring snarl of frustration, swinging blindly through the smog and instead sending a grinding razor of compressed air shredding through the ground, cutting a thirty foot trench all the way to Maaka herself.

    "You'll get your turn too, don't worry!" Executioner calls, firing a couple more blasts in Maaka's direction with her particle hand cannon. Even in the smoke, she's too alert -too scarily wily- to be taken off guard by Tomoe, and just like that, she wheels around and parries the blow directly with her motorbike-sized 'sword', using her unnatural wrist rotation to twist Tomoe's blade and then strike her back and forth across the shield and head with massive, ground-shredding swings of its six foot edge, ending with spinning pivot kick to punt her into a building. Just like the briefing had said, she's hellbent on her target, now Tony instead of M-4.

    The others bought him plenty of time though. The unibeam blasts straight through the smoke, and where Executioner's sword comes up to block it, she is completely overwhelmed instead. Howling in rage, the T-Doll is lifted straight off her feet and hurled through the courtyard-facing wall of the mansion's east wing, crashing through an entire dining room and into the back yard. Smoking, sparking, and covered in hideous burns, she just comes charging straight back through the ragged tunnel made by her flight, rushing Tony down like a demon -an image helped by the heightened glow of her sensor 'horns'. Heedless of any damage, she fires until the barrel of her gun is glowing hot, then ploughs into him sword first at tremendous speed.

    "You're not getting away from me! None of you are leaving here alive!"
Alexis Maaka     Maaka notices the unibeam send Executioner flying into the mansion. She makes chase, only to get hit directly in the arm with the particle gun. She screams, feeling carbon fiber and graphene melt and burn, before her skin does the same thing. She drops her rifle, the melted remains clattering in two pieces at her feet. Clutching her injured limb, the cyborg sees Executioner charge toward Tony, and she draws her sidearm. The Glock .45 kicks in Maaka's palm, as she fires away, blazing away with the pistol in a white-knuckle fury.
Tomoe The clang of blades, how did someone who should have been cubical bait end up in a life like this? Even if SAO had happened still if not for the Unification she would have faded away back into such a fate after an escape from such. She does a counter-party on the massive blade, however, the kick gets Tomoe sending her into a building she cracks the wall and slumps to the ground seemingly out. She dazed she hears the wors bad memories come back. She gets up gripping her weapon and just moves with all the speed she can muster going right for the T-Doll again.

"Better have said so."

She engages in rapid attacks with her blade Dawn Breker aiming to go after the T-doll's joints. She's going again and again and in a final motion, she will try to slam the pommel of her blade into the t-doll's face.
Amon Amon notes the resistance to his strikes immediately, and adjusts. His knuckles are bruised and sore by the time the combat in their immediate vicinity winds down. He shakes one hand animatedly and asks the Lieutenant, "Do you have a spare glove on you?"

The Lieutenant grunts and shakes his head apologetically. Splitting up his shock swords is also mechanically inadvisable, so neither of them bring that up as an option. This elicits a nod from the masked man, who turns to survey the melee at the foot of the villa. It's what they WERE trying to move towards, but...

Juliet's tone is telling, and Amon's own assessment of the situation is similar. It's not a good idea to push into that engagement, and the situation is nominally under control. An amber beam of light cutting through the fray simply reinforces that notion.

"No." He decides.

"We'll return to the extraction point. We're running low on supplies, and I don't have the equipment to..."

Then the shouting from above becomes audible. Amon clasps his hands behind his back and straightens out. He is bleeding, dirt-covered, probably charred here and there as well. He is objectively in pretty rotten condition for just a man, and as he just pointed out he doesn't really have the equipment on him to handle this situation effectively.

Assessing himself, he is bare-handed and out of weapons. His bolas are discharged, and he used his grenades. All of his explosives went into the tactical obstruction, and the local weapons are too unwieldy. There is a radio handset at his belt. There is a river nearby, and the fluids in these... beings is adequately controllable but he can't afford to actually use that.

"Return to the extraction point." He commands the Lieutenant, who looks confused and concerned but does as he's told.

He picks up one of the fried T-Dolls around him and drapes it over his shoulders like some macabre waifu hunting trophy, and walks towards the sounds of chaos and screaming murder robots. The masked man takes fire, and quickly swings the t-doll around to use as a shield. Some shots still get through, and his movement is momentarily staggers as further blood is drawn and leaves a lingering trail that carries on behind him.

He adjusts the weight of the T-Doll by manipulating its fluids so that it is partially lifted, though not so much that it meaningfully rises from how he's holding it. By the time he's reached the actual site of combat, there's a hole in the wall from Executioner and she's in the middle of charging Tony down.

Amon shifts his grip on the T-Doll as he closes in, hefts it up and brings it SLAMMING down towards Executioner's back like an especially absurd club, applying force to the remaining internal fluids to give it more kick than he is even /remotely/ capable of in terms of sheer physical outpit.
Gordon Freeman     Gordon remains silent, pushing his glasses up his nose. His HEV suit pings. "VIP located." He lets his crowbar down to hold in an unthreatening position, nodding silently. He still doesn't say anything even throughout that whole discussion and exchange, but he does have that /look/ and /posture/ of someone who's terribly relieved and rather authentically positive about how things have turned out. He looks eager to help, slinging the crowbar into a tool slot at his hips, and getting ready for the vents. He's already halfway to stacking a couple stools in the ticket booth when M-4 hoists him, and follows into the crawlspace.

    Here, he understands what's going on. In Black Mesa and other massive facilities like that, what M-4 has here is usually referred to as an engineer's ratnest. Gordon regards it with a warm smile, but tilts his head at the photos. When she stows them, he recognizes them as a treasured thing, and thinks. It's likely she had an attachment to other members of her group; it's likely any photos there are treasured for showing them. He speaks up briefly, asking: "VZ-61?" As if prodding her about the sentiment in those photos. He matches it with a warm smile that's without sorrow.

    He pops up out of the hatch like a prairie dog and clambers. Tapping his chin with one hand, he listens to the sound of battle... Then pokes and prods at his HEV suit. He's transmitting coordinates to M4. He gives a firm nod to her and to Krysanthe. It's a silent urging to get to the extraction zone, where they can teleport out. "Lambda Complex remote sample retrieval apparatus is at: Ninety percent charge." His HEV suit synths. Gordon feels confident that they can make it through this last bit. Especially if they can disable that Executioner and her proxy-combat power.

    He takes off. He rushes as hard and as fast as he can towards the villa up the main road. First off, he needs her down to protect M-4's retreat. Second, he needs her down to protect Tony!! And that means it's time to barrel straight towards her with a power-assisted dash and utterly tank whatever she throws his way, all in order to leap at her and try to get a solid cluster of crowbar strikes. It's a cluster he hopes will be enough to get a good angle for him to get behind her and yank the crowbar heavily across her throat.

    This would normally be a very stupid decision. But Gordon has seen enough of these machines to note a few key things with his keen engineer's mind. The first is that they have massive amounts of subdermal plating. The second is that their joints are all armored -- except for the neck, presumably to preserve awareness. Third is that they have circulatory systems, likely to circulate coolant or something similar, so it'll make a lot of sense to cut that circulation -- specifically at a joint where there's no armoring and, by necessity, flexible subdermal plating, and a cluster of functionality that's likely needing a lot of coolant.

    That, or he'll be riding the back of a murder machine.
Tony Stark Tony Stark had showed up today jazzed and hopeful. He wore a nice jacket. He put on a TIE. Today was, originally, a day to meet the brightest minds in a field and try transportation, and then a milk run after. Shoot the terrorist robots, break for scotch and pick Isaac Kleiner's brain over a nice cigar. Bringing in the Mark XVII was just a precaution. Somehting for Friday to kick around in.

She liked that.

Here, and now, as Stark stared down Executioner and standed, heroic posed in the Mark XVII, shoulders back, firing down range with all the juice the Arc Reactor could manage. And, as he pushed, as he fired, as the ground boiled in his weapon's path, he watched that energy gauge out of the corner of his eye. His SmartTargeting system continued to bear down an uninterrupted beam of energy, and the anti-personell guns on the shoulders drilled any Rippers that got close. Incidental fire still struck, here and there, but he was the Iron Man. He could last through it, to finish this fight.

Then the meter passed into the yellow zone, and then the red, heat building up like an inferno in the chestplate.

Finally, with his energy in the low teens, the beam let up.

And then Executioner got up. Then she charged him back. A suicidal flight bearing every iota of close-quarters murder that she embodied. Maaka and Tomoe's attacks stagger the charge, and Amon's Waifu Golfswing and Gordon's barreling charge into a terrifying episode of Life With Murdergirl finally breaks the charge off just enough that Tony can rocket out of the way, but that sword - that blade had a mind of its own, dragging its length through plate, and hooking into the corner of the expanded chest reactor housing, gashing the material and leaving a sparking, smoking gash that leaked black, electrical smoke.

His eyepieces crack and he's blasted away by the resulting force-wave, spinning laterally in the air and smashing onto his back.

<<--!!!WARNING -Armor Integrity Critical- WARNING!!!-->>

Tony rolls to his front, arms bracing in the earth as he looks up. His eyes see stars and his chest feels numb. His heart thumps in his chest.

"Lady... You really need to stop externalizing your issues." He heaves, wearily.
Gideon Kaspar     The vaunted stopping power of the .45 cartridge is not enough to deal with the rampaging android, barely slowing her down in her furious, almost suicidal charge for Tony. Even when Tomoe swoops in and catches Executioner in a hail of precision stabs, neither the T-Doll's bleeding nor her limp and broken gun hand stop her. The reality of the situation is very sudden and hits at the worst possible time, wherein Sangvis Ferri's mysterious 'advanced T-Doll models' turn out to be so different from the rank and file killing machines that they are completely capable of committing to a surprise, tactically unsound strategy, solely out of what appears to be spite or hatred. Whatever possible, highly questionable reason they would have to simulate something like that, it does at least accomplish what makes human soldiers so dangerous under circumstances like these.

    It also accomplishes what makes human soldiers prone to screwing up, though. Though the remaining T-Dolls still posted at the impromptu mansion HQ itself can lay down fire on those in and approaching the melee, they are slaved to, and thus limited by, Executioner's focus, and that gives Amon just the window he needs to sneak in. By the time Juliet realizes he's actually going, she only has time for "Wait! What do you think you're-" before he's already off, and she can only try and chase him down, ducking the same beam fire without cover of her own, where he runs up behind and sucker clubs the enemy ringleader with the most unlikely of cudgels.

    With that altogether, Executioner finally stumbles and falls short of getting her claws into Tony on her berserk charge, screaming in fury as he blasts off and eludes her yet again. She turns on Gordon in a rage, firing several times dead center into him, until her handgun overloads and explodes in her hand, and he crashes straight into her while she staggers back from the tiny critical reactor blast, taking several vicious crowbar swipes upside the head and neck before finally grabbing him with the gigantic killer robot hand and hurling him away again, clutching a steady gush of rust red 'blood' down her front, swaying on her feet, sword dragging in the dirt.

    "You think you've won with all of this?! Huh?! Like you idiots even understand! If that's how it's going to be, I'll just TAKE YOU ALL WITH ME!" The words are unambiguous. Scarecrow had blown herself the hell up with lesser provocation and less of her actual reactor intact. When Executioner begins laughing with that ominous glow building in her chest, only she is in any position to find it funny.
Gideon Kaspar     There is one last thing for tonight, waiting in the wings to upset and shift an already mercurial understanding of Tactical Dolls. Executioner is completely off the reservation, doing things no sensibly programmed robot should, and yet she isn't the only one doing so. From behind where Gordon came from, the loud rip of automatic gunfire punctuates Executioner's laughter with a big fat period, as thirty one high calibre rounds rip into her side from knee to hip to chest to neck, crippling her entire left side with a cacophonous shower of sparks and synthetic blood.

    Both her legs give out, and she topples. Her shoulder fails completely, and the sword falls from her grasp. A bullet strikes just under her collar bone, and the building light sputters and fails. Executioner faceplants into the scorched earth, the remaining SF T-Dolls fall equally limp, and M-4 drops her spent magazine, having completely ignored Gordon's directives to retreat and head back to her G&K command with her mission critical intel. "Sorry for interfering." she says, still in that weirdlt soft voice, standing up from her firing kneel. "And than you for the timely rescue. If I can make a request-"

    "You know . . . we won't disappear that easily."

    Even M-4 cuts off, not having expected the Sangvis unit to be operational, but despite that incredible pounding, Executioner not only manages to speak, but laboriously roll over with gratuitous sputtering of broken and overheated motors. "Even if you hide among Griffin's troops . . . we have other ways to get to you. Don't forget . . . your companions still stranded on the battlefield. We both know . . . what you're willing to do . . . hahaha."

    M-4's expression hardens, and she immediately lifts her rifle again, aiming dead for Executioner's head this time. A mission parameter fail is prevented in a timely measure by Juliet finally catching up in chasing after Amon, grabbing hold of the weapon. "Restrain yourself! I understand how you feel, but our orders are to take this one alive! She will answer for her evil, but first she has some questions to answer!" It only takes a couple of moments of wrestling before M-4 sighs and gives up, resolving to ignore the Sangvis Ferri Doll's derisive laughter, up until her vocal unit finally fails from how badly Gordon had savaged it.

    "-If I can make a single request, please, don't stop here. You have to save all of us."
Amon "Mm."

Amon discard the now-more-battered T-Doll, clasping his hands behind his back. He angles his line of sight slightly towards Juliet and says, "Sorry for the trouble, Miss. Let's just say that I don't like my business dealings to get cut dramatically short."

Briefly, he glances towards M-4, "... And I would like to hear more about /your/ situation, later."

But then his focus turns towards Tony. He strides over, hands still clasped, in that same posture he always adopts at rest. Whether he's been shot, or burned, or blasted, or cut. It is a way in which he asserts how very clear the world is to him, and exactly how firm he is in his vision. It's a small thing.

It is also a powerful symbol, to be able to do that. Amon never misses the opportunity to /appear/ powerful, whether he is at that moment or not. The difference is nonexistent-- if people think you are powerful, then you are powerful in some way.

"I am told," he unclasps his hands to offer Tony a hand up, "that it is impolite to keep one's friends waiting."
Tony Stark Tony, with his suit groaning under auxiliary power, finally pops open his faceplate and reaches a hand up, grasping Amon's forearm and letting the other man help heave him up.

"Well, you've got both a flair for the dramatic and a killer sense of timing." He smirks back, his eyes wincing as he gets up with a twinge of pain - enough damage had carried through the two suits he had run through that he was bruised, battered, and exhausted.

"I'm glad we--"

He raises a finger. "Hold on. Friday, send this idiot a bill." He orders into his earpiece, before letting his hand fall. "And get me another suit when that air interception clears. I want out of this thing before the aux fails."

He gives Amon an honest 'you saved my ass' chuckle and shake of the head. "Hell of a swing you had there. And Doctor Freeman too. Man, I shouldn't have brought the second string for this, should I?"
Amon Once he's through helping Tony up, Amon re-assumes his usual posture. Regarding his flair for the dramatic, he tilts his head slightly to one side -- perhaps in assent -- and remarks, "As you have observed, I am a man in an opera mask. I think that my tastes speak for themselves."

He pauses at the presentation of Tony's finger, and behind his mask cannot help but grin at the exchange that occurs before him. Though he is scarred, life has not yet been extinguished from him altogether.

"If it is any consolation, I was not wise enough to bring my best either. I'm saving it for a... special occasion, you might say." He raises a hand momentarily to gesture at Tony, "I assume that the same is true of you."

His eyes narrow behind that mask, "I am not in the habit of repeating my mistakes."