ISS Araxie
Alex scrambled into his flight suit and then down to the hangar. Speaking from his mindshare through the Intercom he ordered in a voice that brokered no questioning; "Araxie, I'm launching in the Unicorn. I'm going to distract whatever's doing this long enough for you to get far enough away to go to FTL safely. Then I'll rush back and we can get out of here."
Alex hopped into his Mecha, with was waiting for him with its engines hot, and shot forth from the Araxie's hangar, wheeling around to face the direction the attacks were originating from. He throttled up and sped towards the Kupier belt of the E5 system.
Plugged into the Whirlwind's systems from the back of her neck, Raven was immediately given the feedback of her attack as an explosion's signature bloomed in the distance. She had definitely struck a vital area, and perhaps another well-placed shot could fully disable her target. The 30 seconds spent aiming and waiting for another beam to be fully charged was longer than she would have liked, leaving her position now vulnerable to a counter attack.
The sudden appearance of Alex's craft on her combat display a few seconds before the Sunfury was ready to fire again surprised the combat veteran. This was the mysterious mecha Killigrew had warned her about needing to take out, and with how fast the reaction time of its pilot seemed, it was a well-deserved priority. Raven hastily began bringing her combined shield and propulsion systems to full operational power, using the frigid rock as momentary cover for her second shot of white-hot nuclear fusion right across Alex's nose and at the Araxie...
Right before Raven fired, Alex detected the buildup of energy and rolled out of the way at impossible speeds, dodging away from it and behind an asteroid, which he transformed behind then kicked into the path of the beam.
The giant stone hurtled into the path of Raven's destruction, exploding outward into fragments that quickly melted into slag. But it wasn't for naught; the asteroid had broken the encasement on one side of the beam, causing its energy to dissapate far too early and strike the Kouken-class with only a glancing blow to the starboard side.
But the fact she essentially missed her mark wasn't the thing that made the Lorath pilot curse under her breath, it was how fast the enemy reacted and dodged the FTL speed attack. It should not have been possible. "Now this.. is a worthy adversary," the black-haired woman murmured, as her 25m tall Whirlwind began to shift its thrusters positions and descend deeper into the belt. 10 more seconds was all she needed, as another round was chambered...
Alex emerged from behind the cloud of dust that remained from the rock, transforming briefly before speeding away and turning to make an attack run. His weapons weren't as long range as those used by the whirlwind, so all he could do was weave through the asteroids of the Kupier belt as he tried to close the distance.
Even in its high-thrust, locked-joint configuration to increase encasement of ejected plasma, Alex's variable fighter was much faster than the tank-like frame he was facing, and the distance was steadily closed despite Raven's attempts at evasion through the rocky field. Still, it bought enough time for the Sunfury rifle's power levels read green once again, as the large, metallic humanoid female turned its back around to face its pursuer defiantly. This time its muzzle belched out a hail of much faster superheated packets that -- while smaller than the unwieldy beam from before -- still had enough punch in them to seriously dent a light starship.
Alex evaded the firsst few shots, but as the packets came faster and more steadily, he began to take hits on his shield, the first of which brought him down to half strength on them.
He began to take a more evasive stance, weaving between the streaming packets, closing in faster and faster. He transformed back and forth between humanoid and fighter forms, sometimes only transforming the legs to use for sudden changes in direction.
As he closed the range, he transformed for a final time, and his rifle gunpod began to spit 80mm tungsten death at the much larger mecha.
The stream of packet fire soon ended as the Fyunnen's artillery needed another lengthy pause to reload, her breathing hard as the Whirlwind's targeting systems and her own judgement just couldn't seem to quite keep up with the transforming fighter's rapid changes in shape, not unlike trying to wrestle a feral Lmanel who always was straddling the border between man and beast. Alex's counterattack found the mark, as the solid rounds started shredding the Whirlwind's powerful combined shield system in several places, as Raven's dodging could only lessen the damage overall.
One volley of the rounds happened to pierce the shroud enough to make it to where she kept her backup magazine of compressed helium containers, and the resultant explosion of several of them sent the combat frame reeling backwards through several tiny asteroids, and sending up a field of fresh debris.
As Alex closed in on the new debris field, he scanned for his target, knowing that he only needed to occupy them long enough for the Araxie to get far enough away for him to return and the ship to enter FTL speeds.
The spot where Raven's frame had been before seemd to have no traces of the Whirlwind's energy signature, though what Alex did hear on his crackling comms was a sharply accented female voice in Trade that whsipered. "Behind you."
As soon as this was broadcasted, from the cloud at his back came the flashes of dozens of mini plasma-tipped missiles igniting to life like a swarm of angry birds descending upon him, before their mistress charged out with a durable durandium blade alight with a similar, deadly glow.
Alex flared his thrusters, and shot up and over Raven's whirlwind, pulse lasers flashing out at the missiles, causing a chain explosion inside the swarm. He continued from over to behind Raven's mecha, and gave it a spinning kick to the torso. While not powerful enough to send the larger craft flying, it surely could cause some damage.
"Nice try, but you'll have to do better than underhanded tricks!"
The impact to the torso close to her fluid-encased control pod was blunted, but still enough to feel it as if it had actually struck the Fyunnen square in the back as layers of mounted plating chipped away into space. As much as she saw the damage readouts, the feedback actually only made her more eager to continue fighting. This was what she was bred for, after all.
"I don't need tricks to stop such a sloppy attack," quipped Raven in return, as the torso he had smashed into opened up to reveal another weapons bay. Inside, 4 heavy anti-matter missiles roared to life and exploded at near point blank range to Alex's exposed leg area, as her own Whirlwind used the momentum of his previous attack to slide backwards out of the way of most of the blast.
Alex was thrown backwards into an asteroid, and was dazed for a moment. He shook his head, and his mecha did likewise as he struggled to get up.
"Done already?" came a transmission from his enemy, as the Lorath brought the deadly durandium charged blade level at Alex's variable fighter, the light of its deadly arcing plasma reaction glowing white-hot through his dizzied. "I expected more from the one who dared to challenge Killigrew."
There was no room for mercy in her words, as her Fyunnen honor demanded a fight to the death. Raven's thrusters flared as additional plasma was fed into the blade, the larger Whirlwind beginning a charge right at the heart of his cockpit with a finale thrusting coup de grace.
As the Lorath mecha sped towards him Alex grimaced and tensed up. His enhanced reaction time helped him count down the moments until the blow would be hitting his location, and his link to his craft helped him to execute the maneuver he came up with at the last moment.
Right before Raven would have run him through, he gripped at the asteroid with his mechanical fingers and used the leverage to flip up into an all fours position above the blade which was now embedded in the rock, and then pushed off and with only a few minor thruster firings was behind the whirlwind to deliver a kick which pushed the bulky mecha into the asteroid, sending chunks of rocks flying as they fractured under the impact.
"So the little pirate queen sent you, huh?" Alex panted over the comms, the strain clear in his voice, which was odd since normally a pilot wouldn't feel any physical stress from a relatively low gee maneuver like his.
The unnatural speed of the dodge was something she was unable to counter, having comitted totally to the strike. The only thing Raven's gigantic sword met was rock, as it impaled through the space boulder like a hot knife through butter and was jammed there, her frame immobilized as it also connected with the rock and sent chunks of her plated armor flying as well.
The comms channel was filled with curses in Ly'thir, as the Whirlwind had to momentarily wrestle with withdrawing the blade and shattering the asteroid, thighs opening up on both sides to reveal more mini-missiles that were fired in Alex's direction in a wide spray. "I gave her my word...You and your friends would be eliminated."
Alex zigzagged throught the asteroid field, letting the floating rocks take some of the damage and firing his pulse lasers to take out the remainders. Still, some got through and knocked him upward into the open above the whirlwind, where he took a moment to regroup before charging downwards, right fist cocked back in a telegraphed punch.
Alex's voice seemed sad, or maybe wistful over the comms channel. "You don't even sound like a person. You're talking like a machine."
The melee weapon was finally drawn from its imprisionment by the Lorath pilot, the scraping sounds and dark coloration it now held speaking to the fact the plasma edge it once bore was momentarily snuffed out. Still, this did not stop Raven from raising it defiantly at Alex as he swooped him for his attack, aiming to sever the offending arm from his mecha's body with its keen durandium edge. "Don't condescend me, boy!"
Alex was unable to avoid the attack, but with lightning speed, he brought up his other arm to block the attack. As the blade bit into his arm, he let out an animalistic howl of pain and rage. The sensors within the arm of the mecha registering not pain, but simply disconection. However, in the human mind of Alex, this translated to pain.
He brought his right fist up into the torso of the Whirlwind, just above where her cockpit happened to be, with the force of a piledriver. After the impact, he discharged the plasma cannons built into the forearms of his mecha into the Whirlwind, before pushing off of it with both feet.
His mecha gripped the 'injured' arm with a look of lifelike anguish.
The satisfaction of seeing the sword slice into Alex's arm was fleeting for Raven, as it was soon replaced with the echoing through the oxygen-rich fluid of the plasma bursts shredding through an opening in the ablative armor his fist had made. It missed her pod only narrowly, and blew clear to the rear anti-matter reactor systems of the frame. It only took a small hit to the critical containment fields to begin a slowly cascading failure that was displayed in large red lettering all around her awareness through the neural link.
The Whirlwind staggered backwards, and took up a combat stance for a fleeting moment even as tiny explosions began to rock it's power plant through the hole in its chest cavity. "No, this can't be... I still can fight...!" There was little Raven could do, however, as the safety systems of the walking tank 's ARIA overrided her commands, and engaged the magnetic accelerator coils within the unit. The cockpit's egg-shaped escape pod was soon blasted into the void in defeat, along with a cloud of shrapnel and a scalar-wave that washed out over Alex's systems for a moment, as he watched the remants of the winged combat frame he faced in battle soon catestropically join the Kuiper belt debris field that floated around them.
The gravitic plate attached to the base of Raven's control pod seemed to have malfunctioned in its attempt to automatically flee, however, for as it aimed towards one of the system's planets it instead slammed into a large asteroid nearby with a thudding-metallic sound. The comms traffic from the Fyunnen pilot seemed to have only static now... but faint life signs still were traceable on sensors within its cavity.
The fight had taken all of two minutes, the high speeds and reaction times of each pilot making it feel like longer.
