Re: Mission 5: Amaya's Gate
Kotori's glance encompassed her executive officer and tactical officer. She kept her composure, but the low points of her black-furred ears spoke volumes about her uneasiness.
"Very well, Shosa. Thank you," she told Yukari before she turned to Nyton and added: "Welcome back, Taii. You may return to your station." In the end, her words seemed faint, barely above a whisper.
* * *
@black Knights:
The five-person power armor team retraced the steps Masako had done counter-clockwise into the ring-shaped complexed and through the access corridor set foot into the engine room. Scorched nekomachina pieces littered the floor, and the blast shutter was open.
Beyond the opened blast shutter, a long corridor opened up - initially stained by the blast of a grenade. The corpse of the Eve youngling Suzuran was still on the floor, her body broken and her head crushed. Not far way, the scorched remained of yamadura-alloyed armor indicated where Masako's previous Daisy armor had fallen, and then self-destructed.
It didn't look like the doomed Daisy's self-destruction had done any enemy in - the M6's self-destruction sequence was one made to avoid KFY hardware to fall into the hands of the enemy, rather than to sacrifice the unit in a last ditch attempt to inflict damage to the enemy.
Ahead was a long corridor, plated in metal, with pressured conduits being mated to the walls. It went ahead for roughly a 100 meters until it came to a wall with a ladder going up through what was possibly a vertical passageway.
...and close to that ladder were two nodal drones, hovering close to the ceiling. As soon as the Black Knights took notice of them, they slinked around the corner and up into the vertical passageway. They were replaced by two pale figures that dropped down the shaft.
They were slender like nekovalkyrja, with white armor plates integrated into their bodies in a strange mix of endoskeleton, synthetic flesh and exoskeletal plating. The faces were expressionless masks from what they could see of their mouths - the upper-side of their heads were covered by an armored visor. Long platinum blue hair fell down to their waists, and their manes lightly stirred from some non-existent wind.
The Daisy AIES computers identified them as NH-28 Nodal Integrated Weapon Systems, and what stirred their pale hair was not wind, but rather clouds of nodal nanomachines in such high density that the air around them sparkled.