Re: Mission 5: Amaya's Gate
@Asher:
With the burning innards of the raker beam turret's machinery behind him, Asher leapt and made an hawk-like dive for one of the technician nekos. His chosen prey screamed at his coming, but froze on the shot, only firing off shot after ineffective shot.
He hewed his zesuaium sword through her, and with a muted scream her two halves bloodily flopped down to the grated flooring.
Other techs yelled in a mix of shock and anger. One of those at the forefront started to get them orgainzed so they would beat a retreat. Asher lunged for her, swung his sword, missed, swung again and cleaves her in half.
The enemy survivors flew away in a hasty, panicked retreat, and the chortling Malifarian just brought out his forearm turreted cannons on heavy mode and fired them down the corridors. Caught in a flurry of large grenade-like blasts, the fleeing nekos - including the nurses and the wounded nekos - dropped to the floor as if they had been flying insects caught within the spray of an insecticide can.
It evoked some nice imagery: Asher the Exterminator was on the job.
@Kyou:
Kyou hacked through coolant lines with her zesuaium blade before she reached the more pivotal portions of the turret's machinery, where she started leaving long molten scars in with her lit aether sword.
That did it. The smoke, protesting sparks and flames burning around the chamber had pretty much turned the place into her own private hell, one she ruled over. The techs had given up attacking her and were retreating down the access corridor.
@YSS Miharu:
"I'll just drop down the dorsal airlock," Kotori replied to Yukari as she had Surtur swing around and pounce next to the airlock.
"Faster that way, and the main passageway as room enough for the Akuma."
Upon a telepathic prompt from Kotori, Miharu's AI opened the airlock with an atmospheric retention field in place to allow the large mecha to quickly ease through. The Taisa sheathed back the psionic amplifiers into their armored housings and dropped down.
As she hovered at the upper deck level, Kotori grit her teeth as another of Eve's augmented psionic attack assailed them. She could protect against it, but she couldn't counter something that was so enormous to cope with right away.
Then, the outer armor got purged: nearly a million kilograms worth of armor was ejected by the prototype vessel. As the separated armor plates expanded around
Miharu, what they revealed underneath was for the most part support ribbing, tubing, exposed sensory systems.
All of that shed armor made
Miharu's main hull look less 'badly damaged' and more like 'incomplete', though the armor over the breached portions of the hull had been unejectable and attacks that had carved through the outer armor left the exposed inner hull with smudge marks here and there. Having more than 25% of the ship's total mass missing paid off as far as the ship's gravimetric engine profiles showed: even with a single sublight engine, STL mobility had been largely restored.
As
Miharu trailed into position and then picked up speed to arrow in toward the
Takumi's last ion engine, Hinoto opened fire. The main gun cut a white line across the target before to discharges of positron lightning slammed into it next and ruptured it open. "
Takumi's sublight propulsion disa-"
Hinoto never got to finish that report.
Takumi had blurred away into another position, a couple of hundred meters above to place it out of the firing arc of
Miharu's main gun, with her pronged nose pointed straight at the smaller experimental vessel.
Yukari had barely a second to realize that
Takumi had managed to restore one of her CFS nacelles to function, shielding had just been restored and Eve had made a FTL jump to get right above them, turned to bring her positron cannons to bear.
With a twitch of her piloting stick - more pilot's reflex than any actual thought seeing she had barely any time to think - she had
Miharu bank to the side, right under the small shroud of whirling armor plates they had recently released, before
Takumi opened up with its volley of positron attacks.
Three of those exploded prematurely when they collided in the dense field of armor plates, the ensuing anti-matter explosions weakening but not breaching
Hoshi's shields. The heavier cannon, though, wasn't stopped by the debris field and rammed straight through the shields and into the starboard edge of
Miharu's main hull.
On impact, the anti-matter explosion penetrated the starboard capacitor chamber and entirely ripped it open to space, destroying the redundant shield generator and half of
Miharu's capacitor reserves. The corridor Yuzuki had just run across not ten seconds earlier was now a big tear in the hull with a splendid view of the hazy surroundings of the Blue Rift, sparred by sparking power cables and the spraying green jets of leaking coolant.
The positive energy discharge proved even more harmful as it swept and overwhelmed electronic systems through the subdeck. The starboard turreted particle cannons where knocked offline, with the magnetic containment of their anti-matter reserves compromised. The starboard CFS engine crackled with electric discharges, and it was only saved by the breaker box system Tom had jury-rigged up back at Tsuyosa, forcing it into a shutdown rather than having it entirely blow up. The fusion reactor experienced electronical troubles and with the coolant feed cut off, its heat levels were rising, threatening a meltdown.
Consoles through main engineering burst into sparks and went dead as their electronics were fried. Volumetric windows upon which they had relied to multitask operations fizzled and went dead. Luckily for Tom, the central monitoring station had it own set of rugged manual switches, gauges and dials to keep track of the ship's condition after electronic failure - and a glance across them painted the ugly picture for him.
From the vantage of the bridge operators, most of the systems on the main hull had just been crippled. The only systems that still appeared functional were the central aether power plant, the port capacitor bank, the MEGAMI, life support, the main sensor and communication array, and the main gun.
"Ship navigation and shields are offline!" Mara tossed telepathically to Yukari, busy at her station as she plotted the next teleportation coordinates for Asher and Kyou.
Code:
Asher, Kyou, I'm sending you to the port and starboard (respectively) power junction manifold at the base of each pylon. You'll appear in a cramped accessway with a junction of tubes and power cables running through: it's the main power feed of the psionic amplifiers and the CFS nacelles. You need to take those out as quickly as possible - we really need their FTL propulsion, shields and psionic systems to be taken out ASAP! When you appear, strike where the network of power cabling seem to intersect, and report immediately once you are done!
Above,
Takumi used her maneuvering thrusters to have her nose track the drifting
Miharu with her four positron cannons. Another volley was definitely coming, soon.
@Miharu's medlab:
Lighting flickered overhead as
Miharu's electrical systems floundered under the positive energy whitewash of the latest, ruinous hit.
"What I need you all to do,"
Miharu's AI - her voice scratchy with static, told them aloud - "is to stop being children and focus on saving lives rather than saving your egos."
"Nao,
get up. You're going back to work - not into an hemosynthetic tank. Get yourself a new AMES suit,"
Miharu then ordered the ailing tech.
