RP [Strays] SLUG WAR

In the cockpit of his Lancer, Prig sneezed, the act requiring an entire-head-shake that splattered water and wet-wolf-hair onto his screens. Sneezed also hurt like the dickens these days, thanks to the invasive tumors. Super fun. Chips was doing his thing over the intercom, and Prig wasn’t entirely sure whether ‘Pokie’ meant ‘Prig’, or someone else. Then he was talking about names; a King, someone named Roger, someone named Yoo-Eee… It sounded like fuel was the topic of discussion? And then an order to go to the ship and tell Shani some things. This was an order for all of them, he presumed.

An energetic voice Prig recognized as that of the pilot of the four-legged Mean Machine had spoken up. That was... Charlotte!

"Sounds like a smart move, Charlotte." Prig was brave enough to bark out over the airwaves. Splitting the party up was usually a good idea, right? "Whoever else thinks they're fast could go along with you back to the ship to get the message to the boss-lady. I'm not fast, so I can stay back with whoever else wants to cover you speedier ones."

He phyisically turned his mech, wondering which one was piloted by 'Joanna'. The Lancer mech Prig piloted was, in fact, actually decently quick, but Prig was so used to his actual self being agonizingly slow when walking that the mentality was still holding him back!

Joanna fires at some slugs that get within range all while listening over the communications channel to Chip's planning through the comm system in her suit. "Seems like things are getting pretty desperate" she thinks to herself with a sigh.

Joanna's ears perk up upon hearing her name mentioned over the radio, she turns her mech towards Charlotte's at the same time Prig turned his mech to look around for her. Charlotte's suggestion for Joanna to follow makes sense, her Dynamiteon is in a pretty poor condition, its canopy is basically gone, and its energy reserves are lower than the rest of the squad due to the custom boosters, though it is quite fast, courtesy of the same custom boosters, so it should be able to follow Charlotte back to Shani quickly.

"All right, we will follow you" Joanna's fairy says over the radio as Joanna walks her mech over to Charlotte to enter a formation with her.

No Mans Land - Chips and Prig.

Before the mutants was a venerable sea of writing movement. No longer were there one or a few stragglers as before; Now the ground was carpeted with forms like a bumpy and miscolored shag carpet, and it was upon them.

Stopping his stride and coming about the large medium-class highwayman was a heavy hitter against other mecha. Against a sea of thousands of targets, however, it was fighting against the tide. Tripple rotary lasers cut strafes of xenos while hyper lasers and heavy lasers turned entire sections of the oncoming mass to die on the ground. And yet the alien horde simply climbed over their comrades undaunted as if he was trying to fight an inferno with a water gun...

"Yeah, Didnt quite think this one through!" Chips admitted, the backs of the mechs of their comrads already long out of site beyond the wall and moving around the city towards the shuttle.

And then, The Cavalry Arrived. Literally...

Slower than horsed or the like the crab riders were hardly considered agile or momentous. But a few hundred meters when the hundred and more odd armored men atop their noble crustacious steeds crabwalked sideways into the oncoming tide there was surprising momentum. Driving deep into the ranks of the oncoming slugs the mass of several-ton crustacion crushed slug under... foot?... As sharp appendages stabbed down through them as one mass looked as though it could push all the way through the miles and hundreds of thousands of enemies.

But they did eventually slow and stop. But their battle did not end there. Rising and smashing their heavy bodies down flat on slugs the crabs crushed and ripped through slugs while their riders fired bows with surprising balance ontop of their mounts down into the open mouths of the hoarde of teeth and stub. The mutants could watch with fascination as they witnessed a slug able to gain purchase finally on the smooth carapace of a crab only for its rider to meet it with the point of a drawn cavalry sword right through its face before it tumbled back off the crustacion.

With a hundred of such instances and more as the mass pushed ever deeper the crab riders began to push outwards as well, creating a sort of semi-circle wall from which only a few slugs on the outside of it could skirt around. Essentially halting an entire flank of the entire hoard the oncoming tide slowed and ebbed as slugs began trying to climb over one another and block those behind them to create a sort of traffic-jam as the cavalry enacted a small plug into their advance.

Able to move into the open ground now, The highwayman joined them and began firing over and past into the hoard while nearest Prig the wagon and train of Yamogs zealot militia finally reached him as the long crab-knight of the group saddled up beside the mech, the massive crab large enough that the man was only just bellow Prigs own cockpit as the man started waving his sword to get the Mutants attention and began gesturing to the other, unsecured flank that the cavalry charge had not halted as a steady tide of enemy aliens seeped past as the man with the massive eye painted on his brigandine armor actually managed to pull ahead of Prig on his mounted crab as it began to side-scurry with impressive speed as he rushed towards the open tide.

Ship - Joanna, Charlotte.

Passing by the northern part of the city that had not had its walls melted by super-nuclear star paint the girls got cheers from defenders as they passed at the sight of their massive mechs. If anyone thought them fleeing or extracting from the horde in sight even from their part of the wall they could do nothing from their vantage but watch them pass.

Arriving at the ship didn't take but a half hour from when they left. As the large in comparison to their mechs crashed tanker laid tilted slightly just outside the wall. A few of the companies infantry drones held a position around it, firing in the distance at some stray slugs moving their way but handily dispatching them before they could ever get close. A sort of camp had formed around the base of the ship as strays and even some co-opted locals scurried about between the ship and some of the piles of organized salvage while at least a dozen other strays loitered around a massive generator half the size of a house as they all frantically worked on it as it sporatically spewed smoke exhaust irregularly as one of them no doubt was on clutch duty to keep it from stalling.

The girls were met near the perimeter by Clotho. Now in a normal, non-commander variant drone body as the two mechs saddled down, their servos and battery banks whining as at least the one that still had a cockpit opened.

"Strays O'Brian and Fletcher, What are you doing here, wheres chips?" The member of Shani's Pledias questioned, already knowing the answers to the latter at least due to her connection to the Fae if not the former.

Eastern Flank

Yamog had intended to accompany Joanna and Charlotte- They were in a scout mech after all- But their progress was impeded by the gathering swarm of space bugs, and an overwhelming fear of tripping over one at speed. The armour on this thing was mostly a theory, and it didn't take much to imagine the entire body turning into a crumplezone with one bad fall, like a fruit on a rope being swung against a tree.

Now, over a ridge and away from either group of allies, she found herself increasingly lost and confused- Heat warnings beginning to mount as she fired the lasers again and again, chittering enemies crawling in like a tide. Deimos was of course barking navigation orders and insults at them- But they were too busy trying to stay alive to act on them.

First thing that gave them a sense of direction again was an arthropod with a soldier on it, and then another- The gathering regiment of eye-emblazoned crab dragoons had charged, and basically came to their aid by accident.

Could this be the zealotry she previously found so lacking? Or provenance, even? If this situation hadn't happened, wouldn't the heavier and slower mechs have become overrun?

"Men, I am with you here!" The raspy and pervasive words were loosed from the pathfinder's loudspeakers, forging a path of a new kind. "We will put fire to the slugs! Burn them with the pure hate and indignation, only the heroic soul of a human can muster! Harry! Preserve your fine souls! Find yourself not bogged down in this sorry place!"

Methodically, they swapped their lasers to chainfire mode, and the four barrels became a timely, rhythmic thud of drums- Now being careful not to overheat themselves to death, but still beating out a melted and exploded bug for each and every volley. Saving power, the flick of the giant nano-blade occurred only when they required personal defense.

Luk, with some assistance from wayfinder, maneuvered his mech behind an outcropping and began laying down fire; each individual blast from the plasma shotgun tearing slugs apart with each blast.

Wayfinder watched with satisfaction as each shot hit-the big lizard mutant was improving steadily; here soon she'd be able to get him to speak whole proper sentences in addition to shooting straight. What a relief.

No Mans Land - Chips and Prig.

Prig tried to take it all in for a moment as the melee got weird. Crustaceans and sluggy-things battled like two species of parasite vying for supremacy in the guts of a gigantic beast. He could only imagine what it must smell like out there, partly because his mech had no olfactory pass-through, and partly because of his nose-cancer. Golf-ball sized tumors in the nasal cavity tended to wreck one's sense of smell.

Off-comms, Prig muttered, "These guys are serious. I feel like a chump, being all safe inside a metal shell."

He wasn't just a passive observer; he was an active participant, stomping and blasting. More than a few sluggies got close enough to him to be a problem, but between the passing cultist maniacs or the other riders, he had help keeping trouble off of his chassis.

The wolf-boy keyed up his comms, addressing Chips, though others could chime in if they wished. "Chips, you're gonna get out there and ride a crab too, right? Looks way more fun than piloting a mech!" He snickered over the line, good-naturedly, to show he was jesting.

As her mech powered down, Charlotte popped the hatch atop her squat little scout mech. A few moments later a pair of tall fox ears appeared over the rim of the hatch, followed quickly by the face of the pilot soaked in sweat from a combination of the sheer amount of heat buildup in her mech and the exertion of piloting it for quite a while at this point. With her headset still on, the strange shape of it built to work with her ears she could hear the question loud and clear... But chose to shout the answer down to the fairy as if she wasn't wearing said headset. "Bossman said there's a change of plan, we gotta get this hunk of junk turned into a flying bomb asap. Fly that sucker right into the big bug and kablooey!"

Her speech was fast and frantic, both to get her message across quickly and out of excitement to see said big explosion; indeed hidden from view her bundle of tails were waving to and fro in excitement. "Ya need any help with that?" She asked as she hopped deftly down the mixture of short ladders and handholds on the side of her mech, only barely stumbling a little bit as she jumped the last meter or so.

No Mans Land.

A gaffaw of epic proportions at the statement of Chips riding a giant crab sounded over the radio. It was heard just barely under the uncontrolled tinny bell like cackling of his fair, Snacks, over the same net at the idea. Seeing as the communications systems were all sealed inside of their masks and picked up little sound outside of it-it was clearly intentional before it was cut off by the sounds of grunts as Chips no doubt tried to swat at the avatar of the little hellion despite the fact she technically existed tens of lightyears away like the rest of the fairys save for the partition they copied onto the strays power gloves and mechs on the off chance the connection to the Fae was severed.

There was little enough time for merrymaking, however. Yamogs righteous speech might have concluded had a mass of epic proportions not begun to take shape. At first it might be confused with one of the Bigger Bugs which was quickly dashed as one of the bus-sized xenos was simply smothered under the mass of the half-stadium sized abomination of pink-green-blue spotted flesh. Looking like a tube of murky sausage meat in an old condom the Biggest Bug had no right to be able to move under its own power; Tiny legs almost reminiscent of a centipede moved in unison to inch it forwards while a fat, beady head poked just barely out of a pucker of fat and was almost comically small despite the fact that the maw was the size of a house with teeth five to ten foot low in serated rows four deep.

It was discolored and splotchy as well. Its lower half of its body looking scraped and torn and worn as angry patches of dark green shown where the friction of dragging its massive body had come into contact with likely boulders or irrate hills that had torn open its flesh somewhat. Drops of ichorous fluid from its gnashing maw fell bellow it, each enough to fill a swimming pool as the abomination to any size conservation theory dragged itself over its own kin who did not get out of the way in time.

Even so its backside flared and swung as tiny pebbles in comparison sprayed disgustingly tens of meters away as the newly born slugs were trampled by the sea of their own they landed in.

The biggest bug defied all reason. All purpose. It and its kind Traveled around the world doing nothing but eating and birthing more of its kind catastrophically to the point it had driven the Rogerites of the world to near extinction. All known laws of instinct dictated that some semblance of balance should keep the alien infestors from eating their primary foodstuff to extinction and yet despite the light show of lasers and explosions of Macromissiles. Ignoring the sea of glowing, burning star paint; It looked only towards the city of fresh biomass that if conquered would be its last meal.

Someone shot it anyway.

From one of the militia wagons a canvas tarp was pulled away as a man swung around the ballistae and against all sense of self preservation sent the six-foot long spike of barbed crab-splooge flying over five hundred meters in an arc as it started to descend and stuck ten meters off the side of the colossal kaijus face.

Without even slowing down the massive monstrosity flexed its body and spasmed as its front half swelled slightly and-

"Uh oh" Chips shouted over the comms as his Highwayman, directly in the bugs path moved to the side as fast as it could strafe even as the geiser of steaming green-yellow acid spewed from the ground, coating and nearly instantaneously melting the flesh of the bugs before it and pushed up in a line as it cut through a line of its hoarde, three crabs and their riders, and coated an Olympic swimmingpools volume of spray on everything to the front and side as the brave and plucky member of Yamogs milita tried to dive out of the carriage but not far enough as, not needing to worry about melting was hit with enough volume of force that his body was turned into a paste on the ground in the trench it dug.

Slowing slightly as it deflated back to a normal size, the Biggest Bug started slowly inching and humping its way forwards in the now very clear path it had just made. But those near its rear and side surged ever forwards right towards the now stricken Crab Dragoons and Yamogs militia who were all unceremoniously deciding they needed to be anywhere else as some of them threw weapons or shields to the ground and hightailed it much slower than the chasing slugs back the mile towards the city walls.

"Shucks! Goddamn!" Chips swore once, and then corrected himself with a much more appropriate to the situation remark as his mech swung and stomped after he had paused in shock at the attack. "Somebody do-" He paused before shouting, "At your legs, man! Luk look at your legs!" The senior mutant shouted as the slugs got dangerously close as evident of a couple of the smaller but still large aliens started pulling themselves up either of Luks mechs legs, one of them managing in good time to reach the rear of the fuselag and get over his cockpit as it began biting at the transparent durrandium of the cockpit and slamming its hard nuptual like legs against it.


Rogers Ship

A couple of the nearby strays looked concerned at one another as they shared a look at Joannas statement, something unspoken going between them about the ship. An awkward silence went on for at least a minute as "Um"s and "Yeah..."s were mumbled from the two men right up until the time Clotho sauntered over accompanied by Shani in her self-mutilated for the sake of fashion strays armor who despite the sweat of the day on Joanna the much dirtier and grease-covered mutant gave the smaller woman a sudden Hug-attack and a cry of "Charl!" as Shasta rubbed her face against Charlottes own affectionately before the drone commander tapped the mad mutant on the shoulder and gently pulled her away.

"Im aware of the new plan." Clotho stated at Joanna, her faceless gaze looking towards the woman power glove to spend the unspoken message of the fairy-to-fairy communication possible in speeds faster than a mutant could blink its fifth eye.

"Im wondering why 'you' are here." Clotho continued on the same logic, wondering why they had made the trip all the way to the ship and not just sent the message despite chips orders.

"They're here cause Joanna knows how to pilot the ship!" Shasta gave one of her nuclear smiles as she looked up at Joannas mech, the statement not lost that to that point the question had never been asked if any of the strays knew how to fly a ship let alone point it at a moving target and lead the ship into it.

None of them, obviously, did. Of the ships of the corporation all were flown by a few adequate pilots of middling skill who were rare enough in the corps ranks. While the others were done so autonomously by Fairy AI who downloaded, ran simulations, and dedicated all of their processing power to flying a ship; Of which none were present on Rogers world or were unoccupied enough to appear there.

In fact the only one in the entire system was Lachesis who was piloting the Avatar of Clang in the system at that very moment and refused to ever disconnect from her body.

"Yeah!" Shasta continued, "You saw the clips of Joannas new ride. She knows how to jet and move~" Shasta said so reassuringly enough few suddenly doubted her as all heads turned towards Joanna in her mech.

No Mans Land.

Well, that was certainly ‘The Biggest Bug’… or at least the ‘Biggest Bug So Far’. The thing seemed to be ripping its own bottom side as it crawled, spewing more horrible creatures out of its... 'back-end' as it went along. Prig noted that the bloated beast did have a head, and though he wasn’t a xenobiologist, he figured that things with heads usually put important things inside those heads… Unless it was a false head? Or detachable, like a lizards tail?

There wasn't much time to analyze the threat further. Prig caught Chip’s message about legs, but when the bird-man said ‘Luk look at your legs!’, Prig thought he was saying ‘Look, look at your legs!’, and so Prig lost a few moments trying to aim his cameras down at his own mech’s lower chassis before he understood.

He hustled his Lancer-class over to Luk, but as his own mech had no arms to speak of, he couldn't exactly swipe the little monsters off his comrade. "T-try not to dance around too much! I'll see if I can shoot them off..." If Luk agreed, Prig would try to help by carefully, very carefully aiming single Macro Laser shots at the creatures trying to invade Luk’s mech.

Luk turned his head upwards-and blinked slowly as the slug tried to get it in. He could feel drool pooling in his mouth even as Prig called to him as it slowly dribbled out...so...hungry...he reached for the lever controlling the cockpit-he remembered this part-big...and red. With a sharp pull, the canopy suddenly hissed upwards as he lunged outwards; seeing the slug and dragging it in even as it struggled against him while shrieking in protest. He bit down...hard-feeling the creature's innards filling his mouth even as he started ripping into it with his claws.

Wayfinder, realizing what was going on attempted to shut the canopy while sending a hurried "Do it!" to Prig while powering up their mech's own lasers-firing them off wildly even as the big lizard mutant attempted to eat the slug he he'd captured. As much has she liked him, the fae REALLY wished that he was smarter than this...

Joanna's ears jolt straight up and she stares wide eyed, as if saying "What?" in her mind upon hearing that she has to fly a whole starship, at a moving target no less. She is aware that she knows how to maneuver her modified Dynamiteon around in flight for long periods of time, but she is not even sure if she can fly an actual ship without crashing it the moment it leaves the ground and before it gets to its target.

Seeing everyone from below look at her, she looks down and places her finger on her chin, thinking hard about how she should handle a larger vehicle. After a moment of thinking to herself, she shrugs her shoulders and, through the broken windshield of the canopy, she gives a thumbs up and nods with a smile to everyone. If she can fly a mech with ship-borne thrusters slapped onto it, she is confident that she can fly an actual ship, though probably after some adjusting to its handling and quirks.

Shuttle

As Joanna was led inside the ship the outside became a scene of controlled chaos as strays ran about moving equipment and getting to cover as a more dedicated team messed about a complex machine and crane network of cables fed under an expose pannel into the ship. Joannas and Charlottes mechs were moved into the side bay where a shuttle might otherwise have been had King Rogers the money to afford one in his life as a fuel runner. While the idle mech was maglocked to the deck, Charlottes was briefly hooked up to a long cable into a port as her battery status started to slowly climb back upwards.

There were no spare macromissiles. But she had most of her lasers back up and full if not her primary reserves.

"The shuttle is unarmed." Clotho projected her cute little fairy avatar into Charlottes cockpit beside her own fairy as the two casually held sisterly hands even if one of them was supposed to be a serious mercenary commander. "If any xenos large enough to divert the shuttle get into its path it can be disastrous. Try to keep that from happening."

With that short order the fair disappeared as her drone body was seen waving reasuringly from further away on a hill where many of the strays were fleeing behind.

Shasta was not with them as she slapped the mech in greeting as she flew on by and up the ramp after Joanna.

Shuttle - Cockpit.

The megashuttle fuelers cockpit was a tight affair. Barely twice as big as Joannas mechs own it had a single tub-like seat surrounded by consoles that all had alarming display icons in various shades of red that if it weren't for the speakers being yanked out might be blaring master caution alarms. a lot of the consoles were labeled too though it was unsure if it was by any of the strays of Rogers himself.

Plopping in to the torn leather backed seat Joanna was forced to sit up sharply and pull the faded instruction manual on it from under her. Bookmarks made of tape had a lot of process marked until she found the startup procedure which seemed easy enough. Pulling a knob out on a nearby console a light next to it turned on to a dull yellow as she turned a choke and the ship began to shutter.

The ship suddenly rocked and shook violently as outside the group of strays around the generator kicked the output into its max on the ship attempting to start up as its own long dead battery banks and generator coughed to life and a small eruption of fire spat out from several pannels blown off in the small explosion as smoke coughed out of the ship and it rumbled with the offputting sound of a Lorrfolk being thrown down a flight of stairs. With it up and running cables and pipes were yanked out and the ship was allowed to be under its own power for the first time in years.

That was the easy part.

No less than six turnstyle levers were in the cockpit and all were labeled confusingly in that they each somehow controlled a cardinal direction despite the odd number while several pedals seemed to control dirrectional thrusters that Joanna suddenly remembered salvaging some of and were no longer there. While frantically flipping through the manual a form crashed into the cockpit and lept into the chair with her, the taller and shapelyer shasta pushing joanna to one half of the chair while the Mad Mutant flipped her cascading circled hair out of the other mutants eyes as she gave Joanna a grin expectantly.

"Co-pilot ready, skipper!" She yipped, her elbow pushing one of the levers forwards as the ship began to rumble at whatever it did and a grinding sound bellow them could be heard and felt as the recently installed sled made of ship hull began to grind against the ground as the thrusters on the back of the shuttle blasted slightly and increased their ferocity and caused the ship to inch several feet forwards.

No Mans Land

Luks cockpit refused to close as a much larger form the size of a large motorcycle gained purchase and got two of its front legs wedged under the transparent durrandium as it tried to close only to hit interference. Almost able to get its massive, tooth-wrung head under the canopy the xenos flew off a moment later as Prigs secondary blasted through its back half.

And then another, and a third. But with every slug on them they focussed on ten more were ignored and either ran past them or converted on their machines any moment they stopped. With those that passed them quickly came up on those of Yamogs militia that had routed and began to run them down.

The Dragoons were holding, however. Rather impressively for inbread outworld backwards nobles the crab-riders if steadily pulling back against the tide were holding their own as their riders lashed out with sword and lances while Lugs innefectually slid off the smooth carapace or were crushed by massive piston-like claws. Near them, chips mech was also covered in slugs right up until the moment he threw on his frames thrusters and the wash of fire and heat cooked most of them alive as his machine slowly rose into the air several feet and then back where it landed heavily ontop of several other aliens that if not crushed were cooked alive.

One of the aliens, however, was a bit too large to crush outright and Chips mech overcorrected and before their eyes fell onto its side with considerable force and did not move even as slugs crawled across it large and small like wounded prey as the Highwaymans icon went from a cyan-blue to a suddenly alarming Yellow as Snacks, Chips fairy put out a distress signal that when not followed up by a report from Chips himself meant that the old Mutant probably didn't get off lightly from the crash.

Not far from the down mech, The broodmother of the aliens visibly crossed the threshold line of where they needed to keep it for the shuttle.

Speaking of...

No Mans Land - Shuttle

Shasta screamed with giddly delight as the shuttle dragged and skipped across the ground with such force and vibrations that if the target nearly five-miles away wasn't the size of a stadium Joanna might not have been able about to see it the way the shuttle shook as if dragged across the ground at close to a hundred kilometers an hour. The strays in their mechs might have noticed if she didn't that the shuttle itself was engulfed in flames as leaking fuel ignited on its surface from the sparks on the ground and dragged behind it like a comets tail as if the craft itself was a blazing star of a vengeful god sledding on the ground on its reinforced hull bottom.

The terrain wasn't even or overly highly but still Joanna was forced to fight the ship with everything she had if only to keep it from wanting to shoot towards the sky and come back to earth fatally or turn over and start cartwheeling.

It was still several kilometers out. But not at the finish line yet even as from her spot in the side bay Charlottes mechs maglocks on the feet felt a bit too loose as her fairy fed them more power and she looked ahead through the flaming hull to see one of the house-sized Xenos making a B-line straight towards their path and eas easily large enough to cause the shuttle to lose control and crash if she didn't do something soon.

Prig breathed a little easier after the latest and largest invader of Luk’s cockpit lost the bulk of its buggy ass. “You’re about as clean as you can get, I think!” he called out to Luk over the comms, though Prig was a little confused by what definitely sounded like ‘eating’ coming from inside the other mech. That bug was dead, and not eating his fellow pilot… right? Something was having a meal in there...

Prig didn’t have the time to think much more about it, as his dreary Fairy AI, Gunk, picked up on Snack’s alerts.

“Crrrrap, Chips! Hey, hey!” Prig called out, his voice panicky. He tried to turn his Lancer, but the mech’s legs were gummed up in slug-bugs both dead and alive. It felt like he was in a swimming pool of wet concrete, the soup of chitin and insectoid guts schlurping and burping in his wake. “Chips! Chips, hey, come on, respond!” He found himself growling with exertion, even though it was his mech doing the work of snow-shoeing across the landscape of insectoid life and death.

But even as Prig turned, his cameras were also showing him the feed of that huge, lumbering monstrosity, its death-march largely unimpeded. If he stopped to help Chips, that was time lost trying to main or kill that Big Big Bug. He'd already spent time helping Luk, but that had been a quick, sure thing. Prig could tromp over there to help one birdbrain, just to see the whole mission flop, to see all of those fleeing weirdoes eaten, to see the crab-riders flambeed. What if Chips was already dead inside his cockpit, that same birdbrain decidedly outside of its birdskull? Snacks probably would’ve said so if Chips was dead, though…

“You’re not authorized to take a Moral Quandary Break right now…” Prig’s Fairy warned him, correctly interpreting his screwed-up expression. Prig thought about Luk, maybe trying to encourage the other pilot to help Chips, but then… “No, really, your contract clearly specifies-”

“Alright! Yeah, I’ve had a few contracts, I know the deal.” Prig cut her off, frustrated. Hoping old Chips would be… alright… Prig turned his Lancer to intercept the path of the beast. His mech had a Big Shot, and maybe if he got a lucky blast in on the Mother Bug’s tiny little head, that would… do something? He hustled off, dodging and jumping and shooting to try to get into a pro headshot position...

Charlotte was definitely surprised to be hug tackled by the ever excitable Shani, while she had gotten a little used to the antics of the woman... She was still not fully sure if she enjoyed it, the bundle of slightly dirty looking fox tails behind her were wavering uncertainly for the duration of the hug. "N..nice to see ya too Shani!" She grinned and leaned into the hug a little, before the mutant was off to go start hyping their "pilot" up for the insane mission they were all going on.

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"Hm hm, roger that!" Charlotte nodded in response to Clotho, the fox mutant strapping herself in as she listened to the short briefing. "Any big bugs I see, I'll try to knock em outta the way!" The plan was insane of course, although Charlotte would be lying if she said she wasn't excited for the chance to see such a huge explosion. Artemis, for her part, was utterly terrified; the poor little fairy having trouble keeping her avatar coherent The reassuring hand of the much more experienced fairy was probably the only thing keeping her from shutting herself off until the whole thing was over. All Artemis managed to say was a quiet whine, like a terrified small animal might make.

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Charlotte tried her best to make... Any sense of the landscape outside the shuttle bay as it flew past too fast for her to really see anything. Still, while the jolts and shocks to her mech made it impossible to focus on anything specific, the group of house sized bugs were big enough to see. "Hey uh Joanna, got some of those big fuckers coming up! I got a plan so try to break as far to the right as you can on my mark!" Charlotte shouted over the radio, to make sure she was heard by the pilot of their terrifying bomb ship. With that she left the job of keeping her mech anchored to the floor to her long suffering copilot, before she settled in to wait for a gap in the bouncing where she could aim her shots relatively accurately.

When the ship ramped off a bump Charlotte took her chance. In the short period without shockwaves rattling through her mech, she set her small collection of shotgun weaponry to fire at full rate, before she hit the button to fire all of the missiles in the rack sitting atop her mech. "Now!"

For a brief, beautiful moment the front of Charlotte's mech lit up like a star. With the fire rate limiters taken off her energy weapons and an effectively unlimited supply of energy from the ship, all of her guns fired well beyond their required cooldown cycle fire rate and started melting themselves in short order; although not before firing a barrage of shots into the side of the oncoming bugs. A moment later the missiles hit home, set to spread across the sides of the slugs. While Charlotte was under no illusion of killing or really damaging any of the huge slugs, she was hoping that the ships slight course change and the concussive force of her weapons pushing the bugs off course would be enough for the ship to avoid hitting any of them on it's course for the mother of all bugs, or MOAB for short.

No Man's Land - Farmstead

Not much time for inspiring words now. Yamog was fully enthralled in the act of marshalling her regiments of pike and shot zealots forward. No time to wait for the heavier wagons, no way of stopping the constant tide of grotesque crawling monsters- The best they could do was dance and zig-zag, stomping and burning creatures with their lasers. This path of the maimed was the opening that the foot troops could exploit, stabbing immobilized creature's faces, or letting the crab riders lance exposed undersides and orafaces.

It was a marching island, an amoeba-shape in a rolling gale of chrome-painted technicolour gore- No time to think or plan, just the weaponized human will to survive.

Somewhere at the far length of Prig's firing range, the fairy Deimos knew, ahead of the approaching shuttle even- Exposing themselves to the giant, mountain sized queen's ire?...

Crossing a flash-fried farmstead, a broken ruin...

"...One eye..." The digital being manifested, a glowing figment of static on the dashboard. "...Hey, pay attention to me..."

Sweating, unblinking, the blue demon just shirked, then threatened to scowl-

"HEY! IDIOT! What do you think is gonna happen to your little flesh-fellas when that shuttle hits the mountain?"

"...Erm... Ah... but we need to..."

"Secure the farm! And hit that damn slug with something!"

A firing solution blinked up. Yeah, there was some bus-sized thing wandering into the path of the shuttle. Yamog popped off their last two macro missiles... Made the distance, but a bit too fast to be accurate... Maybe it would at least come towards them, whilst they hunkered down?

Basically just an earthen ridge, an old shepards brick wall, half a blown up farm house... But good enough to keep a bunch of them alive, at least?...

Shuttle - Cockpit

Joanna stares surprised at Shasta, who just suddenly jumped in, with an eyebrow raised before turning her head ahead of them in a snap the moment the ship started shaking. As the shuttle scrapes across the ground, the unpleasant screeching noise reverberates throughout the entire cockpit, amplified many times thanks to her ears' hearing being quite sensitive, causes her to cringe a bit.

With the shuttle slowly moving out, Joanna frantically starts looking at the controls and tries to remember any of what she read in the instruction manual that she just skimmed through in hopes that she could apply it well enough to prevent the ship from crashing before it hits its intended target. Though, she is confident that she can.

No Mans Land - Shuttle

Joanna tries her best to keep the shuttle on course while also keeping it from doing a front flip before they even reached their target. The entire cockpit shakes, and they get thrown a few inches upwards every time the shuttle takes some air and lands, but she still manages to keep herself on the controls. She notices the Xeno ahead of them, moving in a path that would intercept them and probably cause the entire shuttle to do a front flip and crash into a flaming ball.

She hears Charlotte's voice through the radio, telling her of a plan that she got. Hearing what she has to do, she awaits her cue.

At Charlotte's mark, she turns the shuttle right as much as she can, and in that moment, their obstacles were swiftly taken care of, and she quickly brings the shuttle back onto its course.

Wayfinder had assumed control of the mech, triggering the jump jets and leaping backward as Luk quite literally threw the remains of his unfortunate meal out of the machine, licking his chops as the Fae slammed his cockpit closed. The tech crew was going to be pissed about the mess.

The big lizard mutant on the other hand was quite pleased as the rumbling in his belly had quieted for a time-the mechs's guns blazing in all directions as it did a pirouette and landed, beeling its way out of the bad position it had found itself in an attempt to join the rest of the strays.

The End Of The World

Missiles and toroids hitting the big-version of the slug before the ship the vessel misses it only just as the alien flinches and recoils, sparing the ship its fatal speedbump as Charlottes silos go dry and her vision becomes a sea of fleshy xenos like a line in the distance changing the ground from mud and spare splotches of grass to shades of greens, browns, blues, and yellow-purple in a strange sort of visage as if thee ship was just a common vehicle driving alongside the sea.

Except the sea wanted to eat them...

Flying close to four hundred kilometers an hour everything happened fast. Jostling and slamming in the pilots seat the two mutants half-wrestled onto their feet as the speck in the distance seemed to close startlingly and it became apparent that they were either definitely going to hit it, or likely be close enough to do their attempt justice as the controls were locked and the remaining retro control systems kept the shuttle off the ground. They struggled against the extreme rocking and vibrating of the ship to get down the flight of metal steps; Falling down most of them and managing to pull themselves onto the catwalk as the two mechs, one idle and prone the other already at the door awaited them.

Getting to the deck bellow was a trial of effort as soon as they reached the bottom as the ship jerked slightly, launching Joanna up into the air and hitting the dark hard and beginning to slide towards the open bay doors of the cargo bulkhead being only saved at the last minute by a lunging dive from the Mad Mutant herself who hooked one arm around a strap connected to a ground-mounted ring of metal used to secure cargo and catching Joanna by the ankle. Crawling then more than anything Joanna was able to make it to her mech and carefully scale inside while Shasta, unable to fit in the much more cramped cockpit hooked a loop of cable from the harness of the jumpsuit she and all the other strays wore and hooked it around the mounting brackets to one of the tanks of Mirage Nanites on the Dynamiteon.

With little time to lose, and both the girls Fairys screaming at them in warning the two mechs on either side of the ship jumped out of either door as their jumpjets kicked on and their fairys fought with the gyroscopes to stay level as their momentum carried them. They hit the ground hard as their shock absorbers and hydraulics protested and the two mechs slid in the mud for at least three dozen meters leaving four lines of deep trenches in their wake and a mutant dangling off the side and under Joannas mech like a Christmas ornament with a bloody nose as Shasta flailed about, her cries of adjunct pain from slamming her face against the mech muted.

As the shuttle burned away, the Two mutants and their bloody-nosed tagalong got front row tickets to the fireworks show...

The shuttle careened past Luk. Past Prig and Chips downed mech. Four-score of the original hundreds of the cyclopian militia were there as well, making a stand alongside their lady as spears impaled charging Slugs over the berm as the shuttle passed them by, mere meters off the ground as the force of the passing vessel pulled slugs off the ground in its wake as it zipped by.

It hit the biggest bug somewhat rearward and high. Colliding with the much larger force of mass it struck into the hindquarters of the biggest bug and sank like a finger poking into a fat-kids belly and the back of the shuttle began to lift off the ground as its thrusters kept firing and pressed ever deeper until the first front quarter of the ship disappeared. The broodmother slug, hit off guard slid slightly from the force and turned its front half in instinctual act to attack the attacker as a few lasers hit the ship and bug hoping to ignite it.

As the front of the ship was crushed even inside the biggest bug it did not puncture the monstrosity and even at the end its thrusters died from the lack of control input as the ship halted in its side like a thorn and then began to list and appear to be falling out of its side.

There was no witty remark. No cool catchphrase though not for a lack of having one. Clotho was perhaps one of the more serious and level-headed of her Pledias sisters right behind only her eldest sister Abigail. The fairy like to think she was cool, composed, and hard boiled. Even as her inner avatar was trying to hide her giggles from her other sisters in the Fae as she remotely activated the ships IFF tag they had placed in the rear of the ship.

When the little blue icon of the ships registration tag popped into her hud she was already turned around, Letting her drone body silhouette what was to come as she tried to look as cool and nonplussed as possible as...

The satellite in orbit. Massive in size if only appearing as a white dot in the sky suddenly swiveled a weapons matrix on its belts to glare its ire at a new contact it perceived as coming too close to its ward. It fired one of its heavy anti-starship lasers down at the planet at the target. The laser was not some great torrent of energy, No. Instead it was just a telephone pole-sized beam of red energy almost easy to miss in the light of the day and certainly at a distance. It hit the ship and past it as it cut a trench of freshly-formed obsidian six foot deep in the mud. The beam cut through the midway of the ship right through the back, missing the bug it was embedded in but igniting the highly volatile tanks of starship fuel.

The tanks ruptured instantaneously, exploding with a wall of bright concussive force at hundreds of meters a second as a wall of force and fire extended for miles. Those crab Knights unable to disengaged were flash-fried. And when the shockwave reached Yamog her Knights all threw themselves to the ground and part of her cockpit even dented inwards as the transparent Durrandium took in the impact and her mech almost toppled over.

Four Days Later

"No! No! Not like that!" Chips squawked at one of the strays as his highwayman, or at least the last of it on the cradle as it was being disassembled was being pulled apart with the exception of its heavy laser refusing to come undone as the poor mutant instead of relating to the fact it still had one bolt on had the small crane arm pull harder and yank it off with a spray of sparks as wires pulled and began flailing electricity.

"Oh... Yeah I guess it worked out then!" The mutant admitted in his cozy chair, the neck brace and arm sling seeing him hardly able to do the job himself as the strays continued breaking down their base of operations.

The Avatar of Clang was in orbit. On the other side of the planet avoiding the satellite it could just easily have destroyed but waiting patiently as it ran shuttles and shuttles planetside to Rogersville with fresh troops, drones, and an evac party for the mercs. The crater with the front half the biggest bug and a sea of now swelling and rotting xenos greeted them alongside great pyres as the men at arms of the final city burned great piles of those few that had remained that even now threw great towers of smoke into the air.

Its people had celebrated. Or at least those that had survived had. Great parties still raged in the streets as wines and crab boil were broken out for the great saviors until the next morning when the toll had set in.

They were the last few hundred thousand of a planet that once held millions. They were alone now too, King Rogers having been said to have taken the field personally to mount the counterattack with his Crab Dragoons. In reality he had tried to escape to his ship and after a heated argument as to its location when he did not find it turned physical now inhabited a shallow grave, his fancy crown a trophy. The strays, always eager and optimistic had forgotten to write a receipt for the several sacks of literal gold coins the King had taken with him clearly as early payment he owed.

A bit late to the ransacking the gold and silver decorations, candelabras, and what was left of the treasury after Rogers nobles got their first still made the mutants out handsomely.

Chips. Now King Roger the Fifth wore the crown on his feathered head and like the king he now claimed to be by right of his name acted the part of the tyrant as the stray broke down camp and got ready to head home. He had thought to make a permentant base on the planet, with a steady source of recruits and manpower for the corporation for all of a day before someone pointed out all the bleeding eyes, and throwing up and how all the houses and streets were still coated in the super-radioactive star-paint the locals thought was so neat.

As a shuttle touched down, however, The mutant lamented that they still got some manpower anyhow as Some of Yamogs new zealots and surviving knights helped load the shuttle full of crates of wires, metals, and a whole amorys worth of Crab-spunk weapons for trophies. One of them was even trying to coax one of the several thousand pound crustaceans into the shuttle causing Chips to laugh slightly before wincing at his fractured collarbone.

No. He was getting the hell out of here and so where the strays. They would leave behind the few hundred dumb-drones as promised that no doubt one of the nobles would take advantage of and become warlord with. But after the survivors of the super cancer who succumb to mutations settled maybe they could come back some day... Until then...

"Aint no place like freehold~"