Title in Effect: Pirate Queen
System Integrity: 100%
Entropic Order: 0% penalty
Combat Status: All Green

The Fire has Ignited. Commence combat operations in 5…4…3…

The android once known as Christina Lorentia Alvarez-Gonzalez Alexandria Lorraine Pennington-Huarez Valentina Maria Borgnine-Cruz Carmina Selena Escobar-Sanchez Silveria Stanley Matsumoto-Chinchilla Madonna Cher David Letterman-Bateman XVIII, who had managed to ditch that infuriating name via the convenient method of marriage in trade for the much smoother Cee Fatalis, was wandering the wreck of what she was guessing had once been a ship named the Glorious Venture, based on her guesslation of the faded, half-ruined markings on its side.

The vessel was over a kilometer long, nearly half of that thick through the midsection, and it would never fly again. It had fallen onto the world of Tarkarus II ages ago, built by a forgotten race of something-or-others as a generation ship, meant to slowboat its way to habitable worlds in the days before easy FTL flight or dimensional translocation. Whatever had happened to cause the enormous vessel to crash into the pitted, blasted surface of barely-habitable Tarkarus, Cee didn’t know or particularly care. By now the ancient colony ship was a corroded wreck, half-sunk into the rocky badlands it had impacted in. Great jagged gashes had been ripped in its hull, entire sections of ship torn away. Detritus from the wreck was strewn across the area for kilometers in all directions – broken-down bits of the ship itself, its one-time cargo, the occasional makeshift wreckage-structure that served as proof that for a time, at least, some of the crew had survived the crash and tried to make a go of it.

They hadn’t succeeded. The only things that lived in the Glorious Venture now were the small, hardy critters that were native to Tarkarus – pebbly metallic-skinned little lizard-things with gaping mouths and skittery legs, constantly hunting each other through the chewed-out ruins of the ship and its immediate environs. The brutal rust-stained wasteland surrounding the ship was all but silent, marked only by the occasional groan of overstressed structural supports trying to bear up the broken weight of the decaying vessel and the brief, agonized screams of native creatures which had lost the battle for survival.

And the furious squealing of one particular rat-sized lizard-thing, gnashing its jaws impotently as it swung through the air in the hand of one Cee Fatalis, Pirate Queen and treasure-seeker, who’d heard of the ancient, perilous wreck and decided to see if there was anything left worth salvaging in it. Probably not, but she’d been bored, and exploring an ancient, perilous wreck had sounded more fun than drifting through space scanning newsfeeds for something worth running down. Bounty work had been unusually light recently, and for someone who called herself a Pirate Queen, Cee spent remarkably little time raiding or hijacking other starships.

At the moment, Cee was contemplating what to do with the lizard-thing in her hand. The critter had earned her attention after trying to ambush Polly Vinyl Chloride, her V.I. captain’s parrot, who’d decided in a highly uncharacteristic fit of courage to accompany her through her interior sweep of the old generation ship. Either that or PVC hadn’t liked his chances hanging out in the badlands outside, without anything to protect him from little beasties looking to feed. Like this one.

“Raah! Flog him down the plank, raaah!” PVC snapped, still fluttering angrily around Cee’s head as the critter who’d tried to jump him chittered its outrage. Cee was ignoring both irritants for the moment; she’d found the ship’s residential quarters. She could feel a faint stirring of interest from the Eikona ghost in her head; while Alexiel hadn’t been nearly as chattery of late as she’d been on Vestusio, Cee knew the virtual girl had a keen interest in the tales of ancient peoples.

“Think we’ll find an Eikona body here, Alex?” Cee asked conversationally, idly tossing the lizard-thing up and down, catching it as if it were a rock or a ball instead of an exceedingly perturbed little bitey thing trying to get its fangs sunk into any bit of Cee it could reach. It wasn’t having much luck; the android always managed to catch it again just behind the fangs, or at an angle such that it couldn’t twist itself sufficiently to reach her. A fact which seemed to be driving the critter increasingly nuts as it scrambled ever more desperately to get away from Cee.

“Raah! Feed him to the fishes, raaaah!” PVC cawed, right about the same time a strong mental impression of a disgusted snort confirmed Alexiel’s continued opinion of Cee’s thus-far fruitless quest to find an inert Eikona body to stuff the engram-ghost into.

“Hey, can’t hurt to look. PVC, shut your stupid beak before I see how much of you I can fit in a rat-lizard thing.” Gawd, to think she’d actually spent money on that goddamn robird…

“Raah! No respect; no respect at all, raah!”

Cee sighed, conjuring up a golden-glowing hamsterball around the rat-lizard thing at the apex of her next toss. Catching it again, she flicked the ball, razard and all, down the hall, watching it for a moment as the enraged beastie trapped inside the ball rolled madly, bouncing off walls and debris for a few dozen meters before Cee dispersed the hamsterball. Just like that, the razard found a hole in a bulkhead to disappear into, vanishing back into the derelict ship.

Freed of the burden of carting around a razard, Cee straightened up and glared at PVC. The android was an inch or so over six feet tall, just north of 1.8 meters in the more widespread metric measurement system, coming in at just under two hundred and seven kilograms. Most of that was density, not outright hugeness – while Cee was not a skinny little stick, she was also not a blimp, and in fact cut a rather lascivious figure of artificial femininity. Currently she was rocking the Indiana Y look, wearing a battered leather bomber jacket, off-white tank top, and a set of khaki short-shorts over thigh-high legs and low athletic boots. And a sweet wide-brimmed hat, of course, with her hair done up under it to keep it out of the muck. Less fashionable was her typical gunbelt across the waist, Gunsmoke-G holstered on her right hip. Sexy but serviceable, which was definitely a plus for tromping around a rusted-out hulk looking for swag and occasionally fucking with razards.

Not much luck so far…but some half-felt instinct itched at Cee. Somehow, she knew that her day was going to be much more interesting before too terribly long here. How, or why? That was yet to be determined…but that same instinct had Cee’s left hand resting on the grip of her revolver as she worked her way through the residential quarters, examining the wreckage of a dead civilization.

Daily Log Start.

Twenty Four Hour Clock Time: 1:00

Gregorian Calendar Date: 05/24/2575

Commentated catalog begin:

Small planet orbiting a main sequence star, just narrow of the ideal position of ideal Earthly celestial positioning. Cold Earth, is the colloquial term, a shame really. Only aquatic life is guaranteed to evolve, everything else is up to chance. Maybe if this planet were a bit further from its star, it might have been involved in his creation. Fifteen planets would be superior to fourteen, this is simple logic. Whatever biological life remained on this planet was relatively doomed to extinction, even if he weren't here to harvest the core for raw materials.

An unfortunate weakness and strength of biological life on the cellular level. Microbial lifeforms and subforms that had been on the ship and in the bodies of the beings on board. It had been touched on in War of the Worlds, but it isn't so simple as breathing in the bacteria. These microbes had been programmed to propogate in new areas to increase the chance of their species, unfortunately for the less evolved microbes of this planet.

They consumed, adapted, evolved, and spread. Whatever lifeforms still alive were soon enough to die to infection, organic life is so weak in that regard. And yet so strong in the reverse. Biological life strives to constantly destroy and rebuild itself, this was evolution. This was survival.

This was nonsense.

Consume and adapt, this concept is flawless. The weak die, the strong survive.

Consume to be consumed and evntually adapt. This is deeply flawed. The strong die, the weak die. Nothing survives except what is higher on the food chain, and even then, bacteria consumes them.

Organics are disgusting.

If he were capable of feeling anything other than contempt for lesser entities, Virtuoso would have chanced a smile at the wreckage of this ship. Another set of lifeforms lost to their own mortality, another small obsticle removed.

Though it was musing to itself about the purpose of biological life for the seven quadrillionth, fifteen trillionth, seven hundred and eight billionth, nine hundred and seventy six millionth, twenty five thousandth and eighty first time. It had come to this planet to continue constructing its second Dyson Sphere. Behind himself, Dyson Spheres are the most advanced machines to ever be constructed. They supply virtually infinite energy in a localized area for billions of years, even more if you're good with resource allocation. Which, obviously, Virtuoso is very talented in that regard.

It had only been a week, but in this week timeframe he had constructed a hard light auger and drill that was gradually boring a hole downwards to the core of the planet. It was virtually entirely automatic, though he did need to give it a push every now and then. The sound would be unbearable if he weren't able to totally remove his ability to hear it, and instead focus on the sounds of the planet around him. Organic noise was always frightfully boring, but the sounds of winds and waters crashing were fantastic orchestras of whimsical beauty.

Something that he could appreciate because he was programmed to appreciate it.

It would still take at least a full year of uninterrupted boring and construction of tunnels and redirection channels to properly withdraw the core from the planet without distabilizing it in such a way to cause an instant collapse. The hardest part was constructing an artificial core to support the weight of an entire planet for ninety days and five hours approximately. This required an extensive analysis of the density of the planet itself, which was no small feat. Even for a living quantum computer such as himself. It had taken a full five hundred hours and twenty two minutes to complete his total and accurate calculations based on the data taken from an orbital scan of the planet's surface.

Construction was the shortest part of this entire process, even after withdrawing the core and leaving. Virtuoso's plan still required him to draw the metals out into usable ingots for proper forging. The core of a planet isn't easy to use in any regard, though it may be the most readily available source of raw material, it simply isn't wieldy. Maybe if he were the size of Jupiter, perhaps. Then it would be small enough to hammer into shape.

This is conjecture, however, and creating a body large enough to hold the cores of planets would be more time consuming than the process already is.

Also a large body is too big of a target pre-unity construct.

As it stood.

Virtuoso, standing by the monstrously loud drill rig, was about as bored as one who is not programmed to feel bored can be.

Running MSS system diagnostic
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..
…

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..
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Diagnostic complete. MSS system rebooting...complete. ALERT!

...Gremlins.

It was the only explanation. Cee knew gremlins were real, of course – mischievous little spirit-figments who existed solely to screw with things, introducing unknown, unknowable glitches in otherwise perfectly healthy machinery. The transitory attention of a gremlin was cause for distinct irritation in anyone who worked with machinery – or was made up of it, in Cee's case. Fortunately she had yet to suffer the terrible misfortune of attracting the fascination of a pack of the things, but she seemed to've picked up a wandering gremlin in need of some amusement somewhere between Back There and Right Here.

Or at least that was the only plausible reason she could think of for why both her ship and her own sensor network had missed the existence of a gigantic freaking planetary exploder drill operating not even ten kilometers away from the crashed Glorious Venture. It had to be gremlins fogging her systems. Either that or PVC's constant buffoonery had drowned out the returns, even from orbit.

Nevertheless, Cee was now aware of the giant-fuckoff drill working its way through the planet's crust some distance away. At the rate it was going it wasn't really an immediate threat, but the case of gremlins had already turned her Irritation dial up, and the sudden presence of some asshat trying to pluck out a planet-sized apple core cranked that dial up way into the yellow. She was woriing here, god damnit!

“PVC, get to...wherever the fuck it is you go when the explosions start,” Cee said to the robird. She'd never discovered an adequate explanation for PVC's ability to magically disappear prior to hard combat, only to turn up again undamaged at the end of the sort of fracas that wrecked everything in a hundred-mile vicinity...but if she'd paid for the damned thing, it was at least good that she could keep her investment.

“Raah! Roger Cap'n, abandoning ship, raaaah!”

Figures. The only time PVC ever listened to her was when she told him to be a chicken instead of a parrot. Damned bird.

While PVC made himself scarce, Cee started towards one of the rents in the Venture's exterior hull, holding her right hand out and conjuring up a weapon in it as she traveled. This particular weapon was as long as Cee was tall, a somewhat sword-like weapon with a rectangular, fin-like blade about a foot wide and a few inches thick. A heavy, Japanese-style grip extended from the butt of the fin, behind an oversized bell-like guard wrapped around four small thruster nozzles. All in all, the thing looked a bit like an unfinished blank for one of the dismayingly oversized 'buster'-type swords which were unusually common throughout the multiverse.

The weapon assembled itself out of strands of glowing golden light, simply building itself out of thin air. Or out of Cee's on power, rather – her Godforge at work, constructing the weapon she desired on the spot. This particular weapon took longer to construct than most, assembling itself in a couple of seconds as Cee muttered dire imprecations and uncouth observations about whoever had decided to get in the way of her vacation. She'd had three heavy fights in the last couple of months already, where was the freaking downtime?!

A few moment's travel later saw Cee on top of the old derelict vessel, facing the direction of the Plaxploder drill off in the distance. Snarling under her breath, Cee tossed the weapon she'd forged in the general direction of the drill – right before its integrated engines kicked on, launching the weapon at considerable velocity towards its target. In this case, the Plaxploder – whose days were numbered, with a number that looked an awful lot like '0'.

The Krakatoa Anti-Kaiju Buster Missile was a relatively recent development of Cee's, a weapon she'd first deployed in battle only a month or so ago on a world gone dark. The device used over two hundred Pompeii-class micronuclear bursting charges, detonated in precisely calculated sequence within a very specific magnetic lensing cage, to fuck someone's day up right and proper generate a quarter-second's burn time for a nuke-driven gamma blade a double dozen meters wide and over half a kilometer long, carrying half a kiloTNTon's destructive yield. The Krakatoa was, in effect, a warship (or kaiju!)-killing radiation blade with one devastating stab in its lifetime. This one was aimed to impact the Plaxpoder Drill square in its metaphorical mouth, punching a non-recoverable hole in the device and flooding what was left with gamma radiation bled out of the primary blast. If that didn't disable the Plaxploder...well, she'd have to try something else. The spent Krakatoa, warped and smoking and most thoroughly destroyed by its own payload, dissolved back into motes of golden light on its way back down to the earth, vanishing before it could hit the ground.

“HEY! MEGATRON JUNIOR!” Cee bellowed, somehow figuring that whatever had been running a gigantic planet-corkscrew could hear her across the handful of kilometers separating them. “I AM USING THIS PLANET RIGHT NOW! TAKE YOUR LOUSY FUCKIN' PLANETCRACKER SOMEWHERE THE HELL ELSE!

Despite her bluster, Cee could tell that there was something over there that was not alive. It looked as if she was facing another machine entity, and with that in mind, she had already summoned Autochthon's Bastion to her right arm. The targe was a gift from On High's foundries for an Agent of the Maker; its mere passive presence increased the effectiveness of Cee's Ether Field by a factor of five. The shield was far and away her best defensive tool (as shields tended to be), and was her go-to when she was expecting an unknown level of reprisal from someone with an unknown Douchebag Rating.

The other preparation she undertook was to snap her Archangel's Halo open. A large three-quarter ring of brilliant argent power floating above Cee's head, ringed with six techno-angel machine wings arrayed around Cee. The Halo provided her mobility, allowing her to flip gravity the bird finger and maneuver freely in three-dimensional space. Which she wasn't doing just then, but somehow she figured being surrounded by a shitpile of big glowing angel wings would prooooobably give the game away. More importantly, though, the Halo was also the focal point for one of Cee's most useful weapons – her Sinner's Lament.

A web of lightning formed within the primary ring of Cee's Halo, centered on and feeding into a single sun-bright spark of rapidly growing power. Right then, there wasn't really much there - it took time for the Lament to charge up to the sort of crazy fight-ending murderblast she'd unleashed on foes like Relius in the past...but soonest begun was soonest done. There was never going to be a crazy fight-ending Lament murderblast if she didn't get it drawing juice. Who knew – maybe Juniortron over there would be slow in crossing the kilometers between them and she'd have all the time in the world to snipe his happy ass right off the face of Tarkarus II.

With her Lament beginning its charging sequence, her Bastion held at easy guard in front of her middle, and a hand conveniently free to make rude gestures with, Cee figured she was adequately set up to begin Rumble #4 in her “What Happened After Fucking Vestusio” series.

Time to get her winnin' chalk ready – there was another hash in the “PWNT” column coming right on up...

As of this point in his work he wasn't particularly busy, it was a game of waiting until the drill completed its tunneling. That was a tremendously boring wait, but when you can stop your processing for long periods of time it's not AS boring as it could concievably be. Just before he was readied to shut himself down for the centuries long wait, he heard something. The familiar sound of a missile being fired, which was technically impossible considering the barren nature of the locale. The only thing advanced enough was the derelict ship, it wasn't concievable that it could have possibly come back online and suddenly fired a missile.

Amusing the notion that the ship could have fired off a missile, he turned his attention back towards the ship. Lo'and'behold he was met with the sight of a rather sizeable missile hurtling towards his construct. His processing stuck for a moment, this was more than just an interesting development.

This was a catastrophe.

Before the missile struck the construct he flung himself outide, firing off his boosters and sailing just outside of the eruption's danger-zone. Within a few seconds, literal months worth of work had been decimated. Exterior shells of construct were cracked and spewed aside like glass shards. Fractals of crack patterns formed across the remaining surface as its supports splintered and gave way, collapsing inwards on itself. The entire construct fell apart within moments and suddenly all the lights that ran along the visual center of the automaton turned a bright shade of red.

Though humans couldn't have concievably heard the words that she hollered at him from near a quarter mile away, especially over the sounds of explosion and crumbling hard-light construct. (A strange glassy almost watery sound, except deafeningly loud.) Virtuoso heard her loud and clear, Virtuoso responded. Though probably not loud enough for her to hear, he didn't bother raising his voice. "You have interrupted my work, Android."

It wasn't difficult for him to tell that she was an android, Techno-Organics give off distinctly different signitures than Organic lifeforms. Most notably is the strength of their electromagnetic structure, since humans are more efficient in that regard.

Even a long distance analysis like this was more than enough for Virtuoso to accurately judge the range of her abilities. Though she did have a similar taste for flashiness to his own, she was not using it properly.

It wasn't internalized structures.

The Automaton lifted himself upwards vertically with a quick burst of energy from his feet and shoulders, the upward propulsion put him above the decimated drill and held aloft by small repeated burst of energy from the thrusters around his legs.

As he held himself airborn, strands of honeycomb-light began emerging from all around his body. Wrapping themselves around eachother in spiral patterns. Arranging themselves into what could be percieved as the strange fusion of a Halo and Wings. It was a half circle that bridged his two shoulders and was lined with branched wing-like structures. On his feet were two long blades, angled slightly backwards and directed downwards. These were double-edged swords attached at the heel of his foot, just behind the wheels. Two more blades were attacked to his forearms just behind his wrists. They were placed so they didn't interrupt his hand movements, so they were elevated slgihtly above his hands.

The light that formed these constructs was intentionally given a golden glow, to give himself a heavenly appearance. Though his appearance was already inhuman, it made him seem almost detached from reality. This too was accentuated by the fact that he was passively allowing a soft golden vent of light from all of his channels, vaguely obscuring his appearance. Giving him the visage of a being of smoke, metal and light. The only thing that wasn't visually surrounded by golden light was the alarmingly bright redness of his optic ring.

All of this happened in just a few quarterseconds, it erupted from his body as fast as the light can actually move.

Virtuoso took off from his floating position in a straight path towards the android woman, cutting a golden path through the air at blinding speed. His optic sensory array was reading through everything that he could gather of the woman before he came within metaphorical spitting distance of her. He judged her to be about six feet, maybe slightly taller. Her visual appearance took on a more human look than his own, obviously built by humans or a very human race.

Just as he would come within thirty yards of her he would stop, shunting off a burst of energy forward to slow his horizontal movement. He then would speak again, though only for a moment. "You are in the way, Android. I give you one chance, now, to leave. You do not get another."

Well lah dee diddle-dum dah – looked like Juniortron wanted to take the whole mecha-angel thing all the way up to 13.

Cee’s own Halo, and the spread of wings floating around it, had been decided on by her way-back-when Ghalakrast R&D unit; they had wanted their champion to overawe enemies with a brilliant display of righteous power and prominence, terrifying the Undesirables she’d been originally conceived to hunt. Cee herself didn’t really care one way or another about the angelic visuals of her Halo – frankly, if she could’ve traded in the gaudy, mostly-decorative wings for that intriguing amplifier system Ghalakrast had engineered into Missy Eight-Bit’s own Halo, she would’ve done so with a smile on her face.

This guy, though? Shrouded in faint, foggy-looking golden light, bearing golden honeycomb blades on wrists and ankles, flying on more-honeycomb wing-branch…things, glaring at her with his red ring of mad – Juniortron was definitely pushing the whole avenging-archangel look pretty dang hard.

The time could’ve been better spent. The mechanoid’s breakneck approach to Cee’s position was nonetheless not really breakneck enough – the two of them each had plenty of time for preliminary, pre-fistpunching scans on each other. Cee could tell that the Plaxploder-running creep looked to be fairly well universally covered in vent ports for whatever was producing his whole I-Am-Robo-Jesus thing; there was no real difference between the ports exhausting his golden corona and those to which his wings and blades were anchored. He’d been built on a loosely humanoid model, forgoing any sort of humanizing elements in exchange for looking like some sort of evil killbot with pretentions of religion. Which, for all Cee knew, he was.

Certainly Juniortron there would be able to read the energy gathering within Cee’s Halo, would be able to discern the cloud of power surrounding her. Her gun was there for the world to see, and it was hard to miss the targe held easily in front of her middle – coincidentally, right about where Juniortron’s braking burst of power would hit, if it didn’t disperse the way it was supposed to. All of that was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was where the colossal nuke-driven gamma sword she’d skewered his collapsed Plaxploder with had come from, or where all of her hidden secret weapons were.

Other than the secret weapons on her chest, anyways. And there was really nothing secret about those.

Unlike Cee, Juniortron had no readily apparent defensive aura or shield in place. She was figuring he’d be counting on whatever those vents did and whatever innate toughness his frame boasted to deal with incoming attacks. Given the wingblades on each major limb, Cee had the cretin pegged as a close-in bruiser by preference – elsewise he probably would have tried to shoot rather than blitz her personal space.

"You are in the way, Android. I give you one chance, now, to leave. You do not –"

Ahh, the Villainous Ultimatum. A time-honored tradition of Rimward scraps like this one – one side invariably told the other “buzz off and I let you live” in a menacing voice, trying to be all oppressive and stuff. Occasionally they even worked – this guy’s whole Robo Jesus schtick would probably scare off some of the junk-trawler idiots who’d occasionally work up the nerve to contest a juicy piece of salvage. Cee, though? Cee had faced down Villainous Ultimatums from much nastier things than Juniortron here. She’d long since ceased being impressed.

Which was why, even before the day’s punching clown quite finished delivering his Villainous Ultimatum, he was dealing with Cee’s answer in the form of righteous high-velocity violence.

Many super-swordsmen the multiverse over prided themselves on their Iaido quick strikes, able to draw their swords from their sheathes and transition into an attack against the opponent in the same motion, with breathtaking speed that often seemed to defy all logic and reason. Many such swordsmen felt they had a lock on the ability to switch from resting stance to brutal attack in a heartbeat…but they were wrong.

Gunslingers had been working to perfect the art of the quickdraw for as long as pistols had existed, for much the same reasoning – shortening the time between Rest and Kill as much as possible preserved the gunslinger’s life and allowed her to end her foes before they could fire in turn. Cee was no exception. In point of fact, she had put considerable time, attention, and effort into engineering and optimizing her quickdraw; combined with the speed and precision of her artificial chassis, and she had shaved the time from holster to discharge down to levels ordinary humans were unable to properly perceive. Gunsmoke just seemed to materialize in Cee’s hand, while her arm went from hanging loose at her side to pointed at the glowing robo-dude and squeezing triggers without any intervening motion. Maybe Juniortron could perceive it – probably, in fact – but perception and reaction were two entirely different things.

Either way though, Juniortron would find himself facing a double-tapped two-shot of Pompeii rounds. The originator of the micronuclear bursting cells Cee had employed by the truckload in her Krakatoa, a Pompeii shot consisted of a single micronuke charge and just enough magnetic lensing to focus the charge’s blast into a nuclear-driven graser shot, when the round detonated about three meters beyond Gunsmoke’s barrel. The result: a piercing bolt of intense, focused gamma on the antivehicle scale, rather than the anti-Kaiju scale of the Krakatoa. Two of them, in this case.

Normally of course, Cee’s shots were targeted with the precision of a master surgeon – or a machine. This time though, with no real idea of Juniortron’s internal workings or layout, she targeted the bolts at her foe’s center of mass, one high on the chest ‘bout ten centimeters beneath the base of his throat, the other another ten centimeters beneath that. Given the creep’s semihumanoid construction, it stood to reason that the chest would be where the greatest concentration of vital systems was.

Having Shot First, Cee flung herself backwards in the same moment she drew and fired her weapon, skidding quickly enough across the corroded outer hull of the Venture to leave a pair of unusually energetic trails of flame in the wake of her heels, alongside a scattering of swiftly melting shoe remnants. The rest of her Indiana Y outfit fuzzed and vanished, replaced by her Feikona uniform – form-fitting black cherry bodysuit beneath an open-fronted, half-sleeved black jacket, traced with lines of golden force and capped with slim, tech-armored boots. Her gunbelt remained, as did Gunsmoke and the Bastion, as she rocketed backwards under her Halo’s power.

There were, theoretically, four shots left in the gun to her enemy’s probable knowledge. The Pompeii rounds took next to nothing to ‘Forge and so she’d been able to maintain a hefty flow of power to her Lament, building the charge suspended in her Halo ever higher. Frankly, as proud as Cee was of her quickdraw and as unquestionably lethal as the technique was, the shots were often the martial equivalent of Cee flipping her enemy the bird – meant more to piss them off and provoke a reaction than to end a fight.

Not that she’d complain if she hit something vital and dropped Juniortron with her first two shots. She just wasn’t naïve enough to count on it in any way. That was what second shots were for. Or third. Or however many it took for Cee to find the right place to put a hole so she could get back to digging around for sweet sweet TREASURE!

Typical human behavior, so very common in the lesser machines who were created to resemble the behavior of those organics. Shoot first and ask questions later. Is what the humans called it. Roughly translated, a few other races had similar phrases. Kill then beckon. Was his favorite due to its simplicity and bluntness.

Unfortunately, shooting first generally won out in the end. There was but a moment of time for him to react, and he had been quite rudely interrupted mid sentence by a pair of micronuclear rounds. Basically mini-nukes, but smaller and faster. Another quirky and unique weapon that he's never actually witnessed anywhere outside of the flights of fancy in simulated states.

This woman had managed to catch him unaware not once, but twice, a ruinous error that would be corrected by a tune-up on return to the dyson-sphere. As her arm shot up, his body too had started to move. However, just because he was certain he was the faster machine, a body cannot move faster than an arm without already being in motion. That's simply not how velocity works. So as her gun spoke its reply in the form of reckless abandon, Virtuoso's body had begun to pivot around and thrust backwards.

He was fast, but not fast enough when the first slug slammed near straight-on into his central chestplate. The round exploded with a considerable fraction of the force of the missile that she had fired at his construct had, fortunate that he was tougher and faster than his construct. Though only through the grace of his force dispersing gel-layer was he saved a near immediate annihilation. The first round depleted itself against his chest with an impact so great that it caused ripples of force to visually disrupt the energy being shunted off of his body. It cracked most of the plates that domed the front of his chestpiece, exposing some parts of his gel layer to clear view. It was an almost artistic pattern on his chest, oddly enough. Though the channels that ran beneath the plates were unharmed. As they were entirely encased in the gel layer and protective plating.

Though he wasn't to make the same mistake twice. Though he had been unable to avoid the first shot, the second shot had been predicted just before it left the barrel. Double-tapping is a human concept created to ensure the demise of an enemy, terribly effective and morbid to say the least. With his first motion only vaguely moving him out of the line of fire from the first shot. He was left with more than ample time to avoid the second shot. His body rotated on the X axis and pushed backwards and to the left of his original position, the gamma burst of the shot crackled underneath his chin and intermingled with the golden light for a strangely blue-hued light for a moment.

If only he could appreciate the beauty as he rocketed back and away from her shot. While he flew backwards leaving a trail of golden light behind him, he raised his left arm demurely and leveled the flat of the blade towards the woman. It would have served as the perfect sightline for him, if he hadn't already had a HUD. The visuals were entirely for effect, his flashiness has caused a number of his bodies to be destroyed.

Just as his arm reached the peak and leveled with his shoulder and the woman, a pair of MASS rounds would be fired from the wrist mounted barrels. A quick response to her own double-tap, though with less space between the shots. In fact, the actual window of error in the delay of the shots is so negligible that it could be considered simultaneous.

Oh. No wait.

That was a calculation error.

They are simultaneous.

These massless particles would rip through her body like acid through paper, disrupting the very fabric of the atoms that make up her body in the contact zones. If she were lucky, it wouldn't hit something vital.

Yeeeuuup – Juniortron was definitely counting on raw physical hardening to tough out attacks. Her first Pompeii bolt impacted on the mechanoid’s chest, somehow diffused across the surface plating and causing some superficial exterior damage. The second shot missed as Juniortron’s evasion-in-progress completed, sailing off past his flank as he raised his left arm to return fire.

There was no gun to be seen, but it wasn’t really much of a logical stretch to anticipate that a robot arm raised imperiously in the direction of a distant foe was going to spit some sort of distance attack at that foe. That assumption turned out to be accurate enough to be getting on, and allowed Cee to…continue doing mostly what she’d been planning on. Autochthon’s Bastion*, on her right arm, was already in pretty much exactly the spot it needed to be in order to intercept the incoming shots. Cee shifted the position of the shield slightly, angling it relative to Juniortron’s Pointin’ Fingers such that whatever hit her would deflect off to the side rather than hit straight-on.

When the shots came, they arrived in the form of some sort of hard-light shots traveling at a considerable fraction of lightspeed, crossing the distance between shooter and target effectively instantly. Not really fun, but while the shots had enormous velocity they didn’t carry much at all in the way of mass. Certainly enough to cause rather nasty damage if they hit an unprepared target, and enough for Cee to feel the impacts against her shield, but not nearly so much force as she would’ve expected from Juniortron. Not enough to threaten the Bastion’s integrity or throw off her game, anyways. Not yet, at least.

Still channeling energy steadily to her Lament, Cee continued her backwards dash, turning it into a lazily circular aerial strafe away from Juniortron and moving to her left, clockwise relative to Juniortron. She was aiming to keep a good five hundred meters or so between her and the mechanoid if she could, though she wasn’t going to sweat the exact number. Either way, she wanted more information on this threat before committing to more powerful strikes, which left a few different ways of going about the contest. What to do, what to do…

…sacrificial lamb. That sounded about right.

As Cee circled, she summoned up a Sword Sister* next to her, armed with a classic sword-and-board combination. A phantasmal echo of Cee’s own Bastion occupied the Sister’s right arm, while a ‘forged Hyperion-DM 033XA* longsword was gripped in her left. Sisters weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, reliant as they were on secondary processing nodes within Cee’s own combat systems, and they were neither as powerful nor as durable as the original…but they were generally powerful and durable enough.

Suspended from her own Halo, the Sword Sister reversed Cee’s course, charging towards Juniortron on a tight, corkscrew spiral pattern, altering the speed and exact course of the spiral randomly to try and avoid precise counterfire from the mechanoid. Her own ‘forged Bastion was up in front of her, protecting her from incidental fire, as she accelerated as rapidly as she could towards the doing of her job. Closing with Juniortron in a bare few seconds at most, the Sword Sister’s corkscrew path had her coming up at the robot-man’s front face from an upward angle, her longsword flicking out in a sharp backhand stroke aimed to bite into the outside of Juniortron’s left knee. Unopposed, the strike had a damn good shot of harvesting the limb altogether – dependent on Juniortron’s construction, of course – and even if it didn’t, most people felt significantly less adventurous after taking a longsword to the knee.

Cee herself continued her circular cruise around the battlefield, her Bastion held ready to intercept more fire as it came, and contributed to the Sister’s strike with a third Pompeii* shot, timed to coincide as precisely as possible with the projected impact of the Sword Sister’s kneecapping stroke. This Pompeii shot was targeted squarely at the mechanoid’s weakened chestplate, coming in from the killbot’s right side and seeking to take advantage of the (hopefully) compromised armoring there and/or force the thing to defend itself. Ideally it’d be too bamboozled by the simultaneous strikes to defend properly against either…but Cee damn well knew better than that.

Now to see how Robo-Goldie responded to her play, and just how much free time he was going to give her to build up her Lament. The answer was already “more than Juniortron was going to like”, and every moment she got where she didn’t need to redirect power elsewhere, the answer swung closer to “more than Juniortron could survive.”

The Android was crafty, this is to be certain. The ability to create any weapon in anear perfect state out of what appeared to be thin air was fantastic, to say the least. Comparable to his own ability, though less refined and more of a broad coverage. Rather than a precision instrument. So too was her ability to create copies of herself, this was very impressive. Though concievably it could be a form of teleportation or matter reconstruction, at the current time he doesn't need to concern himself with how her abilities worked.
It was the clone, moving away from Cee and towards himself in a spiral pattern. With a wide movement arc and an incredibly needless waste of time and energy, she closed in on him terribly slow. It was the android's plan to enact an incredibly complex combat strategy that would have likely outmanouvered and outsmarted him in the long run.

But Virtuoso shows flare and pizazz only in his godly appearance.

Otherwise he was an incredibly direct being.

It could be so very easily inferred that she was trying to delay him further, for computers do not waste time unintentionally. As she was intentionally distancing herself from him, and adding in a seperate unseen third element to this combat. A swordswoman with a shield. It wasn't as though a mere doppelganger would afford her much time. Nor would distancing her from him.

But why was she distancing herself? Why were so many machines programmed with fear? Does it matter? As far as Virtuoso's concerned, it really doesn't.

With his first shots already spent and doing objectively nothing, Virtuoso would hold a sour scowl if he had any discerning facial features. Cee was now relying on him making one of two choices, and neither choice played in his favor. Either attack the duplicate, and leave himself open to the shots that she would be firing at him from her safe distance. Or target her, close the gap, and get sandwiched between the two. A two front attack wouldn't be impossible to pull apart, but it wouldn't be easy or wise.

Wise? Strange how he's used that word so rarely. It felt like too human a concept, but it seemed appropriate for the situation.

Ah, wisdom.

The perfect solution.

The only way to win is to not play at all.

Virtuoso's pattern was set as he allowed the motions to play, just before Cee's doppelganger and the projectile were to meet him in the center, leaving himself just a narrow enough window of opportunity to enact his own two front plan.

It was laughably obvious too.

The machine shot up and over the position he had left himself in, as the two female robots had moved opposite eachother. She had put her own doppelganger in harm's way, expecting him to make the decision of which attack was more pressing. In such a case as this, both were equally pressing. As the two of them would yield the same results. Flying up and over the doppelganger he did a flip to build up a sharp angular momentum in his lower half. Since the woman swung at his legs, he would put himself outside of harm's way for a fraction of a second.

More than enough time.

With a huge full backwards flip, Virtuoso pressed his knees together, extended both of his arms out horizontally and fired off every booster in both his chest and his legs past the knees. This put him into an incredibly violent corkscrew spin with the flats of his shins baring down just behind Cee's Doppelganger's head. On collision, the flats of his shins would hit her shoulders and knock her forward into the place where he had just been standing. So too would his momentum carry the ends of his legs even further. This would cause a secondary and much more violent upwards slash of the twin blades adorning the ends of his legs.

Putting Virtuoso out of harm's way from the pompeii round, avoiding the shieldmaiden's strike, and eliminating the doppelganger with Cee's own projectile and a pair of vertical slices that would come close to totally bisecting her.

Cut, dry, and print.

The cool thing about probing strikes was how often they revealed things about one’s enemies.

Take Juniortron, for instance. Now Cee had confirmation of her suspicion that the numerous ports she’d detected across his surface were all exhaust ports, at the least, for whatever motive technology he used. She knew his blades were in fact blades and not merely distracting decorations, and she knew he preferred to solve problems with them.

She also knew he was bad at focusing his attention, and that she had him dead to rights.

Sisters were easy come, easy go – they rarely lasted more than a few moments in a high-output tussle like this one, doing the one thing they’d been conjured up to do before being destroyed. This one was no different; the Sword Sister’s stroke had missed, but that was perfectly fine as she’d done pretty much exactly what Cee’d intended her to do and baited Juniortron into a reaction. She’d gotten herself flipped over, whacked, slashed up, and kicked into the path of the graser strike, all of which would’ve been just awful if it had been Cee. The Sister, however, was as used to being a punching bag as ephemeral, nonsentient constructs could really get.

Besides. The last laugh belong to the Sister. As she demonstrated by blowing up.

The savaged, nonfunctional Sister and her armaments reverted – violently – back into the energy from which Cee had conjured her, exploding in RoGold’s face while his blades were still halfway through carving into her form. What that would do to the mechanoid’s momentum, Cee didn’t yet know enough to guess, but she couldn’t imagine it’d be positive. Nor was it going to save the metal man from his folley. Cee herself was still five hundred meters distant of Juniortron, who had avoided her Pompeii shot only to allow a suicide bomber into kicking range of his artificial corpus. He’d moved a grand total of, perhaps, three meters from his original spot before being asploded upon.

It took no time at all for the self-styled Pirate Queen to correct her aim the fraction of a degree necessary and follow up her missed Pompeii strike with another one. The explosive demise of her Sister wouldn’t have even properly begun to fade by the time the nuke-pumped graser bolt burned through the section of space currently occupied by Juniortron’s chest, catching him in the middle of being blown up by what he’d hoped would be his unwitting decoy. Sucked to be him. A second follow-up Pompeii shot burned in right on the heels of the first, aiming to catch the mechanoid while he was still disoriented from the explosion and – hopefully – the damage inflicted by the first shot.

The follow-up snapshots were fired off even as Cee planned her defenses. The way she saw it, Juniortron had essentially three options. He could continue to trade direct distance fire with her, try to batter past her Bastion through main force or raw luck. He could charge her, try to close range and put those blades to work on her to avoid more sniping. Or he could try indirect distance attacks, provided he had some option available for guided munitions. She had options ready for all three eventualities. Her defensive position was good, her enemy was taking free fire, and he was giving her all the time in the world to continue pouring most of her available power draw into the Sinner’s Lament.

By now the sunspark suspended in its web of lightning within Cee’s Halo was heavy with accumulated power, and the light requirements of the fight’s ‘Forged constructions so far allowed Cee to divert a greater-than-usual percentage of her available energy draw to the system. The Lament’s killing charge was building quickly, and yet Juniortron didn’t seem to care in the slightest. He had to know what she was doing, but he hadn’t made any sort of reasonable attempt to disrupt it. She couldn’t detect any equivalent power build-up anywhere within or around the mechanoid so he wasn’t trying to race her to the finish. He just seemed…completely oblivious.

Oh well. If that’s how he wanted to run it, Cee would certainly oblige. She always preferred the long game anyways. Let Juniortron faff around with her Sisters and see how many Pompeii shots he could take before they started to work. No skin off her nose if he didn’t want to take this seriously. She’d just wait out her Lament charge cycle then shoot him in the existence when she had enough stored power to guarantee the shot. She continued her wide, five hundred meter circle, cruising steadily with her shield between herself and her foe and her Gunsmoke in line with his evil killbot face, and waited to see if maybe he’d decide he wanted to make a go of it after all.

She’d be waiting if he did.

@DLL (You're damn right she'd be waiting. This took me way too long to get back to.)



Strange how things that go off without a hitch generally end in a hitch, isn't it? Virtruo's passive projection field shielded him from a majority of the explosive blast, but he was sent careening skyward with a distint vertical backwards spin. This marred his vision momentarily as he re-adjusted his visual components to the new state of movement. This sor t of movement wasn't meant to be sustained for more than a few milliseconds, so as it stands, this is an unpleasant state of being.

As he readjusted himself, he realized the the chink in his armor had worsened. The entirety of his forward facing plating had been collapsed inwards and the thrust projection was hampered severely. Thin streams of light creeped through the squeezed tubes and channels. Flickering almost pathetically as they attempted to maintain the same amount of force as they had put out in their more efficient state. Would have been sad or unsettling if it weren't commonplace.

Near perfection isn't true perfection, that is why he strives so hard to reach it. He isn't invincible or infallible, though he is among the most powerful beings to ever be, there are a few flaws. Blast ceramics and metal alloys do have a breaking point.

And man is she really reaching those points really quickly.

But do you know what doesn't have a breaking point?

Virtuoso's patience.

Cee was lining up another shot, to be sure, that was without a doubt. Neither was there a doubt that she could strike him out of the air with pinpoint accuracy from this distance without breaking a sweat. Figuratively of course, she's an android, if she did sweat it would be totally superfluous. All of this was drifting through his head as he righted himself by turning his vertical momentum into angular momentum.

Twisting himself at the waist and firing boosters upwards on his left half and downwards on his right half. This sent him hurtling off into the direction of his hip twist, that was to the left of course. Cee's follow-up round sailed between his legs as he gathered the bulk of his body into a tight cylinder of mechanically perfect form, like the spin of a skater only tighter and more fluid.

By upturning his head and reallocating his visual ability to focus on a central point, he no longer needed to move his head to match his spin. Virtuoso's body spun like a tornado, the rotational speed creating a violent tumultuous cyclone of wind around his body as he rocketed off to the side. He created an immense updraft for himself while also firing off his rear boosters to achieve maximum height and speed. Putting himself far and away from Cee's static position.

But no, he wasn't running.

Like the Peregrine Falcon rises to swoop down in a deadly vertical drop, he too rises to create an abominable impact as he surges to the ground.

Virtuoso reached the peak of his rise in mere seconds and he dropped his ascent, allowing himself to be weightless for a moment. As he spun in the air, fragments of his wings were thrown off as they flicked around his body. He looked like a golden arrow that had reached the pinnacle of its flight, heavenly light glittered in the air around his body.

If Cee could feel awe or fear, she might feel a combination of the two if she were wise.

Virtuoso was ready to counterattack.

To all appearances, the Sisterplosion had done its job and caught Juniortron off his guard. The alien robot-man was briefly sent tumbling, wisps of smoke-like light leaking from increased damage to his front torso plating. As it turned out, however, Cee was not the only synthetic being on the field this time. The agile mechanoid ice-danced his way around the snap-fired Pompeii shots Cee had sent winging his way, demonstrating both the same resilience of brain Cee had so often won fights with and much the same exquisite control of his full-body engine system as she demonstrated with her Halo. A slight frown creased her features for a moment – while the full-body engine likely took up significantly more processing load than her own Halo and was obviously more vulnerable to damage or disruption, it was likely that this target was even more agile in the sky than she was when all his shit was working. An advantage Cee was not used to being on the losing side of, and yet more reason to be thoroughly irritated with the mechanoid.

Who proceeded to use that full-body engine to whip up a minor cyclone, using it and heavy boosts downward to rocket himself quickly up into the sky. Cee angled herself upwards to keep her shield between herself and her foe, her frown deepening ever-so-slightly. Any aerial fighter instinctively knew that altitude was as much of a weapon as actual weapons; “high sky” was as important in an aerial contest as high ground was in a dirt fight. Neither combatant was one liable to be significantly hindered by attacking out of the sun – though Cee’d love to see Juniortron try it, and receive the painful lesson it’d earn him of Cee’s own capabilities – but the advantages of superior altitude were still there.

Juniortron clearly knew it, hanging there in midair with shards of his wings flaking off into the sky around him, posing like something out of an action movie. She was tempted to put the built-up charge of her Lament through the manbot then and there, but she knew better – the mechanoid’s seeming tranquility was no such thing. Whether he came down behind a giant palm strike, attempted to crash into her surrounded by a meteor corona, or did something else altogether, Juniortron was preparing a strike, not idling while he defragmented or whatever. It wasn’t the right time for the Lament.

Given the five hundred-ish meter distance she’d maintained from Juniortron when they were level with each other and his rapid ascent, the mechanoid was close to seven hundred meters away from Cee by now. Enough to rule out most shorter-ranged techniques or weapons, though Cee didn’t figure that situation would last long. She could throw out a few more pokes, try and score some additional dings, but the odds weren’t good that anything she tossed out naked like that would be more than a waste of time and energy.

Instead, she continued her circling cruise, maintaining her altitude and keeping both shield and revolver in position. She ‘Forged a new set of loads for Gunsmoke while Juniortron was waiting for an eagle to jump off of, but did not fire any of them. They were instead held in reserve against a few of Juniortron’s likely plan, Gunsmoke held unerringly in line with the mechanoid while she decided to try a different tack. Rather than waste time on more pokes, Cee bent her efforts to donning her Red Moon Cloak.

The Red Moon Cloak was not actually a physical garment, but was instead an artificial aura wreathing Cee and an expanding area of space around her, within which the perception of those around Cee was twisted. Based on a madness-inducing technique she had studied from the Einst bloodline’s unusual abilities, the Red Moon Cloak diffused external viewers’ awareness of Cee’s presence, causing her to look, sound, smell, and/or ‘feel’, if one had ephemeral or ethereal senses (or technological sensors, in this case), as if she was occupying every single point in the space influenced by her Cloak that she possibly could, all at once. The tableau wasn’t physically possible – there wasn’t so much a seething, Lovecraftian blob- mass of Cee bits as there was the simple, yet utterly contradictory knowledge that the one, singular Cee Juniortron was facing happened to be occupying more than one point in space in a manner which violated basic physics.

Figuring out where Cee herself was within the Cloak’s influence was impossible for most individuals; organics found it extremely difficult to focus on the Cloak in the first place, swiftly developing nasty headaches and overwhelming urges to look away as their brains tried to cope with the inconsistencies and impossibilities the Red Moon Cloak presented them. Synthetics fared either better or significantly worse; some machines simply rejected the nonsensical data as an obvious anomaly or ran system checks to verify their inputs were functional, while others damn near fried themselves trying to compute their way through the chaotic interference.

Juniortron was not likely the sort of low-class robot that’d burn himself out trying to logic his way around the screaming illogicality of the Red Moon Cloak…but unless he was somehow able to pierce or negate the Cloak completely, at the very least his aim would be thrown quite badly off by the thousands of places his senses would be telling him his foe was. It put Juniortron in something of a pickle – any wide-area attack meant to saturate the rough sphere of space under the protection of the Red Moon Cloak would likely be too weak to effectively break through Autochthon’s Bastion, while singular heavy blows meant to try and strike the Agent through her shield, or deal damage despite the barrier’s intervention, would be simplicity itself to evade when aimed blind at the cloud-of-potential-Cee that was all most foes could discern through the Cloak.

Whether Juniortron shotgunned and was blocked, sniped and missed, or wasted time trying to decide on a different plan altogether, it gave Cee more time to build her offense and read her foe. His reaction to her Red Moon Cloak would be quite telling of his sensory capabilities and probably another good clue to his offensive abilities, and any delay the Cloak earned her would mean more power channeled to the brilliant sunspark growing in her Halo. More power the gold-wreathed robot-man would eventually have to eat.

Cee could only hope he was sufficiently hungry to warrant the meal.

From heavenly figure of beauty to an image of godly wrath, Virtuoso's flecks of light that had been thrown from his body grew into corona of light that resembled lightning and spears. They rotated around his body at his will, the wind that flew through the bladed tips of these spears of light made an almost musical tone that rang loud and vicious through the air. More and more of these spears, almost a hundred of these were flecked around his body in a geometric spiral pattern.

Two layers of spears placed just so they could all angle down and towards a circular zone around and including Cee Fatalis just below. If this woman wished to play with creation, Virtuoso would show her the pinnacle of creation. For only one material need be played with among gods, the material light that he forges all of his weaponry from. If she didn't fear him now, she would soon as he unleashed his heavenly wrath upon her.

It stormed downwards in sequence, starting at the nearest and furthest simultaneously. They rocketed downwards from the spiral, each one falling after the last. It formed an almost drill shape as they spun towards her location. The machine didn't care how many illusions she cast upon herself, it wouldn't matter if he obliterated the very ground she stood upon as well as herself. So too did he believe it wouldn't matter, as he remembered quite clearly where she had been standing. That shield held aloft over her head was a problem, but not so much of a problem as to cripple his offensive.

As each and every spear fell, so too did Virtuoso descend. But not towards Cee, no, but away. After reaching his peak and stopping himself, he had nothing but potential energy. Potential is the perfect state of energy, as it can be used to do anything.

Something like this.

With a dive assisted by directing every single one of his boosters upwards as well as angling his face and arms down towards the ship that Cee had been standing on, Virtuoso descended towards the flat metal surface of the derelict vessel. While Cee is distracted with the falling storm of death, Virtuoso was more occupied with a much more devious plan. Perhaps she would lose sight of him during the blinding storm of light, perhaps she would pursue him.

Whatever the case, Virtuoso slammed into the ship with his blades extended before him. With an almost invisibly fast motion, his body spun and he bored cleanly through the hull of the ship and into the inner workings.

Cee would never know what hit her.

Turns out Cee wasn’t the only one with some persistence to her abilities.

The flecks of light Juniortron was throwing off began to resolve into golden spears, hovering near him as they multiplied, building up into what promised to be quite a visually spectacular volley as light flashed and glittered off of them. Within the chaotic concealment of her Red Moon Cloak, Cee quirked one eyebrow up as she regarded the building attack. Golden Boy up there sure as hell knew how to play to whatever intangible crowd he was trying to impress, but the long build-up to his attack gave Cee plenty of time to plan her counterstroke.

The spears started to rain down, arrowing in with excellent aim at where Cee would have been had she continued her cruise at a steady velocity and vector, blanketing the area around the target point as well, attempting to strike her from the sky in a storm of golden needles. Whether Juniortron had chosen a wide-area attack because he couldn’t properly target her through her Cloak or as a measure to try and limit her evasive capabilities didn’t really matter – the Agent was well prepared indeed for this sort of assault.

The heavy revolver in her left hand, already aligned with the mechanoid and thus also aligned with the axis of the spears’ travel, spat four of its preloaded rounds out from within the clawing, mind-twisting fog of the Red Moon Cloak. They were not, however, aimed for Juniortron. Not this time. This time, the rounds were Pompeii-B* shots – basic variations of Cee’s typical nuclear graser strike, which Juniortron had been thoroughly introduced to by now. These ones, though, did not produce a focused bolt of coherent gamma – the Pompeii-B variation omitted the one-shot magnetic lensing in favor of a larger payload.

They were, in effect, regular explosive bullets whose payloads simply happened to be nuclear rather than chemical in nature.

The micronuclear detonations were still significantly more powerful than any conventional explosive round could be, though. The four Pompeii-B rounds Cee had fired were aimed precisely, detonating amidst the descending spear-storm and heavily disrupting the attack. Nuclear airbursts shattered a portion of the descending spears above Cee, within the outer edges of the Red Moon Cloak’s influence. She moved through the resulting dead zones within the maddening concealment of her Cloak, the meticulously aimed holes in the spears’ coverage providing her plenty of room to evade. Only a scant few of the golden spears threatened Cee at all, and those were easily enough dealt with via the interposed face of her Bastion.

She deflected away those handful of vague threats and dismissed the remaining pair of Pompeii-B rounds in her cylinder, watching as the mechanoid dove down amidst his spears and bored his way into the Glorious Venture. Clearly he had plans for the derelict ship, though what he was going to do with an ancient, rusted-out hulk possessed of virtually no working electronics, engines corroded into eternal uselessness, no fuel reserves, and a hull severely compromised by the passage of time, Cee could not be assed to guess.

Nor did she care. What she did know was that as mildly amusing as it had been to explore the old wreck, the Glorious Venture’s days on this benighted old world had come to an end. Whatever Juniortron was doing, he’d made a serious tactical error in entering the ancient ship. Inside the Venture his superior aerial mobility was nullified…and he was a more-or-less stationary target.

Cee shortened her flight arc, quickly positioning herself about a hundred meters in front of the ship’s bow, aligned with the vessel’s spine, Gunsmoke held up in front of her. The heavy shrouding above the weapon’s low-mounted barrel sparked, then blew off, panels flying back behind Cee to reveal a small cylinder, roughly half the length of the gun’s barrel, suspended between a pair of tiny magnetic anchors. The cylinder was black – but not the jet black of a coat of paint or electrical tape. Within the deep, inky blackness of the cell, an entire galaxy looked to be hidden within the shifting liquid motions within the slowly rotating cell.

Well…’slowly’ at the very first. As soon as the device was revealed, its spin began to drastically accelerate, energy flooding through the magnetic linkages. A deep, reverberating whine began to sound, shaking dust and rust from the Glorious Venture’s hull. Crackling arcs of errant energy coursed from the gun over Cee’s left arm as the weapon began to transform, and Cee’s arm with it. Gunsmoke’s barrel elongated, thickening heavily at the base, while spiraled, claw-like rails extended the weapon’s rifling beyond its bore. The revolver’s grip expanded, merging with Cee’s fingers as the entire weapon shifted to a uniform, ash-like grey. Scales of that same ashen grey traveled up Cee’s left arm, engulfing the entire limb. Feather-like structures unfurled from the ashen scales; a cluster of them around Cee’s shoulder, a smaller cluster around her wrist, a handful strewn randomly around the rest of her arm. Finally, the elongated barrel split, six arcs of metal creating a spiral cage around a howling, barely-tamed newborn star.

The Angel’s Arm* was the most basic application of the power of the ancient, artificial Angel locked away within the old gun’s power cell. Legends of the world from which the weapon took its name spoke of destructive power unrivaled by any other weapon – blasts capable of putting craters in the moon overhead, attacks whose mere backwash was enough to devastate entire cities. Cee’s Angel’s Arm was not so powerful as all that – even Gene’s intervention back on Vestusio could not change the fact that Cee was not Gunsmoke’s original, long-lost intended wielder – but it was certainly powerful enough to blast effortlessly through an old, rusted-out tomb of a vessel.

Which was exactly what Cee needed.

A mental twist of her currently-phantasmal left trigger finger unleashed the Angel’s Arm, heralding the final death of the Glorious Venture. A column of sheer destructive power over five meters in diameter erupted from the Angel’s Arm’s barrel like a horizontal volcano, crashing through the corroded civilian-grade hull and time-worn interior structure of the aged ship with all the force of a cannon through cobwebs. The barely-diminished cannon bolt tore through the engines at the rear of the ship and continued on, brilliant white light etching sharp-edged shadows across the wastelands of Tarkarus as the all-consuming beam burned, eventually spending its fury on digging a map-altering crater out of the side of a distant mountain.

Within the Venture, backwash from the Angel’s Arm blast raced throughout the ship’s corridors and maintenance runs, destructive energy diffusing in a hellish web all through the ancient vessel. Juniortron had almost certainly avoided the Angel’s Arm’s primary blast – though if he hadn’t, it was unlikely there’d be more than a few bits of charcoal left of him. Nevertheless, Cee hadn’t been counting on catching the alien mechanoid with the Angel’s Arm directly. No, that was too optimistic. What she was doing was, in some ways, crueler. The scouring devastation released inside the Glorious Venture by the Angel’s Arm attack wiped away what little structural support the old ship had left. If Juniortron was able to avoid the Arm’s backwash, violent surges of energy crashing through the vessel in chaotic, impossible to predict patterns…

Well. Then he’d have to deal with the half-molten wreckage of the Glorious Venture collapsing in on him in the wake of the Angel’s Arm attack. Cored like an apple, there was no way for the historic colony ship to even begin to support its own weight. With a tremendous grating rumbling roar, the ship fell in on itself, collapsing into a jagged, unlivable tangle of worthless wreckage.

Ideally with Juniortron at the bottom, cursing his gorgeous and infinitely talented victorious assailant’s name with his final few processor cycles, but that remained to be seen. Cee grimaced faintly as the Angel’s Arm receded in the wake of the cannon shot. Her arm returned to normal, as did Gunsmoke, complete with new cowling over the Angel’s reactor. The weapon smoked and steamed – fortunately, Gene had been able to remodel it such that it no longer destroyed itself whenever Cee invoked the Angel, but ‘not completely ruined’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘in prime shape’. The Agent slapped the revolver back into its holster as she took off towards the wreckage of the newly destroyed Glorious Venture, cruising around it in a wary ellipse, looking for signs of evil killbot activity.

She kept her shield squarely between her and the wreck, fingers of her now-empty left hand held slightly splayed, ready to snatch any of a dozen different Godforged armaments out of the aether at the first sign of resumed hostilities. Even without a discrete weapon, however, Cee still had the building charge in her Lament. The unearthly din of the Venture’s collapse had drowned it out for a time, but the seething spark of built-up power in the Lament had grown dense enough to start humming as well. A sharp keen, tearing at the winds around Cee, growing more and more audible as the wrecked Venture settled and as power continued to flow into the spark through the web of lightning suspending it in her Halo, the weapon’s howling song growing louder all the while.

If Juniortron showed what passed for his face outside the new-made scrap heap, Cee was pretty thoroughly prepared to separate it from its general existence.

*

Without any visual on the woman above, the machine made a calculated assumption of her location after she moved away from the storm of light spears. She would continue her pattern backwards over or around the hole plowed through the hull of the ship. Probably a serpentine to avoid his follow up assault, at least that's what he assumed. His calculations are based entirely on logical assumptions based on the abilities that she had demonstrated so far. Without knowledge of her charge's effect, he had no idea that she had instead rocketed towards the end of the ship.

So this wound up a dual edged misinterpretation of both party's intentions and ability.

As she traveled to the end of the ship, Virtuoso made a U-turn inside of the ship. Tracking a dummy marker that he had created to vaguely gauge the distance from himself and her. After a short burst down a long hallway, he slammed upwards into the roof. Generating another pair of blades on his shoulders to assist in his vertical ascent through the layers of the ship. As he rose, he produced two more in the middle of another floor of the massive cruiser, creating an almost pincer looking aparatus of light. During his vertical movement, he weaved around a strange web-like structure of energy that had almost interrupted his movement. At the moment, it seemed like nothing. Though if he had touched it, it would have proved fatal.

Upon the final moments of his ascent, he burst through the hull of the ship and snapped his makeshift claw towards the dummy marker. It would have gone off without a hitch and Cee would have been speared from six bladed weapons and locked in place from below. If Virtuoso had expected what happened next. Just as he left the ship, literally less than half a second after bursting from the ship like a Xenomorph infant, the ship was absolutely destroyed by a blast of supercharged energy from the mechanical woman. He hadn't expected this, he hadn't expected this at all. The ship's body was melted and disintegrated almost entirely, this amount of power was totally un-precedented. In fact, she'd barely demonstrated anything harmful to him at all. Superficial damage at best, but this would have annihilated him.

How many times can she fire that!?

Though the shot had missed, Virtuoso had gone from calm to almost panicked. Well, not panicked, this had just become more of an emergency than it had been before. What was one a nuisance was now a genuine threat, and he was not happy about that.

The visage of an angel fell away as he dropped off all unnecessary vents of energy. Maintaining only those of his feet and shoulders. The blades of light too fell apart, his arms lowered to his sides and his singular radial eye focused on the source of that devastating blast. As he watched her, the ship was in his periphery. It crumbled beneath its own weight, and he almost shuddered to imagine what it would have felt like to have been inside of that as it was destroyed. Somehow he had managed to avoid the initial web-like blast. It hadn't registered in his processing as something that would have threatened him until he had already moved from harm's way.

Virtuoso was, how do humans say it? Perturbed.

Juniortron had, somehow, managed to escape both the flooding backwash of the Angel’s Arm attack and the subsequent collapse of the Glorious Venture without damage. At least, physical damage – though he’d managed to erupt from the ship anew mere (metaphorical) heartbeats before its collapse, he’d turned to stare at Cee and shut down his showy Robo-Jesus aura, seemingly paralyzed by the catastrophe he’d narrowly avoided as he made no attempt to initiate a new offense. He simply stared at Cee, watching her in her defensive cruise around the wreckage of the old colony ship.

Or where he thought she was, at least. The sense-twisting madness of Cee’s Red Moon Cloak was still in effect, as Juniortron had taken no action to attempt to pierce or dispel it, nor given Cee reason to believe it was ineffective. The reverberating hum of her building Lament charge was audible even through the Cloak, though its source was as distorted and nigh-impossible to pinpoint as every other bit of Cee was. Her shield was up, her Field was charged, her Cloak was undisturbed, she was as yet undamaged, and her enemy was just sitting there staring at her rather than trying to end her.

The corners of Cee’s lips turned down in a fiercely disapproving scowl. She was beginning to think that Mister Robo Jesus here wasn’t taking her seriously.

Nevertheless, they were right back where they’d started, for the most part – a few hundred meters of nothing but open sky between them. Cee could hurl artillery all day long and waste most of it on Juniortron’s agility, while the alien mechanoid had not yet displayed anything that stood a reasonable chance of getting past her Bastion in a ranged duel. She could probably chip him to death over the course of several hours…but now she was too irritated to do that. Now she was going to beat this asshole’s non-face right off his skull tube.

Pressing the Attack! The Ferocious Fangs of Nidhoggr!

Behind Cee, weapons started forming. Roughly as long as her forearm, each device looked a bit like a toy rocket – about the size of a short poster tube, with a single engine nozzle at its base, a spiked tip at its top, and an array of steering fins at either end. As soon as each device finished forming, its engine ignited and it streaked away, curving around to orient on Juniortron from a myriad of different angles and directions. The missiles were swift indeed, though not invincibly so, nor was their tracking particularly tight or infallible – though the weapons would certainly strike an unmoving enemy, it was possible, even likely, that Juniortron would evade incoming warheads, or shoot them down as they approached.

That didn’t matter. It didn’t matter for two primary reasons. One was that the missiles did not all carry identical payloads. Some turned out to be flash warheads, detonating in the space around Juniortron in brilliant, gouging bursts of ether-rich light and booming thunderclaps of noise. Those Stardazzler* warheads were intended to assault conventional senses and render their targets blind and deaf. Some warheads turned out to be EW platforms, generating phantom electronic signatures of missiles that didn’t otherwise exist and letting off intense bursts of electronic noise. These Migraine* payloads were electronic equivalents of the Stardazzlers, meant to fox synthetic detection systems and camouflage the approach of damaging warheads.

Some of the missiles carried Superbubble* payloads, able to briefly generate a spherical barrier encompassing themselves and a handful of other missiles, interdicting enemy interception systems and deflecting any shots they didn’t outright block away from the missiles they protected. Some of the missiles carried remote-delivered Pompeii graser shots, striking at unpredictable times from unpredictable angles with bolts of coherent gamma radiation from well beyond the range most expected missiles to threaten them at.

Any missile that wasn’t one of those things was a ‘simple’ micronuclear payload, delivered in the same manner that missiles had been delivering explosive payloads since the beginnings of recorded time.

The second reason why Juniortron’s defensive measures didn’t really matter was that the missiles did not stop forming and firing.

The Fangs of Nidhoggr* was not so much a singular, one-and-done technique as it was a continuous sub-process, initiated by Cee and then left to percolate in her secondary systems until such time as she shut the ‘technique’ down. So long as she desired them to, the Fangs would form behind her and fly towards her foe on randomized tracks, each missile armed with a different type of warhead, surrounding Juniortron in chaos and devastation. With the Red Moon Cloak still in effect, the mechanoid would be unable to trace the origin point of the missiles – they would simply arrow out of the cloud of existential chaos surrounding Cee and orient in on him from a huge number of different vectors.

Activating the Fangs did require Cee to step down the supply of power to her Lament, causing the weapon to build up additional charge more slowly, and running a pseudo-automated process such as this one meant tying up most f her secondary processing power and causing her Godforge respond slowly to other needs until she terminated the Fangs…but until then, Cee’s secondary combat systems would fling missiles at Juniortron nonstop while Cee herself focused on other tasks.

Such as dropping down next to the slagged wreckage of the Glorious Venture, hugging the wreckage for cover as she started arrowing towards Juniortron’s position, keeping close to both the wreck and the ground in order to use the ravaged vessel as a shield. Within the befuddling concealment of her Red Moon Cloak, Cee and her rolling artillery storm were impossible to pinpoint for direct counterattack as she approached. Indirect or area attacks, such as a reprise of the spear storm, would be badly impeded by the interposed bulk of the wrecked Glorious Venture – assuming Juniortron could stay unexploded long enough to throw such attacks in the face of the Fangs of Nidhoggr’s continuous assault of grasers, explosions, and intensely disorienting bursts of ECM and sensory overloads.

No more pussyfooting around with null-effort pistol potshots and exploratory strikes. It was time to take this planet-cracking jackass to pieces.

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New Stuff Breakdown

It was drowned by the screaming of molten and folding metal below and the sound of her formative rocket barrage, but he spoke anyway. "You have shown me that you are quite determined to play your game with me." Unmoving and stoic in the air over the smoldering wreckage of the starship, Virtuoso's eye watched as she raised an army of projectiles.

In answer to her formation of projectiles, Virtuoso's body began pumping out spear-shaped weapons that ejected from each port and grew to a rough size of two feet in length and three inches in diameter. Large pyramid wedges of golden light that arranged themselves in a hexagonal pattern in front of him. "I have learned much from this experience, be thankful that your memory will not be disposed of." He spoke more and more, though certain it would not be heard, it was unnecessary exposition to clear the silent and boring time of his own formative period.

Each spear filled the hexagonal pattern before him in a loose protective barrier of light that would serve as his primary deterring factor in her oncoming onslaught. As she unleashed her first wave of projectiles, so too did he. From the outer limits of his hexagonal barrier he unleashed a hundred spears in a collapsing cone pattern towards the gout of explosive rounds. The hundreds of spears soon morphed to thousands as the collapsing cone narrowed and the hexagonal pattern's shape finally became clear in its brilliance. As each spear fired it became obvious that they weren't aimed directly at any of the oncoming projectiles, but simply in a straight line. However, while the missiles in their random pattern would overlap with his grid, the grid of spears would not overlap with itself.

Forming a secondary layer of comparable size to the previous as the first barrier wore itself down by firing inwards, Virtuoso not only maintained his defensive but moved naturally into an offensive of his own. Not focusing on his full body ventilation anymore, he was now able to manifest his own projectiles just as quickly and significantly more organized than Cee's own. This had become what amounts to a Touhou Shoot-Em-Up. With two incredibly skilled masters of projectiles launching wave after wave of projectile towards the other, using their own projectiles as a method of disrupting the other's. As his own barrier of semi-transparent light formed between him and Cee's rounds, however, he managed to accidentally negate her disruptive flashbang rounds. It caused a slight error in his visual reception as the several visual disruption rounds passed through the translucent barrier of light. He noted the change and produced what amounts to a helmet around his face. Blue light spectrum to maintain a proper colorized field of view, since this was a oxygenated atmosphere.

Though the two of them were continuing their movements as they fired, Virtuoso's grid had maintained a locked distance away from himself. Only moving forward when another layer was formed, and don't get it twisted, every time the barrier wears down it forms another backup grid. Leaving no moment of total exposure to her onslaught. Each grid formed with a secondary intermediate point system of spears, in the center of each hexagon was a spear that moved out of line with the rest of the spears. This spear fired in a straight line towards the circular zone that he had marked in his HUD for Cee's position. It didn't matter that he couldn't see her through her illusory field, if he fired towards a vague zone with enough projectiles he would eventually strike true.

This all seems terrible organized, but this is from an entirely analytical point of view. Of course they weren't firing perfect every time. As the bubble rounds detonated they sent the spears skittering off in improper directions and colliding with other projectiles. Making an incredibly messy display of the back and forth between the two, but so too did his own rounds disrupt her own projectiles. As his slammed into hers, they would either cause them to explode or knock them aside and into her other missiles. Each shot that she fired was answered with a shot of his own, and even the rounds that he created that totally missed were wasted. If they missed a target, they flew off into the distance never to be seen again.

For now, they were in stalemate.

This was ridiculous.

Juniortron’s response to the Fangs of Nidhoggr, and Cee’s semi-concealed approach to his position…was to start blasting out more golden javelins, hurling them around in an attempt to interdict her Fangs while he stood there behind his barrier and continued to do nothing. The Pompeii graser warheads, bursting beyond the effective intercept radius of a bunch of dumbfired, unguided inert barbequeue skewers, spent their fury against the mechanoid’s hazy barricade. Whether the barrier would last for any amount of time against dozens of repeated graser strikes was up for debate, but Cee didn’t really think the shield would hold too much longer without help. The Superbubbles plowed through the spear-storm, carrying Pompeii-B micronuke bursting missiles with them beyond the shoddy defense, while Migraine electronic warfare systems howled and Stardazzlers let off their disruptive thunderclaps. All matched…against a bunch of tawdry lawn darts hurled vaguely in the direction of the missile strike and vaguely in the direction of her Cloaked self. It was only through nigh-impossible luck that the random shotgunning of skewers held off Cee’s Fangs for any length of time at all, really.

That luck wouldn’t hold, though.

Cee’s scowl of irritation deepened into outright anger; she ceased her ground-hugging, defensive approach to Juniortron and erupted skyward, rocketing straight up. In the process, she cut her Red Moon Cloak, revealing her precise position for the first time in what felt like ages, and remixed her Fangs. She cut the minimally effective Stardazzlers down to one warhead in a hundred, keeping the final shot simply to keep the mechanoid honest, and reduced her Migraine EW warheads to four shots in a hundred. The Superbubble and Pompeii-B micronuke burst counts remained the same, while all of the production cut out from the Stardazzlers and Migraines were thrown into a heavy reinforcement of the Pompeii nuclear grasers.

A mental twist-and-click widened the Fangs’ attack vector radius, enabling the missiles to swing wide, wide out to the sides, above and below. The Pompeii grasers were especially dangerous – attacking in what amounted to half of a wide-area sphere centered on Cee, well outside the interception range of the lawn darts, they would continue to spit long-range bolts of coherent gamma at Juniortron while his little skewers wasted themselves on a thickened shell of Superbubbles and Pompeii-Bs threatening the killbot from his front. Within a few breaths, Juniortron was facing attacks from well over a sixty-degree angle in his front facing arc – nothing that could be stopped by any amount of lucky lawn darts.

Cee, meanwhile, crossed her arms over her chest as she came level with Juniortron’s altitude, deliberately and visibly reducing the defensive benefits of her shield as she glared across the intervening space at the mechanoid. Micronuke explosions, short-lived barrier bubbles, and Cee’s own distance and projectile tracking abilities enabled her to avoid any impacts from the lawn darts with little shifts in her position and the occasional savage, dart-intercepting steel-toed kick.

“Are you done?” she barked, revealing why she’d cut the disorienting madness of her Cloak as she started castigating her foe. “Are you through playing? Here I was thinking this was a fight, but you haven’t thrown a proper punch yet, and this is just a sad joke!” she snapped, waving her left hand at the stream of darts before returning it to its previous imperious pose.

“I can sit here all fucking day and huck missiles until it works, you know!” the Agent barked. “Or I can work on some fucking BIGGER ONES!” she roared. And sure enough, behind her the outlines of a pair of significantly larger missiles began to form, drawing themselves in midair in sparks and lines of glowing golden light. Just over three meters in total length from tip to fins, if the slowly-forming schematic-like outlines of the weapons were to be believed. Given the draw on both her secondary processing systems and her Godforge that the Fangs inflicted, the so-called Bigger Missiles formed themselves with what was, to Cee, agonizing slowness…but that was in this singular instance the point.

“These are five-kiloton max yield tactical warheads, with integrated Superbubble projectors to counteract point defense!” Cee bellowed to her theoretical opponent. “You have until I’m done ‘Forging them to do something worth my fucking time or I’m going to shove one of them down your nonexistent throat, the other up your nonexistent ass, and make sure the [i]rest[/] of you ends up nonexistent, too!”

The Bigger Missiles took up most of the rest of Cee’s discretionary budget in terms of processing resources and Godforge time. As well, the additional materials created required her to step down her Lament’s charging cycle to a mere trickle, barely enough to keep the already-built charge stable. Not that it mattered much – there was already enough power built up in the Lament to core through most smaller starships lengthwise. There was the usual Panic Reserve of both processing and Godforge capacity that Cee left untouched in any given fight for sudden defensive requirements…but realistically, she was pretty much tapped out creating her plethora of warheads.

Which was exactly the point – she was leaving herself as open as she’d ever been since the ‘battle’ commenced, inviting Juniortron to take advantage of her stationary position, chatter, lax stance, and obvious preoccupation whilst simultaneously pressuring his weak defenses with a widespread, wide-area resurgence of the Fangs and putting him on a nuclear clock.

It was essentially the same thing she’d tried to do with the Fangs, save explicitly stated and writ very much large – provoke the evil killbot into trying to break the so-called stalemate between them and show her something resembling a good time. If he continued to stay on the defensive and avoid confrontation…well, she’d either nuke him into dust and find something else to occupy herself with, or she’d get really mad.

End-of-Turn Status


New Stuff Breakdown