He could not keep this up, Ilshar thought as the mechanical soldier’s fist slammed into his shoulder and sent him staggering, his still restrained arm twisted in a way that would have been painful to someone with a less diffuse nervous system. The automaton’s reeling at his own blow had allowed him to twist and take the swing on the stronger plating of his pauldron, but even so the thing’s entire body was a weapon, and he felt the outer layers of corded fungal tissue in his shoulder liquefy under the impact. If this fight went on any much longer, it’d leave him crippled, if not permanently then enough to get him killed here. The renewed gunfire from outside and comm crackling did not sound encouraging.

It was time to get out of the tent and join in finishing it. The automaton had dropped its rifle, which meant he could safely turn his back to it as long as he put some distance between them. The machine’s hand was holding him high enough that most of its grip was on bare skin rather than armour; this would play to his advantage now. Clenching his teeth, Ilshar sent an impulse through his neural web to the organomechanical implants built into his fungal muscle. Unbreakably firm as it was, the metal hand on his elbow began to slide as the arm under its fingers - or at least the upper layer of its porous skin - slickened and quickly dissolved into a dark putrid sludge, the pungent stench of accelerated decay filling the tent. This reaction was designed as an emergency insulation measure, but it would have to do.

Snarling, Ilshar tore his oozing arm from the automaton’s unstable grasp, taking a long step back in time to avoid its brutal downward swing. Moving as rapidly as his battered body could in the cramped and increasingly chaotic confines of the tent, he shoved his way past some toppling crates and out into the open, the hand of his intact arm reaching for his machine gun. One of his eyes glanced with some regret at the stocky egg-launcher he’d originally dived in to retrieve before that Nexus-damned robot had gotten in the way. If they both survived this firefight intact, it could at least make for a nice trophy.

He emerged in time to see the remaining League forces scrambling into a counterattack, and Rasch materializing in their midst. Ilshar did not have time to load the Ulvath with something that could damage the walkers, but the humanoid troops with them were no less a danger. Propping his gun’s barrel up with his oozing forearm, the fingers below still momentarily numb from the necrosis impulse, he fired a burst towards the assembled troopers - inaccurate even by auto fire standards, but more than adequate to cover the rest of the squad.

Report. Gunship elminated. came the mechanical voice of Echo through the squadnet, crackled and distorted from all of the interference occurring on the battlefield. Moments later, a flurry of point defense beams raked across the sky in an attempt to intercept the last bits of incoming ordnance. Unfortunately for Echo, having just fired its main cannon, its energy capacitors had yet to resupply the energy needed for full powered beams, striking down only one of the incoming missiles as the other two landed squarely into its armored carapace, sending shards of metal plating flying in what would've been deadly patterns had any of its squad mates been close to the warform. As the smoke cleared, sparks flew from the base of the Unztadtlige's cannon, along with some wicked looking scoring across its 'faceplate'. Luckily for Echo, its main hub in the Endoform was safely out of the Warform's 'skull'.

Unfortunately for the Endoform, it clocked a pair of missiles on a trajectory towards it. Unlike the massive Warform however, the Endoform was mobile and nimble- not quite as maneuverable as dedicated infantry, but a hell of a lot faster in a footrace. Dirt kicked up as the Endoform sprinted for cover, diving and rolling as a pair of explosions vaporized the ground just behind him, blast wave and shrapnel scoring its side, but leaving little more than cosmetic damage to its plating. The Warform was not so lucky- while not out of the fight quite yet, the missile strikes had damaged its lateral motor, meaning the Unztadtlige would have to rotate its head and body in place of the turret.

Damage report. Damage to main cannon. Mobility limited. Repairs needed. Be advised: Warform falling back.

There was no place for repairs until the battle was won however, and to do that, the Envenomed needed to sweep the board. The Warform began to back its way to their advance's relative rear, its remaining autocannon opening up to lay down a suppressing wave of semi-guided shells across the enemy position. It was not exactly out of the line of fire, but back enough that their direct threats would hopefully feel the need to engage with the more pressing matters first. Pressing matters such as the 7 foot tall, hulking Endoform, tearing through the tent with the remaining automaton and Ilshar- making an already crowded location suddenly increasingly crowded, the heavy Endoform caving in the robot's chest with a kick to send it to the ground, before swinging its heavy maul at the automaton's head as though they were at a casual driving range.

For good measure, in case it hadn't fully ceased functioning, the Endoform shouldered its maul and picked up the offending automaton, wrenching its ammo belt off of its body before tossing the robo-carcass in the general direction of the closest pack of infantry.

Report. Applying suppressive fire to enemy infantry.

Kleo was forcefully injected with alien DRUGS, the bad kind. She didn't ask for this but now here she was being injected 40mm style, it sucked but that's what happened when you were fighting with aliens. "GAAAAAAAAAAH!" she screamed out like she was some kind of warrior, a soldier of eons bygone. She stood up like a soldier on drugs (she was), gripped onto her shit and made her way down to kill whatever automatons that were left over.

"FUCK! LET'S GO!" She screamed hanging back behind the 'Alice Lady' as she hiked up her Rockefeller ready to lay down hate to anything or person that got in her way. Kleo shambled her way down towards the enemy, she knew it was going to hurt by the time everything had worn out. In fact she was still temporarily deaf from almost being blown up, she kept saying in her head that everything was going to be okay. Maybe it would be if they could frag out and smoke these idiots, this mission couldn't end any sooner. Spitting some blood out of her mouth, the woman carried on!

As the gunship descended, most had been quick enough to get out of the way as its chin touched the soil followed by the rest of the bulk. Flames and smoke billowed from its husk as it tore up soil and flattened tents underneath, crushing any corpses that lay on the battleifled and smashing a few of the repurposed shipping containers out of the way. As if dead-set on finishing its job, it was moving directly towards not just Kleo but Alice, a vengeful final sendoff for its ultimately futile efforts. Precision was not the name of its game and its huge bulk did not directly slam into Kleo. Yet what was left of its wings and a jutting missile pod slammed into Kleo's sides as it came to a stop dead in the middle of the battlefield, the force easily enough to knock her off of her feet.

Alice would fare somewhat better but secondary detonations across the bulk of the fallen machine sprayed her body with hot shrapnel, the sputtering wreck seemingly hungry to get in whatever hurt it could before it was reduced to useless slag. The metal fragements did not cut deep but the near-cauterizing heat and blast-like spray made it clear they would have to relocate soon.

Meanwhile, the half-guerilla nodded to Salvator and sprayed the entire container's contents into his lower body, covering it in a soapy mess of frothy bubbles before tossing the canister away and picking up the assault rifle. As Salvator momentarily disapepared from sight, a full load of cadenced bursts sounded out and caught the gun platform's attention and that of the squad it was guarding. It was enough that as they focused on the pressing threat furiously emptying a weapon not intended for fully automatic fire, they did not notice the voidhanger threat until it was on top of their very gun platform.

The platform paid little heed to the sudden booted weight on its upper body, not until a knife dug into vulnerable electronics and joints. That's when it paused and the sudden lull in suppressive fire let the half-guerilla retaliate, popping out of cover just long enough to catch distracted civsec rifleman in the chest and face. The others spun to notice what Salvator was doing far too late for the crack of their rifles to do anything. The gun platform bucked and shook, but Salvator has removed himself with a blink, just in time for the ensuing explosion to send a plume of fire and shredded metal outwards.

The entire squad perished in a storm of shattered armor and dismembering fragmentation, leaving three more plus their quadripeds to deal with.

Having extricated him from a close-quarters battle with a berserk automata, Ilshar's machine gun resumed its grisly work and sent an advancing duo of civsec troopers hunkering to the ground. The shielding of the gun platform accompanying them flared to a near opaque level, deflecting bullets off into trees and the surrounding dirt as it expanded into a dome-like shape around its body. The gun-platform held its ground, swivelling its turret to face the source of suppression, one it intended to answer with a considerably larger and higher-output machine gun.

Targeting systems locked onto Ilshar's chest and a full spray of luminiscent bolts spat out in flashes of muted light, shredding the tent behind him and cutting through the smoke beginning to spread onto the battlefield from the massive wreckage of the still-burning gunship.

There was a world of difference between the energy discharged fired by the gun platform and the entire autocannon used by the unztadtlige endoform stomping its way back across the battlefield. The quadriped stopped abruptly, hunkering as a few stray rounds slammed into its shield now flaring with power as it neared its breaking point. That was enough to get the duo of civsec troopers to break from its protection, stray rounds kicking up fountains of dirt as they slammed mere feet from their location.

The remaining two gun platforms immeditely stopped firing at the rest of the squad, pelting the massive armored titan with concentrated gunfire and the rifle rounds of their surviving infantry accompaniment. None of this prevented the final bipedal robot from having its chest and cranium caved in, before flying out of the tent and into a whole squad of infantry and their quadriped support.

At the speed the junked robot fell, the shield did not activate; it simply was not fast enough. Yet the raw mass behind it and the brute strength of the huge unztadtlige turned it into a projectile more than a match for the armour of the quadriped. Legs buckled and armour bent before the hulking turret-machine was knocked clean over, rolling thrice before both robots slammed into a large shipping crage, spewing sparks and smoking black.

Enemy infantry and quadripeds had been halved and they were getting desperate. The remaining two gun platforms began to fall back, eight infantry spreading out as they tried to form a defensive perimeter around the massive artillery platform - its wide base like some enormous four-legged iron mat, huge digging legs entrenched in the soil and the unnaturally smooth, almost living shaped metal-like composite of its hefty barrel glowing with a latent, resting power.

No matter however; a beam of hyper-accelerated particles dropped their number to six, two soldiers sharing the same gaping hole int their chest as one of the surviving gealtirocht troopers advanced. The only of two it apepared, assisted by a mere four human infantry, including the foamed up, freshly bisected one - now grabbing his once missing lower half as its legs began to twitch and he began to reconnect.

"THEIR HOPES LIE CRUSHED AND THEY ALL BUT BEG FOR AN END! LET US PAY ONTO THEM WHAT THEY HAVE PAID UNTO YOUR FOREFATHERS!"

This time, the gealtirocht commander spoke with no voice-distortion and not on private coms. They could hear him, see him perched on top of one of the two destroyed gun-platforms, his rail-cannon slung and a long weapon almost piscine smooth but predatory in its pointed shape, taking pot shots with lances of cold blue particle beams. A desperate security trooper tried to blind fire over the trench they'd built around the bun platform but soil was poor protection for hyper-acclerated particles - his body slumped soon after as they could see and *feel* the morale drop in the surviving troopers.

They were panicking, desperately trying to find more cover and fire off what weak retaliatory fire they could, their taxed gun platforms struggling to adapt to the fact that they were cornered - wild sprays of pulse-beam and chin-mounted gatling fire going wide.

It was a matter of time before they were fully crushed

The gunship started to fall, the remaining security troops were starting to be overrun, and Salvator almost relaxed a tad. Finally, something was going right on this op-

"Salvator, Ilshar, we've been hit!"

Son of a bitch. Salvator resisted the urge to curse sulfurously, instead acknowledging the first cry with a click of his comlink. Judging by Alice's next words, Kleo was hit badly enough that stims weren't helping. Of course this had to happen the second he started getting optimistic about the mission.

"Acknowledged." He replied over comms, keeping his voice even. "Do what you have to, we'll pick up the slack for now." Fortunately, this didn't change his current tactical assessment of the situation. The locals were finally taking the lead now that they were definitively winning. Big surprise. If they wanted to finally use their ammo, Salvator wasn't going to complain. Instead, he pinged the squad comms, issuing further orders.

"Right, Echo, Ilshar, you heard the lady. Keep pushing, but don't take any more risks or waste more ammo than you have to. Let the rebels do the bulk of the work for now, we still have an objective to push toward after this." That said, the voidhanger swapped from his heavy shotgun back to his carbine and joined the advance, firing only when he could get a clean headshot on the security troopers.

Kleo had been rushing and running for total combat and annihilation, not paying attention to the falling gunship that her team had blown out the sky not too long ago. Sprinting and being on stims was fucking great. "YEEEAAAAAAHHH LETS KILL THESE-" Then the gunship fell on Kleo, or rather parts of it fell on her. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" She went and vanished under a hail of dust and metal not being turned into a human pancake but being beaten and bruised in the worst way imaginable. When the dust had settled she was already being fished out by the Alice lady, an alien thing. She couldn't remember what race, tribe or thingy she was from. She was cut, hurt, and bruised this sucked. She had to blame the liens for this shit, but then again it was always them saving her ass.

"Fuck... I'm fucked up dewd!" She sputtered out.

Flashes of light and concussion followed one another in quick order, so much so that Ilshar had to retract some of his sensory nodules to avoid getting distracted from his frontal view by the overload. He stepped wider to keep his footing through the shock of the gunship’s fall - they really should’ve used the egg-peg, this is how it ends with low-precision missiles - and leaned aside as a piece of Echo came barreling through where he had been standing not long ago. He had trouble not thinking of it as a drone detached from the behemoth’s real body, but then this was not the time for that sort of reflection either. The grazing heat from some stray energy fire punctuated that. Thank the Nexus they didn’t have time to aim.

The comm traffic flared up in frantic bursts. Of course a crash like that was going to make trouble. Ilshar was idly surprised it had taken until now for that reckless human to go down for the count for the time being.

“Acknowledged,” Rasch’s remark made him glance in the direction the rebel fighter’s victorious cry had come from, “Better hope they didn’t hear that last part.”

Near him, Echo’s now scarred huge main body was falling back, but what it called its Endoform still looked sturdier than the whole armour on his back. The best course to press their advance was clear enough in his mind.

“Echo, take point,” he shifted to place himself behind the metallic humanoid and held his hands in a broken circle before his chest, “You keep them looking away from our wounded, I’ll help up save bullets going ahead.”

There was an unpleasant sensation of unravelling in his diminished arm as he called on the Chasm which he pushed down. Body strength was renewable, given a few moments out of harm’s way. Pale-blue fumes of processed qillatu seeped out from his wounds as if to contradict him, and his teeth scraped with strain as fog gathered between his fingers and three undulant shapes breached out from it like from a vertical surface of water. The semi-translucent bodies of the lamprey-mouthed ether worms coiled and scattered around the Endoform before loosely reconverging through the air towards the trench the last CivSec troops had taken refuge in, guided by the impulse of bloodlust the tarrhaidim had impressed on their simple sentience.

The battle was turning their way, though not with the Envenomed squad coming out entirely unscathed. Echo's main body had taken some not insignificant amount of damage, and a few of the squad had been injured from fire from the gunship- as well as it's crashing carcass for that matter. During the exchange, an increasingly hectic amount of activity was limiting Echo's verbal responses. Verbal communication was not the primary- or even secondary method of communication for the hulking Unztadlige, though necessary for its organic comrades. Alice's request for a damage report for example was delivered not through verbal description but through a detailed breakdown scrawling across a relatively unintrusive box in the lower-right portion of her helmet HUD, listing a frankly unnecessary amount of information in text too small to be read and processed by organic eyes in the middle of a firefight.

In any case, Echo's immediate concerns were still with the battle, even with its Warform backing off, the Endoform still had adequate firepower for the task at hand. Salvator was quick to bark out their general orders, and Ilshar broke it down into more specific tasks he needed from Echo.

"Acknowledged. Echo taking point." The Endoform repeated, its processed voice taking on the Unztadlige's namesake. As their comrades found their courage and began to advance, Echo took the fore position in front of Ilshar and Salvator, subtly staggering its advance to be just behind their friendly squad. They were on the same side, but Echo's priorities were the safety of its own squad, and thus had no qualms about letting the friendlies perhaps absorb a bit more fire than they should.

Request. Remain behind Endoform for maximum protective value. " The Endoform's shield generator flared back to life as Echo projected its barrier forward to provide more cover for Ilshar and Salvator- it still had yet to regain full strength from their previous engagement, but would provide adequate enough cover for the smaller Envenomed element. From the weapons commandeered from the powered armor trooper, Echo selected the heavier shotgun- practically an autocannon by its own merits to fire on the remaining robotic gun platforms.

In minutes the concealed position had been turned into an open-air cemetary as the last of defences manned and summoned was set upon by the suviving opposition bloodied and enraged. Ragged camo cloaks torn with holes and out of which jutted long rifles jabbed at frantic, huddling security forces. Near point blank rifle fire tore clean through metal, ballistic under-weave, and partially augmented bodies in neat holes. Heavy duty scatter-shots tore apart cranial protection and mass alike for those who attempted to escape. The truly determined, whether by devil-may-care bravado or some suicidal proffessionalism, fired wildly at the snaking forms as slugs dove through mist and pointed fangs parted biomass and armor.

It had seemed like a painful forever but one armored, alien foot stomped down on a now fragmented skull and grinded into the mush of metal fragments, bone, and organ mush beneath. The gavel had sounded and silence would not answer; the sound of wreckage burning and the ravenous worms destroying the last bits of troopers they could find continued.

As if to break the tranquillity setting over the pulsing ambience of the distant battle happening just over the ridge of the clifftop they were on, a loud and familiar buzz sounded out from the communicator panel - Salvator's HUD immediately was bombarded with infosharing requests, almost obnoxiously enough that it appeared they were trying to brute force their way into controlling his systems as the device all but rattled and exploded off of his storage.

This time however, the message wasn't spoken aloud but forcefully cracked out of their private coms, into their hearing, internal data receptors, closed communication channels and however else they could intrude.

"We cannot advance any further," To the Envenomed it would be as if someone was yelling into their ear, their very stream of consciousness, or otherwise intruding on their privacy. Yet to anyone else, they would hear nothing beyond maybe a faint buzz at best coming from some of their teammates' helmets. "Resistance is stiff, but we have our targets! Confirm control of artillery piece!"

The very reason they had been sent here sat surrounded by the scattered remains of those who had manned it, an enormous mass like some enormous petty emperor. The four legs it sat on seemed stubby before but they were even thicker than the warform's legs, with visible joints meant to curl up for transportation but for whome the gears and axes that defined them looked like they might crack and break under the mere motion of such. Its cannon was wide; enough to fit one of the civsec troopers in straight into its maw. The smooth surface of it looked unnaturally so; the metal itself a faded greyish-white, as if from some sort of combination of skeletal colour yet sculped almost like marvel if not for the blemishes of lightly glowing ridges and gaps along with subtle bumps along the length of the cannon.

A faint sense of tension pervaded the air; not from the thrill and fury of battle but something else that hung within the very space around it. It tingled skin and caressed bone, seeming to whisper to the mind not in truths or temptations but raw id and seeping symbolism of inexplicable un-logic but something deeper and within every cell and vein. The ZRF troopers staggered about for a second, huffing and stabilizing themselves - some took out chemo injectors but the single remaining gealtirocht grunted as the air in front of his skull distorted for a moment; light simply did not pass through and it blurred as if exposed to intense heat on a summer day.

"We have multiple high-value targets to eliminate. Marking now!"

It was the same fully armored Intransigent commando as earlier, but there was no direct camera feed. There likely wasn't a point; heavy audio-filtering was being employed. Sometimes his words half cut out before the background noise vanished and his voice, forcefully separated from it, spiked in volume almost enough that it began to clip.

Multiple data-uplinks; this time, not requests but forced manifestations upon whatever targeting or HUD systems were in use by the squad. The handheld computer's screen blinked and flickered as it forcefully began to manifest three large upside down orange triangles, tip pointed downwards and distancting in metres manifesting overlaid across their vision if they possessed the cybernetics, biomechanical or otherwise integrated capability for such.

The first target was on the mountain opposite of the very one they stood on; the specific target in general was hard to determine - constantly fluctuating numerical measuresments of distance resulted in the targeter-triangle growing and shrinking. Yet if they zoomed in with whatever optical enhancement capabilities, they would notice quite a few trees shaking about and a large black shape moving between them - something metallic, lumbering, yet not slow - seemingly in the direction of the receding CivSec frontlines.

As harsh as the insurgents had been hit by the civsec defenders, the battle line had moved tremendously since they last spoke with the Intransigence commando group on the ground. The same defensive emplacements once firing at the surge of resistance fighters now found themselves as their beacheads and rallying points for the swarm of darkly patterned troopers and blocky, aged tanks vaulting and rumbling across the battlefield.

The next target marker above a spot roughly 10000 meters away, far off into the defensive lines of the UCL backed lines. A dome like structure of some sort like a giant glassy eye and out of which milled machinery and personnel alike. Targeting data suggested it was a sort of command center of some sort, possibly a major communications hub, and it was by and far the furthest target.

The third however... a red triangle manifested on the corner of their HUD's or equivalents, crossed out by red lines and with an equals sign to its right. [TARGET DATA VERIFYING, PROGRESS UNKNOWN]

"Eliminate both targets."

All the while, the surviving ZRF troopers looked at the squad somewhat impatiently. They were under the impression they were trained to use this technology; some of them certainly looked the part.

"Your hesitation is grating; man that cannon, it's what we brought you along for! The remains of my comrades grows colder by the second."

The same scielto who had spoken with them over the intercepted coms jabbed his finger at the unmanned weapon as the once-bisected human soldier staggered alongside him, his steps unsteady but his agitation no less visible.

"Do not let them get into the com channel. We require the first two targets eliminated before we can reveal the third."

God in void, was everyone involved in combat operations on this planet an insufferable prick? Salvator bit a curse back as the incessant infoshare requests damn near flashbanged him with how many suddenly popped up in his HUD. The actual message wasn't much better, but the urgency was understandable considering the delays and the resistance the other team appeared to be facing.

"Solid copy, we have control of the artillery piece." Salvator confirmed over comms, making the effort to remain professional through his growing irritation. "Moving to comply now, hold tight."

Considering the pushy bastards outright breached the squad comms and their own personal data receptors, he even made the extra effort to warp straight to one of the command consoles controlling the artillery piece. Of course, even that amount of hurrying didn't stop the goddamn ungrateful little local shit from barking his own orders out.

"We're on it!" Salvator called out in response, barely refraining from gnashing his teeth. "Inputting targeting data now." He started typing away at the console, allowing himself a brief roll of the eyes under his faceplate as the other team stated the obvious. Of course they weren't letting the locals into their private comms, that was idiotic. That said...

Salvator shifted his gaze briefly, inputting a marker on his HUD to transmit to the squad.

"Echo, have the microform input the data for the second target into the other console, it'll make this go faster. Ilshar, double back and cover our wounded. The locals aren't going to do a damn thing for them if they're this ungrateful."

He shifted to typing with one hand for a brief moment, the other going up to his HUD's AR display to reencrypt their comms with a new key. It wouldn't do anything for the team they were already infosharing with, but hopefully it'd lock the locals back out.

Kleo laid down on the ground where she was laid out by Alice, almost like a Kleo-like funeral except there weren't flowers or a tombstone for her just death and destruction kicking around. She laid there wheezing, part drop-ship and part Human as this funny-looking alien girl stood over her to help her achieve life rather than death. Why did aliens always have to save her, she was capable of saving herself. One could blame Alice for ODing her on that stim and causing her to charge all deadly like but assigning blame was useless when you were dead, so all Kleo could do was remain still all pretty like while a planet she never knew would be ravaged by a big fuck-off gun along with some kabooms.

"Need... Cigarette, stat... Then, yum-chug rum.. mix it in the IV. Some blood.. would be hella cool too. O positive... chop chop." She said patting Alice's hand (or was it a paw, claw..? Mandible.) She didn't know.

As the battle in the immediate battlespace came to a close, the Warform began stomping it's way back towards the squad. Sparks sprayed from damaged mechanics, scorchmarks scored the surface of its armor and the legs creaked with every hefty stomp, but the Warform continued to move. Already deploying from the main body were a host of microforms, beginning spot repairs on what they could in the middle of a mission, and gathering scrap metal from the defeated forces to for quick patch jobs and temporary fixes. If lucky, one of the microforms might be able to salvage enough parts to return full mobility either through legs or anti-grav generators, if not, scavenged armor plating could at least take a hit or two to prevent further damage to its mobility.

As Rasch barked out orders, the microform attached to his back jumped off to comply, small legs skittering over to the second console and plugging in directly instead of manually inputting numbers. Acknowledged. Inputing target data. Standby.

Echo, while used to agitation on the part of bipedal organics, was not exactly well equipped to deal with it. It understood that these creatures often got frustrated about many things- perhaps their many inadequacies and inefficient biomechanics manifested itself in this form. Be that as it may, agitation often led to aggression, which when pointed towards the members under Echo's charge, was unacceptable.

The Endoform, still in good shape took up a post at the edge of the artillery platform, firmly planting itself between the surviving ZRF squad and the envenomed. Its weapons were not pointed at the ZRF, but sat in a ready position clearly indicating that if any hostilities were to take place between ostensibly friendly forces, they would be put down.

"Alert. Squad is currently fulfilling objectives. Standby. Request. Maintain distance." Echo's voice crackled over the Endoform's external speakers- perhaps a bit more menacing than intended. While the body of the Endoform housed a cluster of Unztadlige coral, the external speakers of its body only featured a single tone.

The Endoform paused for a moment longer, "Please."

Noise and motion died down, but the tension in the air - and the commwaves - went nowhere. Taking a moment to center yourself with a field meditation technique did wonders, but Ilshar supposed one needed to have a spore of the Nexus to properly find that balance. If you lived for nothing beyond the world under your feet, moments like these were a time to be anxious. With a grunt, he splayed and clenched his fingers, severing the etheric wellspring that allowed the two Chasm-born that had not been shredded by gunfire to maintain their material presence. The serpentine bodies dissolved into strangely writhing clouds of fog that lingered in the charged atmosphere.

He squinted, reducing his eye-organs that faced the prize of all this bloodshed. The infernal machine inspired little confidence in him, and he was glad that Rasch was the one relaying their handler’s commands to its targeting systems. Picking up League small arms was all well and good, but this kind of ordnance was sure to have some diabolical etheric mechanism or worse hidden in its bowels, and he did not want to be too close when it fired. Going to watch over the wounded was as good an excuse as any, though he wondered if the voidhanger didn’t have some other motive to keep him distant. It did not take a savant to see that the Intransigence’s plans for the cannon weren’t going to be to the ZRF’s liking. Typical. No such thing as benefactors in the Rim.

Ilshar trudged back through the ravaged camp, leaning slightly to the right, where his arm had begun to feel heavy with clogged capillaries. He walked around Echo, whose bluntness made him question if unztadtlige really weren’t some kind of synthetic. Halting behind the endoform, he gave the guerrillas a knowing shrug.

“Relief forces go at their own pace. Pray you will not need the likes of us on your world again.” For their sake, he hoped there still was a world left after all was said and done. This wasn’t the War, but one never knew.

The two Envenomed who had weathered the worst were easy to find not too far from the gunship’s crash site. He wasn’t sure what to do with them besides stand watch; what basic first aid training he had did not extend to anything other than fellow tarrhaidim, and the supplies to tend to his own wounds were wholly integrated into his body. Not that they would have helped someone with an endoskeleton or lymphatic vessels that wide.

“Everything under control here?” he addressed Alice, who at least seemed lucid, “Shouldn’t be too long until extraction now, unless our handlers have some other surprise for us.”

The massive cannon's joints pulsed and a deep, meditative hum serenaded the turning of its enormous barreled body. Like the mechanical gears of some ages old contratpion, the very movement of which felt dangerous in a sense for all of the advancement and refinement it possessed. Legs took turns digging into dirt and turning in place before raising and digging into the ground as sliding plates half-buried the sound of whirring backup system duplicate gears beneath as its smooth body seemed to almost shift liquid-like in spite of its metal merely point its barrel at the target. The weapon leaned forward, the shadow it once cast in the absence of much of the surrounding foliage stretching now towards the cliff-edge of the mountain, near hailing the distant shape that rumbled past the treeline of the mountain opposite.

With a deep breath, the machine began its judgement. The same feeling of hyper-tension against mind and against skin permeated the air; the space of which began to bend as if exposed to extreme heat. Shapes, bodies, foliage, remains, gunship wreckage - for a moment they twisted and bent as natural boundaries became watercolour blurs, light sucking away like luminous gas in the sight of the group. It snapped back to normal as the weapon's "exhaust" gaps seemed to both radiate and retract the very light they emanated; an azur blue that faintly shone on the area before coalescing into semi-material raw power. Ethereally resonant seals made from the very human wiring and electronics within collaborated with scielto construction materials as the fierce though restrained glow of the rune-like inscriptions lit up among the length of the weapon.

Raw ethereal power reached the peak of its amassing pressure and in the same thunderous report that shook the mountains and the trees, imposing its anger and will upon the Envenomed and all others who traveled or hid upon the mountain, the weapon fired. The midday of the battlescarred firebase became a blinding dawn of harsh blue-white as the very muzzle flash of the weapon vanished into the void-tearing exposion. As suddenly as it came, rattling the metal of destroyed war machines and the bullet-ridden trees that overlooked them, the flash was gone and they could see the massive globe of pulsing cobalt aquamarine that soared like a cloud made of raw, pulsing, otherworldly power and mass.

As it descended, somehow neither emitting nor absorbing light, flashes of tracers and piercing blue beams shot up from the rumbling metal shape. It some sort of large armored transport, its own weapons fire momentarily revealing it to any sort of telescopic visual capability from where the Envenomed were located - long enough to be a mobile command center and armed well enough to dissuade drones, aircraft, light vehicles but not the enormous pulsing doom that slammed into the ground to its side. A star blossomed in its wake as it expanded from a dome-shape of raw, arrogant white-blue yet the smooth sphericality of it turned into the unruly, bubbling, frothing rage of a proper explosion. Metal was silhouetted temporarily against the hellish inner blast zone, trees, people, drones - withering away, tearing apart, vanishing as a massive crater of crackling, distorting, bleeding reality manifested where it had landed.

The Envenomed and their allies were too far to feel the neuroethereal interference it would have caused but even they could see the once blocky, multi-sectioned body of a massive command vehicle now twisted like fluids frozen amidst the crest of waves. That was all that was left, beyond teeming smears of now rapidly manifesting dwellers of the oneiric chasm, flooding into realspace to feast on the brutally deceased left in its wake and sources of raw, sparking electrical power that were left bleeding and sputtering.

Almost immediately, the League battle-lines buckled. From up top, they could see tanks abruptly pausing as their rail-cannons stopped mid-targetting. Some fired wildly, shots going wild and tearing lengthy trenches far off from the mecha and other vehicles they were targetting. Once mobile defensive positions paused abruptly, feasted upon by storms of concentrated tracer fire. Gunships circling overhead abruptly paused, uneven fluctuations in firing circles making them easy prey for quad-winged, rapidly flapping bolt-like living projectiles swarming and attaching before detonating in brusts of green, maddening fire.

A full scale retreat was in question but the weapon for all its ponderousnessness turned faster than whole battallions could run. A second massive burst nearly a minute after the first from the weapon's barrel; this time the target would not be a recipient of the mere blast itself but a direct hit. The pulsing sun, like a twitching egg-sac filled with swarming, sliding, and jittering light, descended and the impact was no less horrific. The command centre was an enormous buliding, almost like a small stadium, but it suffered horrifically from the direct strike. The ravenous blossoming of the ethereal sun swelled in size just enoguh to barely cover its curving walls, disintegrating girders and reinforced skeletal structure like burning paper, leaving them withered chunks.

The frenches, the makeshift sub-units, and the vehicles and any infantry among them however - far less remained as the blast wave and void-borne shock slammed into them. Bodies half-vaporized, half shattered into litle symphonies of floating bone, armor, pulp and various bits of fragmenting mass rapidly converting into the unearthly mulch of the void. The metal of machinery cracked and shattered, fragmenting at joints and crumpling at reinforced points, muted explosions of munitions materializing into flourishing, frozen amalgamations of pointed blasts trapped and frozen in place before fading into blurry nothingness.

The ground itself had fared better, kicked up and torn open, yet anything that stood upon it was not returned to dust as much as converted into unearthly, desecrated, un-matter.

All of that was hard to focus on as the rebels, bloodied and worn, raised weapons in victory - hollering, exaltation, cruel taunts, celebration. The pyroclastic extravagagnce below raising their spirits as much as it did the Front forces now storming onto the shattered lines of the enemy.

[TARGET ACQUIRED. COORDINATES MARKING. DANGER CLOSE.]

A third targeting reticle over their HUD's, visible only to them, just as the synthesized voice and coloured text was only perceived by them.

It was not further into the enemy lines, disorganized as they were, nor the opposite mountain top.

It was off to the sides of the battlefield - at a bunker of some sort, the road directly to it blocked off by a pair of enormous and fallen mecha League in origin.

Given the infantry seen entering its hole-punched circular structure and supply vehicles moving in around it over the crater-ridden ground, it was fair to say it was in the hands of allies.

The target marker hovered over it patiently.

"Be fast. You have company. Our allied vanguard detected a spike in raw power readings and something both armored and highly fast moving up the mountain. Do what you need to in order to eliminate the target. Very fast; we are convincing them to hold position. We cannot guarantee it will work."

The special forces team sounded... calm, oddly enough, intentionally even in spite of the fact that the Envenomed team were between two possible disasters. One of which was celebrating around them, stomping and raising fist or firearm alike. Another, little more than a report of a distant threat far off from them... but for how long?

The first two shots hit, and Rasch let himself breathe a sigh of relief. Good. That only left the last one. Though given that the other team was being highly secretive about the matter, he didn't quite like where this was going. Hopefully, it wouldn't be what he was dreading-

The final set of coordinates came through. He double checked the status of the target and its current occupants. It was exactly what he was dreading. Firing on their own supposed allies, for whatever forsaken reason. Oh sure, someone in the brass might have some supposed good reason for this. But for the boots on the ground getting the job done? It was cruel and nonsensical.

Not for the first time, Salvator mentally weighed the cost between the amount of genuine good the Intransigence did in defense against the empires it fought and the amount of uncaring collateral damage it caused. Was this worth it? Were they really doing the right thing here?

A second transmission came through, jerking the veteran operator from his thoughts. Damn it all. They didn't have a choice but to execute, then. Caught between an anvil and a hammer, and with a job left to do. He could see a way out of this, but it would take a good amount of finesse. Fortunate that most of the squad was already away from the anvil, then.

"...All units, fall back. This means you, Echo." Salvator murmured over comms, his tone resigned. "Prepare defensive positions. Fire on the new readings as soon as they come into range. Disregard collateral damage. I'll finish the job here." It made sense. With his ability to blink jump, Salvator would be the best able to get out of the immediate danger zone. That, and he was unilaterally making the decision to continue on with the mission as stated. It wouldn't be right to put the knife they were going to use to backstab the locals with in someone else's hands.

He busied himself performing the necessary manual calculations needed in order to fully confirm that they had the right coordinates while keeping an eye on how fast the new signals were coming in. All while the locals were still celebrating. Part of him still disparaged their lack of discipline and gratitude. The other, much larger part of him regretted being so harsh with them in his thoughts. With this act, Rasch would be proving their caution right. And their trust foolish. A few more keystrokes typed in the last manual confirmations, and he prepared to send it.

Salvator kept his finger over the enter key, and queued up a private communication with the local ZRF leader.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry. But I have my orders." He input the command to fire, and immediately started chaining blink jumps back towards the Envenomed squad, uncaring of how much this would exhaust him by the time he reached relative safety. The incoming signals were almost on them, and if he timed this right, the ZRF would be far too busy dealing with that to react quickly enough against the Envenomed.

As the third set of coordinates appeared, Echo paused for a moment. Odd. They were being tasked to fire on a hostile position- formerly hostile anyway, as the bunker was now occupied by ostensibly friendly forces. To be fair, the ZRF were nominally friendly, but were temporary allies at best. The command was puzzling to the Echo platform. If only for a moment. The Endoform bristled with subtle activity, its grip on its weapon tightening for a moment as it began to slowly lift it up in preparation to perform a pre-emptive strike on what would likely soon be hostiles. Before Rasch's voice crackled across the squad comm. There was a twinge of hesitation before the Endoform abruptly turned on its heel and began returning to its main host.

Echo Platform falling back. Command Acknowledged. the voice rumbled through the squad comm as the Endoform and microforms fell back and merged themselves with the patched up Warform, returning the unit to full firepower. Patched up being a relative term- their mobility was mostly restored, and its damaged sections were armored, but its ability to stand up to heavy concentrated firepower was no longer a sure thing. Preparing Defensive position. Recommendation. Break contact and initiate tactical retreat.

With its heavy legs, the Warform plodded over to where Kleo and Alice were patching up, lowering one side of its body as it deployed a platform to lift them into its troop-carrier section. Alert. Contact imminent. Recommendation. Load onto Warform. Addendum. Anti-grav locomotion allows stability within acceptable ranges to continue triage.

If necessary, Echo's warform could plow through trees if they required a hasty escape, at the minimum it would be able to provide mobile cover for the squad as they engaged with the new enemy. In preparation for the incoming fast mover, Echo's weapons angled themselves in its approximate heading, preparing to- as Rasch said- open fire on the new contact as soon as it came into range, collateral damage be damned.