Chapter 404 - Far Future Ch. 114 – Sword Borrows a Hammer (1/2)

He blasted the wall again, and the smoke wasn't even clear before she dove through it, swinging off to the side, and he did a head-dive, turning his seven-foot-plus figure in a very unexpected somersault, jetpack roaring to break his momentum and hover in midair.

”It's turning around,” she noted, saw the skull-pattern visor glance at her hanging there by her nails, and she started swarming up diagonally, to get behind the temporary cover of a primary support and for the more permanent cover of the roof ten stories up.

He looked at the play of shadows, the crunching impact of a monstrous foot compacting plascrete, and turned to zoom away and around the corner, hoping to get the bulk of the building between himself and the thing coming their way again.

The neo-reptilian hulk of the bipedal creature was just starting to loom around the corner when several pulses of light impacted on its other side, accompanied a second later by thunderous cracks of particle weapon discharge from the Big Honking Motile Cannon category. -Heliograd 200 mm?-, Celestia thought, not stopping her scampering for altitude as some opportunist took the chance to shoot the oversized boot-faced thing with skin like a dried turd. -Could be a GenerGuv 220, but it would be an older model…-

Hey, just because she didn't like using ranged weapons didn't mean she hadn't developed a very healthy interest in ALL kinds of ordnance, especially when walking Things too big to actually be walking around were tearing up the city, and the Mecha crews and Tanks were responding with enthusiasm. Damn, Fyr was tearing things up six miles away right when she was needed here...

Whatever had hit Bootface hadn't done enough damage, as the biomech turned around again, that spatial warp gathering in one hand for tossing out, while the sausage-like maw-head began to open and light up.

Celestia hauled herself over the edge of the roof, briefly contemplated her high 20-something Stupidity Stat, and ran for the section of the roof that hadn't already collapsed into the lower floors to get a better view of the fight.

Screaming volleys of incoming missiles, with much shrapnel and concussion waves, generated bunches of smoke and obfuscation she looked right through. The thing below used pscanning as much as anything to find stuff, along with multiple optical clusters scattered about its hide, so that would only be partially effective for whoever was trying to shoot and gain cover. The combination of a psychic force shield and dispersive hide that could just soak and spread impact energy throughout the mass of the creature meant it hadn't even taken any real damage.

She ignored the sound, pressure waves, and brilliance of the impacts; high resistance to Thunder and Radiant damage took care of them, the psychic damage was taken care of by her Null, and her DR would deal with light shrapnel without any problems, while her Bracers encouraged harmful airborne objects headed her way to kindly miss her.

Augment Wardstones against Missiles were SO nice on the battlefield of the future.

Bootface's tube-maw was actually a cannon. -Well, well, what do you know?-, she thought. Fifteen stories tall, twenty-story building; she couldn't be that crazy, could she?

Of course she could. Her Stupidity Stat was inhumanly high, after all. -Thank you, Undaunted,- she thought ironically, rolling her eyes at herself.

The length of the street lit up with howling psychic plasma lancing out to a target quite some distance down thataway. There was an explosion, but since matter was going to react badly to weird plasma coming in and trying to have a baby, that didn't mean anything.

Her, she was jumping down onto this momentarily stationary target as a ball of perpendicular space went spiraling down the street from its left hand-arm cannon.

She could actually take a normal fall of fifty feet without any problem, benefits of a 5G physiology, but wasn't taking a chance and the Tats on her ankles flared briefly, chucking the kinetic energy of her fall out into the surrounding air with a puff of mist, and then she was standing on Bootface's shoulder. The hole her Null had naturally made in its personal shields sealed behind her, but it wasn't like anyone was dropping charges in after her.

At least, not yet. That was the idea, however.

She drew Chill, and started cutting.

The point-defense lightning projectors were first, as she didn't want to test a point-blank pure psychic discharge from something this big. She stepped on its optical nodes and coolly tore them out with her feet in passing, and cut her way down its front side. Yes, there and there and there...

This phrenic monstrosity wasn't the only thing that could rend space. Her cream-white and black adamant Sword was howling for attention as it bit into a hide that seemed equal parts scales and leather and ewwww-gross, slicing it and the masses of neutral fibers below apart. Purple-orange lightning, maybe mind-green and emo-dark in the pspectrum, promptly vented outwards with some vigor.

She could feel the integrity of its personal Pshields starting to crinkle. Now, being on the front side of a big beastie that was under bombardment by another mech or something probably wasn't a good idea, but given that this thing was basically unharmed she decided to chance it as she worked along its shoulder to its neck, Chill cutting apart anything that looked interesting.

A postule erupted up in front of her with a shower of anti-boarding acid, spattering around her with an acrid smell, sliding down her Vajra as she cut the side of it and let it run down its own hide. A cluster of optic nodes bent her way, and was severed with a flick of her wrist. She saw its head turn towards her, finally taking note of her as she raced to the base of its neck and tossed a Deadweb at that three-foot soulless eyeball.

The BeaconTech ™ consumable blew over the orb with a wet splortch, promptly covering the eye in Energized Lead, meaning it was psi-dead and completely obfuscating both normal vision and any enhanced psenses focused on that eyeball. Lens. Whatever.

She spun behind its neck as the volley from down the street came thundering in, and definitely felt the creature lurch as one particle beam sliced across its chest and found the two focal junctions she'd disarmed, ripping through its proto-flesh and sending tons of rubbery meat and nerve-cables spraying free. The brute turned to guard its shoulder as it realized the weakness and shifted to bring its good eye fully to bear on its enemy, while optic clusters all around Celestia waggled frantically trying to locate her and were cut off by flashing Shards flicking from Chill's point.

The proto-lightning discharges of its point defenses lashed around her, but she was already moving up atop its head and heading for its maw.