-Moon Cell Outer Inner Layer, Night Land, Mare Melum, City of Lost Destiny, Central City region, Streets, Canard-
Pom was in great trouble and if the servant can heal from the EPs, then we needed to deal with that problem pronto.
Something was coming down from above and I swerved the bike out of the way of the two stomping legs that smashed a crater into the asphalt.
Sami, sitting on the back of the bike was already firing on the Archer Gekko with her rifle, aiming to take down its legs.
I pulled out my puck pistol and loosed a few exploding puck shots into it, I would really have to thank Welch for this again. My hockey stick was going to get a lot of use too before this battle was over and done with.
Taking out one of its legs with our combined fire, the machine toppled exposing the top of its head and Sami fired her bazooka and nailed the top of its angled head as it tried to get its guns on us. It blew apart in a spectacular fashion as she had hit its weak point, the top of its head was definitely poorly armored.
By design you can tell the machines were anti-infantry at a single glance and we were all but running around with primarily infantry that most of which weren’t entirely capable in long range. We didn’t have much in the way of aerial support to deal with these things aside from the Skarmory or Dodo, neither of which were available at all times. At least we had artillery, but Castle Alexander couldn’t focus its fire everywhere at any time and our base would have to prioritize its own defense.
We didn’t have any heavy combat vehicles, what I wouldn’t do for a Puckworld Migrator Tank, an Aerowing Gunship or even an atmospheric Skein Flyer. Haven’t seen that last one in a long time, not since they were all shot down by the Saurians and flying through any airspace became dangerous. My close friends basically had access to the last combat capable military Aerowing and it had been enough.
“More incoming, drive Canard!” Sami stated as she slammed the mouth her explosive firing weapon into the side of the bike and did a quick M-loader.
I hit the throttle and the engine of the digital bike roared as we avoided a spray of bullets hitting the pavement behind us as Sami fired back at three of them starting to give chase to us. Those things could really jump, on top of being fast for two legged machines and deadly at various ranges.
Swerving to the right and swinging into a hard left onto another street we narrowly avoided a grenade exploding behind us. Even got out of range of the shrapnel.
“We really need to find that PLANT and soon, because I really don’t want more of these things running around.” My hopes were that we’d find it soon before we were gunned down or blown up in this empty city of dim lights. Didn’t really see much of the NPCs, but they tended to stay in building when combat was happening as far as we knew. I tapped my communicator. “Hmm… Welch, are you on the line?”
“Need something manufactured. I made these headsets, so of course I have one as well!” Welch stated proudly. The manufacturing NPC has proven to be quite useful, but I thought she was too idle as the battle was just getting starting.
“Can you manufacture vehicles or make modifications to ones that already exist?” I asked as I swerved away from a hailstorm of shots coming from behind us and Sami continued to fend off our pursuers with her rifle and the occasional thrown ‘proximity setting’ DCD Bomb.
“Yep to both of those things, but I’m going to need something of an idea of what I’m making and some machine data. Data from those Archer Gekko would be nice to have, hint-hint.” At Welch’s commentary I veered us around and drove us right back straight towards the three Archer Gekko aiming to pass by them to their right.
Hundreds of rounds poured out at us and we managed to get by them with only a few shots going into the bike. Sami built this thing to survive a ballistic missile, so the damage was minimal.
“Sami, prepare to capture as much data as you can from these things. Can the Commandramon temporarily handle themselves while we go back to Castle Alexander after we finish off these things?” If there was one thing I knew all the parts for, and the exact specifications of, it was a Skein Flyer… not the overly complicated pieces of tech like a Migrator or an Aerowing. I’m fairly sure even Pom’s world could even build a Skein Flyer if they knew how to.
“Sure thing, but what are we doing?” Sami asked as we swerved around the bipedal death machines and continued firing on them.
“We’re going to take to the skies after we take these things out.” A Skein Flyer was very simple and I knew exactly how to build one, I just didn’t have the capacity to make one in the digital realms and it was kind of hard to make friends with the locals that had a decent manufacturing base. It just never occurred to me until now, I maybe could have had one since Valora if their manufacturing ability was a little more cutting edge like what Welch can do. Making a physical Skein Flyer would have been hard to do in Valora, but what was currently stopping us from having digital ones with Welch’s impressive capabilities in manufacturing things? “How do you feel about that?”
“As long as we don’t crash and explode immediately in the first ten seconds, I’ll call that a considerable win.” How many things has Sami survived that she can say that so readily? “I think the safest mode of transport I was ever on was a Mekanorimon large enough for a small Commandramon crew. Poor walking tank didn’t survive that one really bad week with me… but he was quite a trooper for a living vehicle digimon. Pom would probably enjoy riding a Komondomon as much as it would enjoy having her ride on it.”
Even as she said this stuff, we kept circling and toppling the Archer Gekko that were having a hard time keeping track of our speed as we rode around them blasting them with whatever we had. Their armor was thick everywhere except the odd biological looking mechanical muscle legs and the weak points on their heads, but we were making a concerted effort to deal with these three and get out of here before more showed up.
“Dormarch, we’ll be coming back to base soon to upgrade Sami’s coding motorcycle.” As I said this, I pummeled the top of one of the fallen walking tanks in its weak points with several explosives puck until it went up in a blaze. “In fact, what are the chances we can get some Rider type APs soon, because I already have an idea for how we can use them.”
“Unsure, the APs we produce are going to be fairly random. The chance of making Rider APs will go up as we narrow down the classes we can field.” Well Dormarch, given your odd classifications… there was more than that Moon Cell could be throwing at us at once. “So basically, right now it’s a one in four chance between Rider, Berserker, Archer and Caster. We don’t know what they’ll look like or what they’ll be, but more advanced APs to field for a variety of situations can only be good for us.”
The exploding Archer Gekko damaged the other two and lit up my grim set beak and Sami’s ironically cheerful, if eager, face as we started dealing with the other two as my partner started drawing in their data for our use.
“Small warning to everyone, Archer Gekkos might be capable of self-destructing!” Stated Sami as she loaded up the data as the other two started flashing white and red. “Get us out of here Canard!”
-Central Mare Melum, Rooftop, Saber Jack Wolf (Band Name: Jetstream Slasher and the Gekkos) Vs. Pom and Dolly (Band Name: Running for our very lives), Musical theme for Mare Melum: [Girl’s Frontline] Chapter Boss BGM Made In Heaven-
“Fire on my current position now!” Pom called to Dormarch.
Pom wasn’t going to directly fight ‘Saber’ Jack Wolf, mostly for a variety of good reasons.
Any damage Pom could deal would be healed instantly, getting bogged down with fighting him would lead to her possibly being shot by an Archer Gekko from another rooftop and there’s the fact that ‘Saber’ Jack Wolf was as, if not more so, dangerous as Kenshin was with a blade back in Illusio. Jack Wolf certainly knew how to use a blade, but he was more brutal force than pure unadulterated skill, but he definitely had a lot of skill. There was also the main reason that Pom wasn’t nearly as skilled with a lance or spear as Jack was with that sword of his and she could feel his intent to kill even without Ocellus being present to tell her about it.
Speaking of the robotic wolf that was hunting Pom, he landed on the roof as Pom was running to the furthest end away from him and he was charging right at her. Only to be forced to stop and deflect the fusillade of artillery rounds that lit up the roof.
The portion of the roof Jack stood on didn’t get struck, because he was just that good at deflecting the artillery shots, but the roof around him was blasted and collapsed the section he was standing on. He leapt after Pom as she used a spring jump to launch off the edge of the building onto the next nearest one.
Jack was not too far behind with followed her as he shifted into quadruped mode with his tail wielding his red blade. He leapt from the falling bits of stone at a fast pace to escape the building from collapsing on top of him and managed to catch up with Pom and lashed his tail out at her, she quickly deflected the blade into the roof with the closed up Paralance and it carved a solid swath into it the roof like the material didn’t even exist.
Angling his hips forward as Pom continued to retreat backwards away from him frantically with Dolly looking out for Archer Gekko, he fired a blast of burning red hot knives from his them. This forced Pom to flare open the Paralance to block the blades and it made making a leap away from the building a little harder to do as the weapon would cause drag in the air while it was opened up in its parasol mode.
Jack watched as Dolly began barking something and he finally heard the mooing as a Gekko landed on the roof directly behind Pom. The dog was clearly intelligent and he wasn’t about to write off the small biological Dalmatian as a threat after the meteoric slam into the street, instead of thinking of it as magic he likened Dolly to having limited psychokinetic powers. Just about anything could be done with microscopic machines after all, magic, what was that but poorly understood technology?
Pom looked up at it, grimaced and closed up her lance to step backwards between its legs to bash its left one outwards with as much strength as she could put into it to destabilize it a bit. She only manage to move the leg a few inches and barely unbalanced the thing. Dolly followed up by swinging her skateboard around on the strap and then into the left leg damaging it enough with a full momentum boosted impact to topple the machine onto its right knee in front of them as Pom hopped back behind it.
Jack immediately slashed through the Archer Gekko cleanly in half vertically because it was in his way of his target, he even did it without entering Blade Mode. He fired off a blasts of burning knives from his hips in bipedal mode, only for Dolly to block them.
“Dormarch, I don’t think we can run from this guy forever!” Pom stated as she stepped back onto the edge of the roof and looked down at the street below with a frown, then a small smile crossed her lips until she saw the toppled Archer Gekko split perfectly in half with an angry bipedal cyborg beast charging straight at her.
After Dolly blocked the knives, Pom jumped backwards off the roof, disappearing over the edge.
Jack jumped off the roof to follow her to the streets, he landed with his left fist pressing into the ground and his right blade ready to start swinging. He looked around and didn’t see the white wooly wonder anywhere.
He then looked back up at the edge of the building where Pom was about to crawl around the corner, his glare made her freeze for a second and she turned to look at him with the dog mimicking her sheepish toothy big terrified grins and then they swung around the corner of the building.
“I think I like her.” Blade stated.
“Shut up Blade!” Jack stated to the ‘Blade Wolf’ AI installed in his body thus giving him the Jack Wolf designation in the first place. He turned back into a quadruped mode and started around the building to see her leaping onto another rooftop and several Archer Gekko mooing and giving chase.
“Just thought you should know she makes me feel all warm and fuzzy at least, but also you should know that...” Blade, not being able to finish his statement since the mute program went active, he did just as Jack asked and would be quiet for another five minutes.
Blade really wanted to warn Jack about two realm’s inevitably colliding, but Jack wasn’t willing to listen and he was quite busy trying to keep track of the ewe trying to lose him by leaping across the rooftops, clambering along walls and even dropping into alleyways and trying to double back towards friendlier to them territories.
Jack was not one to be avoided, where he in his weaker Assassin Loadout his target might have already been dead if she didn’t hear him coming. Jack silently admitted that she might have and probably could have defeated him in a straight fight as he was before he became Jack Wolf.
Hundreds of shots were going after Pom as she using Dancing Flame excessively to dodge and try to get out of line of sight of the bipedal death machines leaping across the rooftops, running through the streets and were in general trying to box her in a like she was an excessively greased up pig.
All the while Pom was specifically trying to lose the one that was the most concerning to her, but the Gekko made that impossible as they were catching sight of her and alerting Jack to where she was. Pom could even imagine the exclamation marks popping up above their heads as they made some loud mooing noises when they spotted even the smallest glimpse of her rapidly blurring form.
An artillery strike fell into a nearby street and cleared the way by destroying five Gekko for Pom who turned the corner a second later and galloped along the street past the destroyed machines on all hooves. She started heading back in the direction of the cities farmlands. Coming around the corner behind her was a mechanical wolf that wasn’t going to tire as easily as she would and he was not only keeping up, but was also gaining on her.
A blast of knives fired from the mechanical canine’s hips and Dolly quickly blocked them with her board and yelped as some of the sparks from the deflection struck her fur and burned her cheek.
“Can’t shake him!” Pom yelled out into the headset while breathing roughly as she stayed ahead of the mechanical dark mutt.
“Like anyone can escape my blade slicing them apart, die!” Roared the frantic quadrupedal machine as they ran into a crossing section.
As the machine was going to leap and jam his claw into Pom’s back, a rope running between to streetlamps rose up into his path and painfully clotheslined him. The Caerbannogs quickly started retreating and throwing knives at him, all of which were deflected by the sword wielding tail even while Jack was prone on his back, before ducking under some nearby cardboard boxes. Said boxes were soon slashed open seconds later by an irate Jack still in quadrupedal form, only there was nothing inside of them.
Jack Roared, enraged to not have caught any of the Caerbannogs with his blade and mostly that they had used the old cardboard box trick to juke him, he was quite familiar with the execution of tactical boxing. He shook his head and simply continued to give chase to Pom who had managed to put some distance between him and her while turning to the left to start moving towards the valley region out of his sight.
“Dormarch he’s not going to stop, I really don’t think anything we have can make him, not without it being a completely overwhelming amount of force!” Pom had taken account of all that had been thrown at Jack thus far, projectiles were functionally useless, her magic attacks did little damage if they could even hit and the guy was practically a walking tank that could take hits. Not to mention the whole healing just by slicing open an Archer Gekko thing being a major problem to actually fighting him. “Right, then they better hurry.”
After that Pom put on a burst of speed and before she knew it, Jack Wolf was already on her tail once again chasing her down a stretch of road. More Archer Gekko were leaping between buildings and trying to get a shot on Pom.
Shots rained down on the street from the left and right as Pom struggled to keep running and avoiding attacks coming at her. A Gekko tried to jump down and land on Pom, She ran between its legs and it tried to quickly turn around and whip her with a silvery tentacle
The tentacle didn’t managed to grab Pom or hurt her, but it did sweep her hind legs out from under her, tripping her up and her wool flared out to protect her chin from being bashed against the asphalt.
In response to suddenly finding herself on the ground, Pom quickly opened the paralance at an upwards angle to protect herself from the bullets coming down from the nearby rooftops. She had to quickly roll out of the way from the Archer Gekko trying to stomp on her with its left three toed foot that kicked up dust and rocks giving Pom a temporary reprieve from the two rooftop Archer Gekkos as they lost sight of her in the cloud and they wouldn’t fire on their own unit by accident.
Jack Wolf had almost caught up to them again, if the glare of the red lights in his eyes getting closer said anything.
Pom sharply inhaled to get her head on straight, two Archer Gekko on the buildings firing at them, one about to attack her with a tentacle and Dolly was already in motion to stop it and Jack Wolf was charging straight at them with that red blade ready to slice through them provided he was going to do it with his tail. He was too slow in his more deadly bipedal state to actually keep up with her.
Coming to a decision, the ewe exhaled and pivoted to put Dolly into the line of fire of the two Archer Gekko, but her companion was already ready and vertically holding her board along Pom’s back.
While Dolly was covering Pom’s spine and herself, Pom tried to ignore that her legs were taking a few grazing hits as she swung the sharp edges of the Paralance’s canopy around to slice away the tentacle of the bipedal machine reaching for her. She took a shot through the left shoulder as she started to stumble sideways towards an alley afterwards.
Pom’s eyes darted to the red eyed wolf that was almost upon her as she brought the paralance up to block a stream of bullets at nearly point blank range when the two nearby rooftops lit up as the two Archer Gekko were blown apart by artillery fire from Castle Alexander.
Jack Wolf leapt for his prey and suddenly found himself once again clotheslined by a single Caerbannog AP that got him dangling from a noose coming from a streetlight, while he was freeing himself a limping Pom stumbled and dove into a nearby alleyway with bullets chasing her.
Hearing the stomping of the large machine about to peek its way into the alley Pom turned the Paralance towards the entrance and backed away as a streams of shots came at her from the Archer Gekko. She heard the sound of heavy metal striking asphalt as Jack Wolf freed himself from the rope with a claw swipe.
“Pom… why do I hear a chainsaws?” Dolly said with a slight bit of horror reliving the existence of Negaduck for a moment as a loud pair of revving noises could be heard approaching the alley.
The Archer Gekko moved out of the way and Jack Wolf suddenly leapt into the entrance of the alley and after finally tossing away his mostly undamaged poncho and sombrero, his back opened up seemingly splitting outwards and produced two mechanical arms with two fairly large and dangerous looking chainsaws on them.
“OH MY DOG… RUN!” A panicked Dolly stated as the two chainsaws spread wide out and started cutting through the buildings at either side of him, it wasn’t slowing Jack wolf down in the slightest to drag them through the buildings either. “I’VE SEEN THE ROBOT MOVIES THAT WERE LIKE THIS AND HOW THEY ENDED, IT’S NEVER PRETTY!”
Halfway into Dolly mentioning movies, Pom tossed the Paralance up to Dolly to hold onto, as she turned and ran with the speed of fear down the alleyway with a mad chainsaw winged metal wolf hounding her.
“Please tell me they’re at least nearby Dormarch!” Pom cried out as she was nearing the end of the alleyway and leapt to climb a wall, but had to kick back off it and continue towards the exit of the alleyway when a series of burning knife nearly took the right side of her face and eye out and threaten.
“They’re almost there, just get into the street!” Responded Dormarch who wished he was out there with his mother and big sister instead of safely in Castle Alexander, even if the danger they were facing was quite nigh unstoppable, terrifying and dangerous to an absolutely ludicrous degree.
After their taking of Cape, Moon Cell definitely wasn’t playing around with the counter invasion force when it sent Saber Jack Wolf. He could almost solo the entire counter invasion force by himself as long as he had Archer Gekko to keep himself at full strength. The Caerbannogs could only delay his efforts temporarily, if they stayed to fight instead of just ambushing or trapping, they would be simply torn apart easily by the Gekkos or Jack Wolf.
Pom ran out into the street and the like a deer in actual headlights froze and looked behind her as the angry metal wolf surged for her as she leaped back and brought the paralance around and Dolly was preparing to help her defend herself.
Only for the Commandramon’s roofless APC to side swipe Jack's backside by drifting into him, it didn't avoid the suddenly flailing chainsaws digging deeply into the vehicle as the menacing metal wolf was staggered and stumbling to stay upright by the heavy impact that damaged the APC as much more than the metal wolf.
Pom leapt for the vehicle as it righted itself and turned to start heading in the direction of the shrine region. Three of the Commandramon reached out and grabbed onto her to pull her into the vehicle, it sped away with a large damaging gash along the right side from where the wolf’s left wing chainsaw managed to rip through the armor on the vehicle like butter.
“More incoming Archer Gekkos are going to try and box you in soon, are you currently alright mom?” Dormarch’s voice called out over the headset, he could feel through the bond how Pom was currently doing and was just asking for a verbal response to put him at ease.
“Eating a Sitrus Berry.” Pom stated as her adrenaline filled answer and she popped a berry into her mouth from her bag while looking out the back of the vehicle to see that Jack Wolf was still chasing them through the empty streets.
The Commandramon tossed a variety of DCD bombs out the back of the vehicle, which were a variety of napalm, cryogenic, shrapnel and even a manually detonated shaped charge. The Driver Commandramon, seeing that all the other explosive devices just didn’t cut it with slowing the metal hound still on their backs, pulled out his own DCD Bomb and tossed it over his shoulder.
Patches of frost, burning metal, bits of small shrapnel and a slight scorch mark made Jack Wolf foolhardy that they didn’t have anything that could really bother his K-9000 Cyborg body. This was right up until the DCD Bomb B-type went off in his face and he immediately got frozen in place by a mass of sticky dough that acted like tar the minute it encased the dark metal canine.
“If it works, it works!” Said the Driver who just sticky bread bombed Jack into falling vastly behind them thanks to the non-lethal explosive device.
“Certainly can’t deny that.” Another Commandramon nodded remembering Sami’s bread loaf rockets that only existed because of Frizzle the Guilmon.
The revving of chainsaws could be heard behind them as Jack Wolf started cutting himself free from the sticky mass and roared at them as they were getting away… from him at least. He still had all the Archer Gekko in the region to keep track of them, they certainly wouldn’t find the PLANT they came from unless Jack allowed them to or they got exceedingly lucky.
-Mare Melum Farmlands, Castle Alexander, Throne Room, Dormarch-
I sighed as mom was safe with the Commandramon for the moment, but Jack Wolf hadn’t ceased his pursuit.
The Valley fell very fast without the Archer Gekko to get in the way of the available Pokémon Companions and Dodo.
The Upper District was going down equally fast to Jeanne D’ Arcs three Valora units, but they were making sure to take the territories closer to Castle Alexander first. They had more territory to cover than the single valley and the Caerbannogs were there in assistance. This Saber Jack Wolf didn’t seem to care about the falling territories so far and I had to wonder what the servant had up their sleeves.
The Digi-bots were having troubles taking the central city area, Jack Wolf was a territory unto himself and any territory he was in wouldn’t fall unless he were to walk out of it or the last PLANT in a given territory was actively destroyed.
So far we had a large V shape surrounding the central city territory which was large and ungainly, the Caerbannogs in the shrine territory on the far side were keeping an eye on the Archer Gekko movements. Though they didn’t see what the Archer Gekkos could be protecting around there, the area basically had very little aside from the shrine a few blocks of city and a patch of forest.
The enemy seems very much primarily focused on hunting mom down when we had almost more than thirty percent of the city and plenty of APs coming in.
Saber Jack Wolf was nigh indestructible and if he does get damaged, he’d heal off an Archer Gekko by slashing them open, he had the ridiculous ability to deflect most projectiles and heavy impacts. Aside from the servant I don’t see much more resistance from the regular EPs. Also the EPs, aside from the Archer Gekkos seemed to be trying to destroy the territories in a lackluster manner I can’t begin to describe as being unsettling for some reason.
“Dormarch, Canard is working on his Skein Flyer design with Welch, what’s the situation?” Sami came in and saluted me, the orange skinned digimon was as cheerful sounding as usual.
“Going fairly well, but I don’t understand why Jack isn’t trying to preserve territories or why Moon Cell isn’t causing much more of a fuss about us having a moderate advantage here, you’d think they would send another servant or try to stop our further progress. The Archer Gekkos seemed mostly focused on hounding mom when they could be defending the territories easily.” Yes, Jack Wolf was very scary and all that, but this… this was unusual. Something was up and I needed to pick Sami’s brain about it. “Something’s up and I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is, aside from the ludicrously powerful servant and his dangerous EPs we can’t deal with in a quick manner. Why aren’t they more worried about territory?”
“Maybe it’s because they can take it back so quickly if they weren’t focusing their efforts on killing Pom that it’s not exactly worth worrying over yet, Jack Wolf seems heavily intent on making that happen and most of the Archer Gekkos are focused in the central city area. Our artillery is helping out a lot with them, but I think something else is wrong…” Sami looked at the screen and her eyes scrutinized it. She pointed a claw at the shrine region on the opposite side of the city from us. “What’s there?”
“Not much, the Caerbannogs are watching the Archer Gekko patrol the region though and are not detecting much.” Which was a little odd when eighty percent of the Archer Gekkos were currently trying to gun down my mother. Still, on a hunch I sent the Caerbannogs to investigate.
Sami just stared at the shrine and forest region and narrowed her eyes as a frown crossed her face.
“The enemy is playing us, they have to be!” Blinking at Sami’s sudden declaration and tilted my head at her as we watched the Caerbannogs sneak past the odd Archer Gekko patrols. “I know military and while Jack and the Gekkos are definitely out to get Pom for real, there’s just something else out there waiting for us and I have a good idea that there’s something much bigger going on under that small forest region. It’s far too conspicuous with the urban environment all around it. Have the Caerbannogs look for holes, camouflaged stuff or anything that is remotely out of place while they are there... the Archer Gekkos might not be the only dangerous EPs in the area and the real threat is possibly being held in reserve until we are too far out from Castle Alexander to really help it or retreat to safety ourselves.”
“What makes you think that?” My curiosity was met with a grim frown as Sami hugged her rifle to her chest as we watched the Caerbannogs continued sneak around on the map before disappearing for a few seconds in the forest. We had Caerbannogs all over the city giving us real time information on the movements of everything in the streets, including the Archer Gekkos.
“Soldiers intuition, when you’ve seen enough battlefields puppy, you’re going to know when there’s needed information that you’re just not seeing. Intel that is required more than anything else in an immediate manner to not die. I’ve been through so many bad military operations that almost got me killed in minutes from not being told things or simply not looking out for enough to know when I’m about to get an incidental knife in the back.” As soon as Sami said that an alert popped up on screen as the entire group of Caerbannogs was wiped out insanely fast, near instantly in fact, that we almost didn’t get any information back from them. They did manage to at least send us back a few images and a video file. After checking them the video file showed a humongous underground facility teeming with hundreds upon thousands of EPs with assault rifles with tunnels that likely led throughout the city, preparing to move out. “What in the world am I looking at here… okay, the enemy is definitely sandbagging us into a false sense of security if they have something like that waiting for us!”
It wasn’t just the massive city spanning facility or the gun wielding EPs underneath everything waiting to be unleashed on us in an unsuspecting manner if we hadn’t just caught them, there was also the grainy image of a giant six legged machine with mantis like arms that look like it could destroy Castle Alexander if it was fielded. It was the last little bit of information a single Assassin Caerbannog got before it got gunned down, the file was codenamed ‘MG Excelsus’.
“I’m sending a number of Caerbannogs, which will spawn from the losses we just took, to look around the farmland region. They could be trying to sneak up on Castle Alexander through tunnels while our forces are stretched out thin in various places.” Now was a time to be panicking, we haven’t actually taken thirty percent of the city… we’ve barely taken ten percent of the whole realm of Mare Melum if there’s a vast underground network below the city just waiting to spring a massive trap on us. I had to make the call of whether or not to panic everyone or not. I hit the all call on everyone’s headsets. “Everyone, this is Castle Alexander, beware all areas. We’ve just discovered there’s a massive underground complex beneath the city, it’s full of gun wielding EPs that look like another generic type of the general bipedal EP form and definitely in the Archer variety. I repeat, the city is not at all safe even in already capture territories and we don’t know when they are going to come up or spring the trap they are preparing on us, but we’re not going to be able to hold any of the territories other than possible the farmlands when they finally do start attacking for real! Pokémon Companions and Valora groups please pull back, Digi-bots finish taking the rooftops your working on and then full retreat. We’re going to be entirely on the defensive quite soon. Let the APs hold the territories as well as they can.”
“Well this certainly puts a damper on dealing with the Archer Gekko PLANT.” Yeah, we had much bigger problems to worry about. “Why didn’t you tell Pom to retreat?”
“We wouldn’t survive the servant coming here to attack Castle Alexander directly and mom is definitely aware of that fact considering she has seen what they are capable of.” I stated flatly, given moms sacrificial nature she’s going to try and stay in the city as long as possible to keep him away from the rest of us while trying to figure out how to deal with him and possibly find the Archer Gekko PLANT herself. "The Commandramon could retreat, but they wouldn't want to leave mom alone out there with only Dolly as backup."
-Mare Melum Central, Blade Wolf AI inside Saber Jack Wolf’s body-
“Jack, there’s several things that you should know… they are very important, urgently so!” Like the fact that the enemy has likely discovered the secret facility that spans the entirety of Mare Melum given some scouting enemy programs were just destroyed inside the facility, also the realm that was about to slam into this one was getting closer.
“Not now Blade, can’t you see we’ve almost caught up to them again and that I’ve got their vehicle smoking? If it’s not about slashing up that ewe into a bloody mess of chunks, then I don’t want to hear it!” Jack wasn’t going to listen to me, he was enjoying his hunt too much and since it was his primary mission he wasn’t going to deviate from hounding the target until she stopped breathing.
That might be of a slight detriment to us or Moon Cell’s plans for wiping out the enemy in one fell swoop as they might have just discovered our hidden forces far too soon given the shrine region had an ‘alert status’ go up.
Jack should really pay attention to what I had to say, since even if we do spring the trap right this instant the other Moon Cell realm coming to collide with this one will mess things up inexorably and the trap will not be as effective as it could be.
In fact it was likely that we’d have to deal with two invasion forces… to think I used to be so cold and calculating. I almost want the adorable ewe to succeed in knocking us down a peg, but we were about to be busy and so were the Archer Soldiers and Gekkos.
-Jungle Realm, Fou-
He could feel Pom’s presence and a feral grin crossed his face, he would hunt his prey and nobody else would hunt her better than him!
Since he could kind of feel someone else trying to do just that and he found the comparison to his great abilities lacking.
-Commandramon Roofless APC, Pom-
Okay, my spine was turning into an iceberg, why did it feel like everything was about to go to Tartarus around me again at the most inopportune moment?
Hearing that the others were in retreat and that we were going to be ambushed by hundreds of EPs from below just doubled the feeling that things were about to get quite bad.
Being in the back of a badly damaged vehicle that was catching fire from the burning knives being shot at us wasn't helping that feeling.
-Outside Castle Alexander, Dodo-
?
Manifestation program query?
Okay!
Query Sent.
“Dodo, why do you need a manifestation capabilities, when you’re already a physical being?” Asked Dormarch and Dodo just didn’t know what went wrong. "I can't humor you at the moment, because I've got more important things to worry about!"
Also Shanty was awake, so Dodo was happy about that at the very least.