//------------------------------// // 71 // Story: Yonder Wandered Fluttershy // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// “You see Mira; this is exactly why we don’t attack Zurg’s empire! He’s got a million of these things and we’ve barely taken out a thousand of them.” Even with twenty Space Ranger Cruisers, Buzz could see all the other teams weren’t taking to being swarmed heavily as well as his was. “Heck, I swear all those exploding factories have taken out more than we have in the last five minutes.” XR was among the Space Rangers that launched from their ships to lend some extra firepower. He popped his chest open and several mechanical arms with various weapons popped out and fired a spray of rapid fire mayhem into a nearby swarm of hornets coming at their circle of protection around the Boojiboo. “Have you gotten everyone onboard yet Fluttershy, we’re kind of being heavily pressed out here and we might start taking some biological casualties if this keeps up.” There were at most fifty Space Rangers flying around, at least two from each ship each which carried teams of four or more rangers. All of them were assisting the Zurg’s defecting people in reaching the Boojiboo by taking out as many regular hornets as they could while the cruisers dealt with the more heavily armored hornets. The Space Rangers were successfully drawing a lot of fire away from the cargo ship; each and every person got their armor scorched at one point or another in the vicious aerial dog fight against a mass of incoming hornets from all over the planet. - “Almost, we have one last Grub to pick up, so please give him or her some time!” Nobody liked to hear Fluttershy plead like that and the Rangers started pushing the hornets back again. Absolute moved away from the Boojiboo to go retrieve the last fugitive cowering behind cover. Fluttershy looked to one of the camera’s that showed her what was going on outside and there were robots raining from the sky in droves. On the screen she could see Absolute Resolve quickly floating backwards towards the Boojiboo with the Grub held in its right hand while blasting hyper hornets with the plasma arm cannon propped up on its left shoulder, the large DOK soon disappeared from view. “Wait for me to get on. Falco lock your Land Master down, can someone cover me while I retreat?” Fox’s Land Master spun around and boosted straight for the Boojiboo after a moment jets erupted from the bottom of the tank until it lifted up high enough to land on top of the cargo ship. Behind Fox the cruisers kept the swarm of hyper hornets from giving chase. As if it were synchronized both Falco and Fox’s tanks suddenly clamped down to the top of the Boojiboo. “Peppy, Slippy, form up on the Boojiboo and fly support, we’re on the move.” “We’re clear, everyone made it. I might even say it’s a miracle that none of us died!” As soon as Styg finished his sentiment, the ship lurched into the air as Lead started steering it to a respectable height to start moving forward. “I’m glad no one got hurt too, Lead please head for the tower. We have to go there to find Bonnie and…” No one could have prepared for what happened next and it had stunned Fluttershy into silence, a part of the tower started to rip apart and something was rising out of its remains. It was huge and it didn’t look very friendly, it started to cascade over the city with its massive size. Her ears went down and her eyes started watering. “Bonnie!” - “Ah crap, now that’s definitely a Venomian super weapon.” Falco had the weapon in his sights and it was ridiculously big and showy, hopefully it went down as easily as everything else Fox has demolished in the past. He turned his turret and shot a pack of hornets with an exploding ball of charged energy. “Do you think we can take something like that on Fox? I know I’m full of myself, but I’m not nearly stupid enough to want to fight that monstrosity on top of having to deal with all these robots attacking us.” “Getting some scans now guys. It’s not completely online yet, but I can tell you that thing has a lot of firepower.” The massive object continued to rise away from the portion of Zurg’s tower it burst out of and Slippy sounded really worried about it. “Massive reading coming from the two arm like structures, they likely contain battleship class laser cannons. I don’t think it’s completely out of the ground yet… I’m also detecting a lot of weapon ports, so expect a lot of missiles.” Slippy was right as the main mass continued to rise until it was standing at full height, it was a giant two legged purple robot and its armor had little dots poking out of its body all around its frame. It towered slightly over Zurg’s Tower which was partially collapsed. “Buzz, please tell me I don’t have to stay out here with that thing.” Booster was one of the rangers out of their ships and he could be heard whimpering on his communications device. The machine slowly started lighting up, what Booster said next sounded like a little child afraid of the dark. “Can I come back aboard Forty-Two now?” “All Rangers back in your ships now! That’s an order, not a suggestion people!” Every ranger started following that order immediately; Buzz wondered what this so called super weapon would do once it finally got online and he didn’t want any rangers outside their ships when it’s weapons came on line, he had no idea what it was going to do. It was as massive as the one Zurg went after Professor Reddschift in, the Ranger Robot he fought the last one in wasn’t here and he was about to call a retreat when the massive machine finally did something. Slowly a large pole rose out of the back of the giant purple humanoid machine with Zurg’s Emblem imprinted on it. A beam of light shot skyward before spreading out ward over the whole city enveloping everything in an impossibly large energy shield. Now the Boojiboo, the Space Ranger cruisers and Team Starfox were trapped inside the massive dome with the robot. It was even worse since the Great Fox was trapped outside the dome and couldn’t assist with its weapons or send anymore quick repair stations or bombs to the Arwings and the Land Masters. “Well now, that isn’t good… this is going to be one heck of a rough time.” Even if it was going to get really bad Peppy stayed with the Boojiboo, it was full of innocents and he was not about to let any hornets bring it down. He noted Slippy on his right also keeping position as they flew a slow circle towards the side of the unmoving machine following the cargo ship. - “My empire may lie in tatters at the moment Lightyear, but I have you now! You’ll never take down my newest toy, The Total Obliteration Machine! You’re trapped and there’s no way out this time, this is the perfect super weapon!” Zurg let out a long lasting evil cackle after the hammy proclamation when giving the name of the large death machine that had entrapped everyone with the machine under the shield. He stopped caring about what happened to Bonnie, as he had most likely killed her when he escaped while having collapsed the portion of the tower he was in while raising his newest super weapon from the ground. “We’ll see about that Zurg, cruisers form up and attack!” While Buzz rallied his twenty cruiser compliment into a concentrated attack, Zurg didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular with his robot as he was letting the Space Rangers attack it. It became quickly apparent that the energy weapons from the cruisers were having no affect as the large bipedal robot flickered as the shots hit a second set of shields that covered the robot itself. “Stop shooting at it, it’s absorbing the energy from your weapons and its shields aren’t weakening!” Slippy was horrified at the implications of what this machine was capable of and was glad that Andross had been incapable of fielding something like this. “Ah, yes, the special feature of what makes TOM so great. You can’t hit me, you can’t escape me, but I can hit you…” Zurg left that hanging in the air and you could practically hear him smiling as both the robots arms came up with their palms pointed at the cruisers and the cargo ship, they started charging up. “Everyone scatter!” Buzz had made the order just in time as two massive beams launched from TOM; all the cruisers successfully dodged out of the way and only the Boojiboo was too slow to escape getting hit entirely as it was grazed. The beams hit the outer barriers created by TOM and the energy moved towards the top of the barrier and funneled back downwards into the pole sticking out of its back. This meant that even if it missed, it could effectively recycle its own shots infinitely. “It hardly lost any energy from firing that, I think it only lost energy from hitting the Boojiboo’s shields. A direct hit would have immediately destroyed the cargo ship. Give me some time while I analyze the data!” Trying to find a way to bring down this monstrosity Slippy was analyzing every bit of data he could get on it. Lucky spent most of his time shooting towards Slippy’s rear end to stop the hornets from attacking his fighter. - “That dropped the shields by eighty percent and it only grazed us!” Styg was starting to get hysterical as they were now in the impossible situation of having to deal with a resource heavy monstrosity that would be nearly impossible to take down. “It’s fully operation, we’re all doomed!” “Doesn’t it have a weakness somewhere? The hornets under the shield with us are also something to worry about.” Another Cerebrian comment on, this soon prompted several Cerebrian’s aboard the Boojiboo to start thinking of a solution before they all died. Nobody except for Roller was paying any attention to a sniffling Fluttershy; he noted the pony was just staring at the wreckage of the tower sadly and she put her hoof to the screen as tears streamed down her closed eyes. - TOM took a few steps back and the outer shield noticeably followed its movements, meaning that it was still highly mobile even with the outer shield up. It leaned forward and crossed its two massive arms. “What’s it doing now?” After having asked the obvious question Mira’s eyes widened when TOM flung its arms outwards and sent hundreds of missiles into the air heading towards them. They were smart missiles to avoid hitting the hornets as they each started targeting the cruisers or Fox’s team and the cargo ship. “We got incoming Buzz!” “Try to take some of them down.” Buzz narrowed his eyes at the missiles, behind him Booster came in with XR and they quickly moved to their stations. Mira steered the cruiser around to fire on the missiles, her pupils shrunk when the shots from the cruiser did nothing but knock the missiles she hit slightly off course. They still exploded once they were within close proximity of the Forty-Two damaging it slightly; the explosions started a chain reaction that prevented the other missiles from reaching their targets. “What the… those freaking missiles are shielded too!?!” The familiar if rather shrill voice of Betina Bucks-a-ton called out. “We need to outmaneuver them when he fires more; they seem to be on a proximity fuse. Somebody please tell me there’s a way to bring either shield down.” TOM turned to and hundreds of small beams started spraying everywhere in the general direction of the cruisers more so than the cargo vessel that was being bogged down by a swarm of hornets since it was slower than the cruisers and weighed down by two tanks. “That’s definitely Venomian alright.” Four voices rang out in despair at the same time in a well synchronized matter. “Come on guys it has to have some kind of glaring flaw! We’ve dealt with things like this before haven’t we?” Fox didn’t think the situation was hopeless even as he knocked some incoming missiles off course by bringing around the Land Masters powerful cannon. “Even the Cornerian Army took care of a robot like this one and that was while we were busy heading off towards Sector Y to support the fleet.” “Yeah but that one wasn’t double shielded, not to mention it also absorbs shots from energy weapons! We don’t have anything that can do any damage to that thing through its shields; we’re all out of Smart Bombs from the raid and we can’t reload since we’re blocked off from the Great Fox.” There was a lot of despair going around and it seemed to be pretty hopeless, even to Slippy. The best anyone could hope to do was shoot down the hornets that were still attacking them while trying to survive for as long as possible against the monstrously powerful TOM. Two more powerful beams erupted from TOM and struck the back half of a cruiser sending it spinning towards the ground. “This is Team Plasma; we’ve taken too much damage! We’re requesting transfer to another cruiser as we’re going down, we’ll be sitting ducks out there for all those smaller lasers and the hornets!” Betina’s team wasn’t the only cruiser going down, the Space Rangers were evacuating each cruiser that was going down and quickly moved to board another one. Seven cruisers had fallen, but their crews had managed to safely escape the crashing ships, but not without injuries. - A crying Fluttershy slowly opened her tired sad eyes to stare blankly at the monstrosity on the screen that would be their doom, after a moment she blinked and then again. Styg was now in the copilot’s seat and quite busy trying to find some way of getting around the shield that was preventing TOM from taking damage; the screen showed something in particular that had caught Fluttershy’s eyes. Slowly Fluttershy’s tears stopped and she started rubbing the wetness from her eyes with her hooves as she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, it was oddly out of place on TOM. She slowly stood up and trotted up right next to Styg ignoring the protesting pain shooting through her entire body. “Styg zoom in right there!” The excitement in Fluttershy’s voice caused Styg to flinch, but he did as he was asked and his head reeled back again in shock at the small unnatural streak of turquoise on TOM’s left leg. Without being told to do so by Fluttershy, Styg quickly panned the visuals upwards and they saw a bleeding Bonnie crawl her way up into an opening in the machines lower torso. “She’s alive! But she’s also badly hurt and losing blood!” Fluttershy’s ears went from up to down again. “Well we’re going to be badly hurt if we take any more hits from Zurg’s super weapon. Our shields are at four point five percent strength and even hornets could break it now. What can this Bonnie really do? Unless she has some kind of explosive device, she’s not going to be able to do much to help us.” Styg’s eyes showed a look of depression. - It will always be the smallest of details that can make even the biggest of problems go away. The last grenade was pulled out and the red eyed gremlin that was driven by hatred and fueled by grief gave a sadistically evil grin as it flicked the pin off with a thumb. The Thermal Detonator was hurled to where it would do the most damage. Drops of turquoise followed in the little gremlins wake as something rather important broke in the ensuing explosion. The gremlin was waiting for its prize to be exposed, it wanted to take everything from the one it hated and it would taste ever so sweet when it did. Beware of gremlins; for no machine is ever truly safe from them. - Just as TOM was about to launch another wave of missiles it stumbled a bit and started smoking slightly. It titled a bit off balance before it recovered and prepared to launch another attack, but before it could do so an announcement was heard and with that announcement nobody was going to let the opportunity slip by. “Huh, that’s odd; the inner shield just went down on that thing.” One of the remaining eleven battered and blasted cruisers immediately reacted to Slippy’s words, the other cruisers then started attacking TOM with a vengeance when Forty-Two actually managed to deal quite a bit of damage to it on the first pass. “Everyone hit that thing with all you got, the shields were good but the armoring is lousy. That’s exactly like a Venomian built machine; it just starts falling apart when its shields are gone!” Following up his words Fox started charging his gun and after striking the giant robot with it, he started firing rapidly into the body and its armor started stripping away at a ridiculous pace. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it, you’re doing it!” Even as he was cheering the others on Slippy continue to take down hornets that were still intent on attacking the Boojiboo. The star cruisers were really causing havoc on TOM’s armor. Fox and Falco’s shots destroyed all the weapons along the arms and body of the TOM. At one point when Falco fired a charged blast from his cannon into one of its legs, the entire robot faltered and fell over backwards to the ground. Afterwards something strange happened to all the hornets. The hornets just started to lifelessly fall from the sky as several explosions ripped across the Total Obliteration Machine and the outer shield fell as well. “Yippee, we did it!” Of course Slippy was happy to see that monstrosity go down. Just like all the other super weapons from Venom, it definitely needed to be destroyed. - “We have to go down there and find Bonnie! Lead lower the ramp, I’m going to fly around to find her as quickly as I can.” At least Fluttershy hoped Bonnie was still alive, she just had to be. Despite the pain of galloping and jumping off the ramp to activate the fake wings of her suit and the pollen spewing thrusters, Fluttershy was more worried about what happened to Bonnie than her own health at the moment. Bonnie had just saved all their lives, now it was Fluttershy’s turn to save Bonnie! If only she could find the small green, fluffy and cute being. It took a while, but flying over the head of the destroyed machine Fluttershy saw two beings on the ground, it was Bonnie standing tall and pointing her blaster at Zurg who was trapped under a piece of metal. - “You know there’s something to be said about underestimating someone of my size, then making that person extremely mad at you when she has a loaded blaster and you find yourself in a very vulnerable position! Just… like… this one!” Bonnie started off slowly and then started screaming as she pointed her gun at Zurg who was trapped by the rubble and no escape plan would save him this time. Zurg couldn’t really say anything, his plans, his giant robot, his empire and everything else he had was completely ruined. He was hardly in a position to think clearly or at all. He did at least silently acknowledge that he had a blaster in his face and that there was no way for him to get out of this one. “Bonnie, are you okay?” Fluttershy dropped to the ground and gritted her teeth at the pain flowing through her body; she trotted up to Bonnie who still had her gun pointed at Zurg as she turned to glare Fluttershy in the eyes. Fluttershy could see what was on Bonnie’s mind at the moment and a rocket scientist wasn’t needed. “Don’t kill him.” “How dare you come here and tell me that I can’t shoot him! After all he’s done to Clyde; well I’ll show you what he did to my brother!” Bonnie kept her grip on the blaster in her left hand and reached into her right holster to pull something out, she held it out towards Fluttershy, but she didn’t look away from Zurg or move her blaster off of his exposed prone form. All she had to do was pull the trigger; she was savoring the moment for when she did. “He’ll never come back the same even if I do save him; he made me Death Knell him!” “I don’t know what that means Bonnie, please talk to me.” It was clear to Fluttershy that Bonnie was hurting deeply; she looked at what Bonnie was holding out to her. It was a small colorful little sphere and on it was a very familiar number with a grey splotch halfway covering the number five. “You see that innocuous gray splotch on this sphere Sweet Cheeks? Imagine the sphere being my brother; now imagine that slowly growing grey splotch being how long he has to live. The bigger it grows the closer to death he is and the harder it is to bring him back as anything remotely resembling the brother I once had. Death Knell is a last ditch chance for an experiment to save their life, it is a very unfriendly process and it is only meant to be done when someone you trust can get you back to my dad in time.” The red eyed Bonnie took a glance at Fluttershy before returning her attention back to Zurg and began steeling herself to fire her blaster. “The larger the splotch is before the experiment is put through a recovery process to save what’s left of them, the more they lose. And you will always lose something.” “You know… I never said not to shoot him Bonnie, I just said don’t kill him. Dying is easy, life is hard.” Trying to reach through to her friend with her voice, Fluttershy just wanted to run up and comfort Bonnie. She stayed in place not wanting to get hurt trying, Bonnie was like a wounded animal as unpleasant as it was to think of her as such. “Please don’t Bonnie, I’m asking you as your friend. I know you’re not a killer.” “Yeah, life can be pretty rough Fluttershy.” As Bonnie said this, she avoided looking back at the sweet pony as she made sure her blaster was aimed correctly. Making her decision, she pulled the trigger. Several bitter tears started splashing against the ground after the shot rang out. “Ohana… it means family…. nobody gets left behind… or forgotten… aloha oe… Zurg…”