[Forlorn Ascension]|[Rites of Dominion]

by Desrium

Unfinished Battle

The ruthless enemy left no time for mourning. From the broken corpses of the deathless tide’s destroyed vessels, the battle mechs reappeared on blazing jets. Ambushing their disordered prey when their ranks were most broken and vulnerable, their guns deployed with shifting plates and glowing barrels.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Elysia shouted to her allied ships across the comm-link. Her voice was distorted by the lingering radiation that the super beam left in its passing. She dragged her fingertips across the ball of light in her hands, causing the battle-sphere to roll over to one side and swerve around the glowing wrecks that littered the surrounding area.

What was left of the fighter squadrons scattered, flying irregular courses and erratically jinking about in a gambit to dodge incoming fire. The larger ships in the defense force were much more sluggish to react. Many of them drifted in space, disabled by their mere proximity to the beam without even being hit by it. Their windows were dark and the lights flickered occasionally, thruster exhaust ports cooling off.

On the G.S.O, all in the observation chamber were stunned as to how quickly the tide of war had shifted against their favor. “W-was this w-what they wanted from the beginning?” one of the officers asked with a fearful tremble to their voice.

“It would seem like so, unfortunately for us all…” another replied. The officer dropped its gaze and put a hand to the pendant around its neck.

“Worry only when we have nothing left to fight with, friends,” said Uolix; though none could see her face, her eyes underneath the screen of her helmet narrowed in an expression of hardened resolve. “Take our remaining turrets offline and redirect the power to alternate weapon systems. Calibrate aiming systems and focus our artillery on Tzorvar Prime. The time has come for those in distress to aid in their salvation.”

The officers complied and issued the order to their machines. The Commander bowed her head.

”You will not serve them any longer, Tsubar. It is the only good I can promise you now.”

Far past the station’s walls, the units were on the hunt, guns hot as they trailed the Harmony’s fighters. Pilots conversed while dodging the unrelenting assault.

“Anti-armor on my six!”

“Getting boxed in on my end!”

“We can’t let them pick us off like this!”

Elysia growled, wracking her brain for a counterattack that wouldn’t mean losing even more ships. Her view screen was full of floating debris and beams shooting off from a myriad of directions. She had to get some kind of order in this rampant chaos!

“Sounds like you’re getting a bit heated over there!” Alikir called out while simultaneously pelting a pursuing mech with magical blasts. The arrowheaded unit rolled from side to side, the stream of magic narrowly flying past its battle scarred gray armor. Several strips of plating flipped up on its back and its guns slid forward. They returned fire, alternating in between their selves.

Elysia pulled the battle-sphere into an abrupt banking dive. “It’s a tad bit difficult to not get heated when you’re in my position!”

“I don’t doubt it!” Alikir replied, resuming his firefight with the mech when the pod-fighter leveled out. He trailed its descent with the free range guns and the mech in turn continued to hurl heavy hitting shells at the fighter. They streaked past with each skillful swerve and roll Elysia instructed the spaceship to do.

“It’s just that, because of your position, getting heated isn’t a good thing!”

“I know, I know!” Elysia responded. She lurched forward as a loud bang sounded from the ship’s aft, the straps running across her chest and midsection keeping her from slamming into her instrumentation panel. Her holo-displays distorted for a few seconds before righting themselves.

“That didn’t sound good!” Alikir muttered.

Elysia glanced at the monitor flashing red off to her side. “We’ve taken a pretty bad hit! Micro-locks sealed off that part of the ship but another hit like that’s gonna put us down for sure!”

“So let’s get the hell out of the line of fire! I don’t think it’ll have as much luck shooting us if we’re behind it!”

“I concur, Space Ranger! Hang on!”

“What do I have to hang on to? I’m strapped in to a-“

He stopped talking when he was pressed back against his seat by a burst of acceleration, the chaos outside a blur to his eyes as the battle-sphere swung about and arced around the mech. As it shot above the battle unit, the ship flipped over to face it.

“Take your shot, Ranger!”

”As if you need to tell me!” Alikir passed his reticle over the turrets, marking each one of them and then pulled the trigger. Twin streams of energy pulses smashed into the weapons, eating through their housing and setting off rapid chain explosions across the unit’s hull.

“Nice shooting!” Elysia said. The battle-sphere hurried off before the mech could retaliate with any other concealed weapons it might had had on board.

“Not good enough,” Alikir replied grimly. “That thing’s still flying.”

“We can’t afford to occupy ourselves with finishing off every enemy. There are others who might need our help!”

“Yeah, yeah. Not to mention the Big One…”

Tzorvar Prime’s maneuver thrusters pointed retrograde and fired up. The dark brown machine approached a large class disabled vessel with its tendrils spread apart, a magical field gathering inside its red claws. When it was near enough, the claws were stabbed into the ship’s hull, plunging deep into its layered plating. The mech’s head turned, surveying the area for a suitable target. It stopped when it saw another ship of similar size to the disabled craft looming off in the distance surrounded by liquefied metal and the machine’s tendrils started to sway, dragging the hapless ship with them.

Just before it could release the ship and send it on its way to crashing into the other one, four thick energy beams detonated a multitude of explosions against the multi-limbed machine’s back, tossing it aside. Tzorvar Prime’s attitude thrusters angled themselves and burned for a short time, turning the war machine so that it could look at its attacker.

The heat damaged warship was nearing, laser cannons firing one by one, volleys of cyan rays exploding against Tzorvar Prime’s metal body. “Accursed machine!” captain Kazach spat angrily, “let that ship go!”

Tzorvar Prime raised the disabled ship up and held it off to its side before lobbing it nose-first toward the incoming ship. It sailed through the void like a missile, unable to stop itself.

“Dive!” Kazach yelled to his crew.

The front of the warship started dipping downwards as the idle vessel closed in. In the moments to follow, there was a glancing hit near the rear of Kazach’s ship, hull plating denting and being grazed away as the two spacecraft passed each other, the disabled ship listing over to one side afterward.

“Damage report!” the elderly Ghanax demanded. Several holographic planes appeared around him and his skimmed them determinedly. “Results: inconsequential! Keep attacking!”

The warship started leveling out below Tzorvar Prime, the guns turning about to aim at the mech. However, the four armed machine had the first strike, its two railguns going off at the same time. The slugs smashed into the warship at a steep angle, one of them hitting near the center of the ship and splitting it apart. The other struck the engine block, causing the back of the ship to rupture with an inferno of magical energy.

The explosion reflected against the unit’s golden visor. With the pest disposed of, Tzorvar Prime turned its attention to the rest of the Harmony’s forces. It brought its claws together, channeling a huge concentration of magic in between them. Black electricity started to jump off of the machine’s armored shell, sickly green energy beginning to appear within the scarlet sphere it was forming with the Arcane-Manipulators.

It was going to wipe them all away. Every single one of them would simply cease to exist by time it was done with its deadly task. Soon, this system would be forgotten, lifeless and abandoned. The battle that happened in the stellar cradle would be forgotten in the great passage of time. Soon, all who lived would be nothing more than sustenance for the Great Ones-

An explosion went off against the side of the machine’s head, knocking it away. Tzorvar Prime shook, casting the fire and smoke away. The machine looked around almost furiously until it spotted the iridescent purple trail that the Federation shuttle left in its wake. It moved its claws apart; the energy summoned spreading apart until all four Manipulators wielded volatile energies in their claws.

”I saved you before! And now I have to help destroy you!” Phineas was hurtling toward the unit from directly overhead, phaser cannons charging up. He fired the golden beams and to his surprise, the unit reacted swiftly, looking up in the direction of the attack and holding up a limb to create an energy shield. The two phaser beams rebounded off the barrier and Phineas had the shuttle break away to reevaluate his strategy.

A spiraling white beam with black and green electricity running along it erupted from another Manipulator, chasing the shuttle down. With only split-seconds to react, Phineas had the shuttle roll to the side, the beam’s outer edge overtaking the ship’s shielding and clipping its wing.

“By Celestia’s flaming tail!” Phineas yelled, warnings appearing across his monitors. His wing was alight with blue arcane fire, most of its panels blown off completely. The engine on it was only connected by the wing’s bare, heavily damaged framework, quite alarmingly enough. He cut his throttle in the hopes of lessening the probability of the engine snapping off all together in flight and turned the ship around so that it was facing the battle unit again.

Phineas fired his wing mounted laser guns and his phasers in a last ditch effort to do some damage as he went soaring away from his target. The wing mounted guns had the advantage over the phasers in that they traveled at the speed of light so they hit practically instantaneously, whereas the condensed energy orbs had a progressively larger distance to travel with each shot fired.

“Come on, think, Startrot!” Phineas was staring at what was certain doom. The power Tzorvar Prime had at its command could have destroyed ships many times the size of the shuttle in one good hit. In the state the shuttle was in now, simply dodging another attack could have resulted in disaster.

“Hey Phineas, looks like you’ve gotten yourself a bit of a situation over there!” he heard Elysia say over his ship’s communicator.

“Uh, I suppose you can call it that,” Phineas said uneasily, staring through his view screen at the machine in the distance, thoroughly anticipating its next attack.

“Brace yourself, Federation pony. This might be a bit-“

Phineas was forced against his seat suddenly. He grunted, at the corner of his vision he could have seen his ship’s damage report appear: a blueprint display of his ship with the port side engine colored a deep red color to show that it was inoperable. ”It’s inoperable because it fell off!”

“… Jarring.” Elysia finished saying when the shuttle was safely underneath the battle-sphere, held by several purplish grappling beams.

“Ugh… I’ve been on wilder rides,” Phineas replied. “Thanks for the assist, by the way.”

“No problem, you had a bunch of mechs vying to blow you to smithereens and we thought we’d deny them the privilege, right Alikir?”

“Too busy shooting to make small talk!” Phineas heard the ranger exclaim in the background.

“That’s odd; it didn’t stop you before-“ Elysia started to say before Alikir interjected.

“The bunch of mechs that were after the pony are now after us!”

Phineas saw the quick succession of glowing darts sailing past his view from all different directions. His aiming reticle locked on to a mech attacking them from the front and he deployed a missile. The rocket’s engine fired up shortly after it was forced out of the launch apparatus and it veered off to the side, arcing around to home in on the mech, which then fired up its own thrusters and sped away with the warhead adjusting its course to intercept it.

Meanwhile, Alikir put the free range guns to work firing quick bursts at the enemy machines to deter them from getting into proper strike positions. “I don’t suppose we can shake them?” he asked.

“Not with our cargo in two!” Elysia replied.

“Trust me,” Phineas said, “if I had both my thrusters ready, I’d be more than happy to give you a speed boost!”

“We can’t keep this up,” the female ranger said grimly. “They’ve got us outnumbered and they’ve taken out most of our heavy hitters. We can’t bring down the normal mechs, much less the big one with the tentacles!”

Phineas frowned and lowered his gaze but said nothing to contest her point. As much as he wanted to remain hopeful that somehow they could turn this around, even he had to realize they were simply outgunned in this scenario. There was no way to regroup because every individual ship was caught up in its own fight out there, and they were being pummeled without mercy. How many other ships were damaged beyond practical combat capability during this fight? What was the true number of lives lost in this one conflict alone, much less the rest of the galaxy?

“Wait… something’s happening!” Alikir said.

Phineas looked up, puzzled. “What’s up?”

“The station, Phineas,” Alikir replied.

Phineas searched for the complex in the sea of yellow, looking past the islands of wrecked ships. His shuttle’s display confirmed Alikir’s statement: something was going on there. Its weaponry was powering up to higher levels of energy output. The stallion knew what this meant: the station was diverting more power to its defenses!

“… Duh, Startrot. Way to forget about the damned fortress just floating out there!”

Uolix watched as target after target was marked for destruction by the super projector.

“Fire Vindicators!” she ordered.

The giant missiles came out of their launch ports in droves, boring through the film of mist surrounding the station at high speeds and seeking out the mechs. Those in the close vicinity of the station met their end immediately, frayed machinery scattered about by the resulting fireballs.

“Fire directed energy cannons!”

Pulsating beams shot into the midst of the enemy. Mechs that were shooting at the missiles or flying away from them were sliced apart and subsequently exploded. Much of this assault was focused on Tzorvar Prime, however, the machine losing one of its limbs by having it sheared off by the attack.

“Fire artillery!”

The guns slid back into their housing, the enormous rounds flying with rolling clouds of smoke. They punched through Tzorvar Prime’s body, the visor smashed to bits when one went through its head, another through its chest, yet another ripping off a large piece of its side, taking off two more limbs and one final round hitting the Hex-core dead on.

The smoldering cavities flashed with green light, lightning leaping out from them. Cracks spread out from each cavernous wound, glowing bright. Rings of runic symbols wrapped around the unit before being scattered by an abrupt discharge of emerald energies and sparks.

And so, the machine-god was slain.