Gozen screams orders, her men pull back on their horses firing again and again to no more effect. She follows them at the rear, knowing her task is to protect them even if her bunraku alone could never defeat such a monster. If she were with the ashigaru she could spur them on, sacrifice a hundred men to pin the kami down long enough for her puppeteers to do their job, send them climbing its earthen flanks to assist them. But their orders were to enter an unprotected breach in a castle, not to assault a monster out of a legend. Wherever they are, they will not come.
She can only trust a runaway princess and a reckless fool.
So we ended up doing something recklessly flashy, and made ourselves the hero of the piece. Lady Gozen is about to realize what she signed up for with us. 'Let her temper her colleague's rashness', she thought. Little did she know she now has two Ondos to deal with instead of one.
It looks like our mechs took the brunt of the beating, but our army was spared instead and we suffered few casualties as woodies weren't good fighters. Might have been a decent trade-off... depends on how much it would take to butter up Mitsuko to get the repairs done. Again.
"I don't know if you're in there, Captain Akamine," you say as you approach the creature, "but if you are I want you to know that your men were good soldiers, and did their best to honor your memory."
This was a surprisingly nice gesture on our part. Unexpectedly so, I would say, for someone who is locked in a battle to the death with a giant monster. Of course, by then it didn't try to kill our murderbro yet.
Then Ondo, his bunraku riddled with iron blades, is flying. The mad bastard, too weakened to hold his own, climbed up the rooftop of one of the squat wooden buildings behind the kami, and jumped. Before the club can come down on you it is Ondo who comes down, short blade held in both hands, driving it with all the force of gravity and his armor's weight into Akamine's back.
Heh. I figured he could do something like that, only thought it'd come to that if he finds it hard to control his Bunraku because of the Heart's meddling, not the damage. Momentum, whether from gravity or from inertia, is impossible to subvert or resist.
I did not expect that move with spear- and arrow-heads exploding. Scary thing, that was... what would even become of us if we jumped out of the mech?
As for the choice, I'd probably try to crush the Heart by falling on top of it. A steel breastplate should weigh a good fifty to hundred kilos. A fall from two meters just might be able to do it. But hands should do it too.
[x]Squeeze it until it cracks. If you can damage it enough, the flow of power will be cut off, without needing to destroy it. It is safer, and it could be repaired later.
Communing with it... it's tempting, considering we already had a similar experience. But while I don't mind Aoi's memories, I am not very fond of a Kami being a presence in our mind or dreams. It could, however, tell us more about the Heavens and possibly the events that lead to the Fall.
