Seems like a good plan. Cut out the enemies buffs and they will be easier to deal with. The fact that this cult was able to grow so large undeteced is inexcusable though. Frankly Piggot needs to be fired and replaced.
Seems like a good plan. Cut out the enemies buffs and they will be easier to deal with. The fact that this cult was able to grow so large undeteced is inexcusable though. Frankly Piggot needs to be fired and replaced.
Whole lot of the BBPD investigating reports made by the local populace (when they can be bothered to), then coming out reporting everything is fine, starting families and backing each other's stories; and then the BBPD started to actively stymie further investigations, insisting there was nothing parahuman about the Church of the Star Traveller and stonewalling the PRT. And the PRT in the Bay is itself is stretched thin dealing with the rapid expansion of the E-88 as well as Mafia associated organised crime groups now fitted with superpowers and weirdo supervillains or crime gangs nobody ever heard of before they just started showing up.
Seems like a good plan. Cut out the enemies buffs and they will be easier to deal with. The fact that this cult was able to grow so large undeteced is inexcusable though. Frankly Piggot needs to be fired and replaced.
[X] Plan Buffs and Slaying
- [X]: Focus on Buff Aura Creatures: Attack the synapse creatures providing synaptic aura buffs to the swarm, lowering their overall capabilities
- [X]: Prepare Buffs: Fire up some buffs before the battle is engaged to rebalance the odds in your favour.
- [X]: Shifting Warrior, Transforming Master: Use your alt-modes for maximum mobility, crawling around enemies like the brood king with the spider-ball, dropping power bombs, transforming into a jet or helicopter as needed; never giving them an opportunity to really grab onto you while hitting at vulnerable points, even going inside the Brood King's mouth in morph ball mode to drop power bombs where possible.
- [X]: The Lightning Incarnate, the Storm's Son: Make heavy usage of the Shock Coil, the Positron beam, and the Electrowave Beam; frying your enemies and stopping them in their tracks with convulsing bolts of lightning and anti-matter; never missing, striking foe after foe without mercy. Deals a great deal of damage but is intensive on your Universal Ammo and Missile stock piles.
[X] Plan Buffs and Slaying
- [X]: Focus on Buff Aura Creatures: Attack the synapse creatures providing synaptic aura buffs to the swarm, lowering their overall capabilities
- [X]: Prepare Buffs: Fire up some buffs before the battle is engaged to rebalance the odds in your favour.
- [X]: Shifting Warrior, Transforming Master: Use your alt-modes for maximum mobility, crawling around enemies like the brood king with the spider-ball, dropping power bombs, transforming into a jet or helicopter as needed; never giving them an opportunity to really grab onto you while hitting at vulnerable points, even going inside the Brood King's mouth in morph ball mode to drop power bombs where possible.
- [X]: The Lightning Incarnate, the Storm's Son: Make heavy usage of the Shock Coil, the Positron beam, and the Electrowave Beam; frying your enemies and stopping them in their tracks with convulsing bolts of lightning and anti-matter; never missing, striking foe after foe without mercy. Deals a great deal of damage but is intensive on your Universal Ammo and Missile stock piles.
Group 2:
Arcee (Autobot Commander, Great Resistances, Great Defence, All Rounder): Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 5
Warpath (Autobot General, Sublime Resistances, Extreme Defence, Tanking, All-Rounder Damage): Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Joseph (Shadow Magic Defender, Decent Resistances, Great Defence, Support, Ranged Damage) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Doctor Black (Bound Shadow King, Great Resistances, Extreme Defence, Support, Control) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress 0
Ten Shadow Formations (Summoned Shadow Creatures, Decent Resistances, Great Defence: Control, Support) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 0. (Comprised of one Nightblade, Three Shadowmen, Five Dark Panthers, Ten Shades, Fifteen Shadow Scorpions, Twenty Nighthounds, Twenty Five Living Shadows, Thirty Shadelings)
Ten Demonic Cohorts (Summoned Demons, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder )Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of one Demonic Decurion, Three Demonic Corporals, Five Moloch Bulls, Ten Demonic Legionaries, Fifteen Winged-Demons, Twenty Hellhounds, Twenty Five Demonlings, and Thirty Imps stats are for each unit)
Three Warlock Demons (Summoned Demonic Spellcasters. Good Resistances, Good Defence. Control and Support, can summon their own demons). Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Hellknights (Summoned Armoured Demonic Cavalry, Great Reistances, Great Defence. Melee/tanking.) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Fire Elemental Cohorts (Summoned Fire Elementals, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of One Pyrocaster, Three Incendiery Warriors, Five Salamanders, Ten Pyro-Phalangites, Fifteen Bonfire-Born, Twenty Flaming Ones, Twenty Five Pyre-Gargoyles, and Thirty Sparklings)
Three Greater Salamanders (Summoned Fire Elemental Warbeast. Damage out the ass. Great Resistances, Great Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Elemental Pyromancers (Summoned Fire Elemental Mages. Ranged Damage and Control. Great Resistances, Good Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Golem Cohorts (Golems. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking.) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Comprised of One Golem Master, Three Golem Warriors, Five Golem Watchers, Ten Golem Soldiers, Fifteen Golem Beasts, Twenty Lesser Golems, Twenty Five Golem Men, Thirty Golemlings)
Three Golem Guardians (Golems focused on defense. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking, Support.) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
Five Golem Wardens (Golems focused on Crowd Control. Tanking/Control) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
Ten Ithilmar Warden Claws (Warp-powered automata. Great Resistances, Great Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Each Comprised of One Ithilya Lance, Three Metal Wardens, Five Iron-Hosts, ten Swordbearers, fifteen Spearmakers, twenty Furnace-Spiders, twenty-five metal hawks, and thirty Forgelings; stats are for each unit. Kept in Webway pockets until needed; summoned on the spot when necessary.)
The monster's aura was noxious as the room writhed in tune with its breath like the rhythm of a set of lungs, a sinister pulse racing through the tissue like some horrid, vast heart. Pulsations brought to life more of the viscous slime, and you launched yourself into a sprint before curling into the morph ball and throwing yourself up with its spring function, charging a further boost and diving through the guard of the creature as its upper two limbs transformed into a pair of crackling swords of bone, crystal, and carapace; flesh melting into base matter and sliding back into its new form. The whistle of its sabre was a death siren, but you latched onto its shoulder while Arne's shock coil sparked to life and danced across its face; matter to energy streams flowing into it, creating voltaic currents that would short out every system on this planet a million times over.
It flinched, you dropped a series of charged pyro-bombs all across the creature; your morph ball mode sprouting out sharp legs and repeatedly stabbing energised blades of cold into the heated areas to cause brief shatterings of the creature's hide, boosting away and uncurling as the surge of hair-on-end sensation rocked through your body and told you to get out of there as quickly as possible. Your body phasing out and your cannon clicking to release a dozen super missiles into the creature's rapidly regenerating face.
Samus Super Missiles: 28/40
By the third super missile it had adapted and its body made a radical, heinous transformation as its tissue became denser, squelching and cracking into a more resilient form that further shrouded itself in living metal as the strength of the iron arm power rushed through it; giving the creature a degree of toughness that would allow it to virtually ignore much of the incoming weapons fire that rained across it, demonic guns and flickering exciter sparks dancing off of its hide and each super missile impact pushing it back farther less and less. The last missile it caught with its hands and flung towards you, unaware that you were immune to your own weapons before you shifted into helicopter mode; rotors spinning to life and hacking through the swarm of winged beasts flocking around you; which steadily grew harder and harder to slice through.
SHIFTING INFESTATION HEALTH: 98%
The munitions launcher vented corrosive fury as the creature loped, body changing into something leaner and swifter, darting around the nimble swings of Idaliryn to grab at Warpath; Boneswords clashing against his power fists with a devastating thunderclap. As its warp shields flared to life to intercept your multi-missiles and rockets, Arne tackled it in the legs, blitzing through a horde of ymgarl strain genestealers who exploded to pulp as his speed booster's comet-like energy through them. It stumbled into a swing of Elendria's maul, warp power flowing into the Eldar girl to let her strike with a force beyond what her flesh should have been able to achieve, a heavy crack making it lurch into Dawnmaker's megaton uppercut; a resounding thunderclap reverberating through the room.
But as Lelithax approached with her halberd, pendulum blades of shadow magic sweeping aside her foes while her druchii weapon gleamed with sinister intent to cleave into the juggernaut's under-right claw hand, it had formed a shield of bio-metallic carapace and its body shimmered with the energy of tremendous speed. A hundred thousand blows rained on the nimble Eldar, faster than she or her kin could block until Idaliryn's defensive field burst; hyshic energies screaming as they dispersed and a heavy hoof stomping on his wraithbone and ithilmar armour repeatedly until a crack formed; fleshy hooked tendrils bursting out and grabbing onto Warpath to throw him to the side; other hand melting into a bio-cannon that erupted with a swarm of hypersonic flesh-starved and acid covered beetles hungrily gnawing at Winterpyre who roared in outrage as he was swarmed by the hungry projectiles. Your heart was starting to slow, the Bladewizard's pained grunts echoing in your helmet and making your lip quiver. Everywhere the creatures were threatening to overwhelm your team.
"Arne, keep the big thing busy, I'll take out some of the support!" You said over your commlink with your partner as he nodded, moving to duel with the Infestation as it grabbed Warpath by the head and tossed him aside through scores of Alice's demons. His suit charged after his wrist mounted shock coil vaporised a row of bloated brain psionic cultists; tearing through pink translucent barriers and making spark-dust out of a hundred bodies, he swept in, bayonet, sword, rotors, and wing blades at the ready. Stopping time and then severing the beast's hands, giving you time to act elsewhere.
You took stock of the situation elsewhere, eyes locked on the situation to the right flank where the line of summoned creatures was at its thinnest.
Incarnate empowered cultists were starting to shoot their way through the flanks of summoned minions; lasguns striking with a force beyond their normal capability, chainsaw swords digging into hapless foes and deadly disruptor field empowered tools striking through demon, golem, and fire elemental alike. Summoned legions who had carved their way through the upper levels were now buckling, fighting bitterly but futilely.
You turned your attention to Ormothin who tried to flow restorative energy into the faltering summoned armies, the Eldar boy wavering as Broodlords slavered with anticipation, their psyker powers crashing into him like a rumbling stormcloud. Clarioli's winds of magic crackled along with his, pushing against the straining waves as coils of energy danced, ghosting in and out of existence while the air began to scream with an energy you found fascinating but worrying.
Seeing that the first Genestealer Abominant; a wretched creature with an assyemtrical face divided by a vertically opening mouth where teeth of various sizes and shapes pushed their way in and out of being, muscles rippling and shifting into a metallic sheen; had broken through, you sprang into action. The creature crushing a Hellknight who had cleaved its way through a score of metamorphs with a single blow from a massive hammer and a thunderclap, approaching the rear lines while Talosii busied themselves with wrestling massive slithering serpent beasts.
You rolled into the morph ball, hacked the abominant's hamstrings from under it and released a few toxin bombs, jabbing the blades of your morph ball into its spine and twisting to make its muscles spasm to swing the hammer into a rather surprised looking Aberrant wielding a massive rotary gun who simply disappeared into purple mist.
Arcee cycle-kicked her way through the swarm, energon blades reaping through foes in her path as she flicked her optics to you, tossing out g renades to slow down the relentless advance, electric field forcing acolytes crawling on her to let go or be turned to dust. She was impressive, skillful, agile, things you admired, but you feared for her as she bled energon from rents in her armour, her movements already slower than yours and only slowing further. She was larger than you yes, older by far. But you were stronger, and she was already fighting to her limits.
"I've got this area covered, move!" She hissed to you, shoulder missiles arcing around her with a whistle and the rumble of bomb-thunder. You doubted that though, could anyone but yourself and Arne handle a flank on their own against horrors of this scale? Already the Cult was sending up further resources, assembled in secret factories assisted by their assimilation of superhuman technological prowess and their understanding of their own native devices. She was brave, but this seemed to be more your position to hold.
"You need to pull back!" You said, voice quivering with disbelief at her stubborn desire to keep her position, stepping back to let one of Alyrsero's devastating Ethereal slashes clear out enemies who had shattered the demonic lines and then sweeping plasmaspewer flame over the other creatures who howled as they died; your beam fire shifting, transforming, always changing as your needs altered. Charged shots were used, morph ball attacks into the thicket of aura creatures were made to weaken the swarm, focused attacks lashing at you; millions of scratch injuries by those beasts who ascertained your position or struck when you weren't ghosted. They were seemingly aware of your time stop ability, and were adjusting around it; creatures with warped time able to move slowly in your field of stopped time tearing their way through the birthing mats.
You panted, Arcee not able to respond properly as she was being pinned to the ground by another abominant until you split the thing head to navel. She kicked herself up while you exhaled.
"We're gonna be fine...promise." Arcee said, relaxing as Clarioli's chamonic power seeped into her and mended her rent armour and cut chassis, letting the gold magic charge her up further as she punched a hand into her palm.
The needle sensation of incoming danger to friends burned in your brain while Winterpyre released a gout of impossible hellfrostfire; combining the energies of three, largely contradictory elements to make full adaptation impossible as creatures burn, froze, and felt the flensing toxin-flame of hell roil through them. Your cannon and bombs had done bloody work; rocket pods and multi-missiles unleashing a war's worth of munitions in all directions, but you took a moment to see that the beasts; under the command of their gestalt; had brought forth heavier armour. A vehicle whose main gun boomed and flattened a section of golems with its mighty detonation rolled into view, gun smoking as it crested over the cover formed for it by shifting flesh to bring itself to bear.
Your grapple beam latched onto the vehicle huge barrel clicking with a freshly loaded shell as the thing's hull and pintle guns started to vomit out rocket propelled mass-reactive rounds, its main gun firing only for you to snatch the shell while your cannon arm yanked the vehicle towards yourself; splattering cultists caught in the path until you smashed your foot into it hard enough to shatter the light tank into a shrapnel storm. The beasts in the way died, ripped apart into bloody chunks that you put paid to with your munitions' launchers toxin sprayer to melt them into irrecoverable sludge, the creatures who were once tearing their way through the summoned legions now starting to get pushed back with the death of so many aura creatures.
Alice pulled a little more of Winterpyre's chains free and the demon king's form swelled in size and his own demonic legions erupted from the earth in even greater numbers. Furious beasts of many sizes and shapes roared their defiance against the Cult; Kaustos similarly increasing in might and heat as Demon and Elemental joined forces to throw the legions back. While it seemed to startle the cultists, it was a sight that warmed your heart. Well, not as much as the Genestealers being bathed in elemental fire were being warmed.
"Now you're going to be fine." You said, giving a thumbs up.
Returning your attention back to the fight with the Brood King, Arne had been busied with a swarm of assassin organisms who kept on trying to sneak attack him; preventing him from properly focusing on his duel with the Shifting Infestation. But the infestation had shown signs of weakening, its warp field dimming and its corrosive blood spilling out. But as Arne had by now adapted to its weapons enough to take its hits head on, the monster pulled another trick; tearing open the veil of reality with a shriek that sent chills of empyreal horror into your mind and soul as you stared into a realm of possibilities and the horrid shadow-web of pulsing hive-thoughts. Nearby daemons were ripped apart as they approached it, beasts formed of gestalt thought slavering as they were drawn into the warp, howling from unnatural demises while the gate was thrown towards Arne. As it lashed out with unreal energies, you were already moving as fast as you could; missiles flying free in all directions to carve your way towards the foe.
Arne grunted as the vortex served as a conduit for direct, incinerating blasts that tore into him, striking him even through phase-outs and timestops through their achronal nature; augmenting the energies of the psyker-horrors and bringing him to his knees with power that would have felled many dauntless champions and armies from the beast's own realm. He didn't cry out, but you could feel his pain. Your stomach flipped inside and you couldn't wait another moment while the creature turned to an injured Idaliryn, still trying to fight until it swept him up with a claw, other arms sprouting added appendages to see off other duelists.
It threw forth incarnate powered lightning at him, the bolts missing him as he ducked and weaved out of their way and his
Its ovipostor emerging to give the Hyshari the infectious kiss until illusory assailants dragged its attention away, the creature roaring in annoyance while Kaeliyae pulled Idaliryn back to the auspices of your team's support; restorative energy and healing mending his bruised body and damaged armour. It had formed a seed gun spitting out the progenitors of sharp, choking, corroding slime covered plants that swarmed the battlefield, dragging down those it touched; slicing demons to ribbons and crushing golems to dust and foil in an attempt to grab their intended prey; tripping Kaeliyae as she raced back; swinging a scythe like talon down with air burning force. Only your timely intervention in jet mode stopped the impact, batting the creature's claw away while Arne fed the warp tear with his radiance beam until it shrieked into oblivion, standing up and rushing its tail.
"Arne, Zoanthropes!" You said, noting the brain beasts hovering in the air and coordinating the fire of cultists fielding heavy weapons while the air quivered under their psychic might before erupting in a sheet of warpflame that engulfed Dawnmaker's enduring White Dwarf form, the Kheldian's luminous white aura flickering as he staggered back and dropped to a knee. A nova of dark energy exploded amidst the cult backline, Joseph's spell forming a howling vortex whose tendrils lashed into some of the guardians of the brainbeasts, cultists bloated into bulky forms with bodies of living stone who shrugged off the impacts of Iybraa's telekinetic projectiles as Alyrsero pressed back against the Tyrannic psychic wave; the Eldar youth grunting while his power waxed and the energic tides rolled back towards the foe.
Arne swung the Shifting infestation like a ball and chain, pulling the beast off of its feet even as it altered its density and accumulated more mass; pushing through even its abilities to root itself into the ground with powers to alter gravity and telekinetically dig in; even through an attempted conceptual link to the idea of the ground. It was a rooting force of tectonic scale, but it was not enough as Arne swung the beast straight through the Zoanthropes, exploding their bodies with the beast's now enormous weight, warp fields cracking and bursting into multicoloured particulates and the whole ground shaking like an earthquake had occurred before he swung and threw it through a charging mass of genestealers who made a rather satisfying splat as their brood father rolled atop them.
SHIFTING INFESTATION HEALTH: 70%
You started to attack relentlessly, blasts, blows, strikes, and dodges dancing around the endlessly changing beast as its form went through an impossible number of changes trying to strike you. Powerful blows that should have landed skimming off in altered fate while you found lucky strike after strike that battered the beast back, giving the Eldar time to recover and letting Iybraa take to the field; joining you with a massive telekinetic flensing attack that sought to literally peel the thing's tissue off once its warp field ruptured. With Warpath and Dawnmaker guarding the injured, the two of you were pushing the thing towards the wall, its aura weakening from the death of many aura provided beasts while Iybraa's fury began to crescendo and squelch any creature that tried to birth itself from the biomat, ripping apart organic molecules as they came together.
Combined with ranged fire directed into it, it was reeling, clutching at an arm you had severed from it while its eyes tried to flow back together after Iybraa burst them in its skull.
Shifting Infestation Health: 43%
Arne hadn't gotten away with it without harm though, the beast's secretions and energies and stabbing limbs having tried to eat through his shielding; nevermind the attacks from other creatures he had to bear while he was touching it. He breathed out, looking at the creatures seeming to pause as his suit warned him of his shielding state.
"Samus...I can handle it...I've had worse...keep that thing busy." He said as he started up his rotor blades, fired up his projected shield and let his shock coil bring his shielding back. He seemed calm, collected, the situation unfortunate, but determined to take care of himself and not drag other people down. He was sure he could recover the situation by himself.
You however...you couldn't let him, his eyes widening beneath his helmet when you abandoned position, Warpath cursing and asking Talosii and some of the demons crawling out of Winterpyre's hellrift to take his place as he thundered towards the rapidly regenerating Brood King; joined by Dawnmaker in his humanoid form like a comet that swept the creature straight off of its feet and into the air, throwing it through its swarms of fliers.
"Samus, no!" He shouted, the swathe you cut through the Tyranids being utterly ruinous to their hordes as he tried to stand on his own. But you weren't going to let him get hurt like that as you fought your way through to him like the angel of wrath itself. Draining energy, absorbing quintessence from the slain, and tearing everything between you and him apart, you reached him as he busied himself with a sword duel with a circle of Tyranid warriors all bearing boneswords in each hand.
Though he was faced with forty crackling warp blades surrounding him from all sides, he held his own in swordsmenship, parrying, riposting, retaliating, dodging, forcing them to back off and give him space and then firing off his blink pack to get behind the Alpha Warrior and stab his bayonet into it, letting his shock coil tear it apart and rejuvenate his shielding further.
You ripped through the surprised warriors in moments, the Berserker booster overwhelming their guards and leaving only fizzling gore breaking down into plasma in your wake between shots, slashes, and powerful close combat blows.
Arne though wasn't pleased. "I had it under control." He said, obstinate that he was able to take care of himself in that particular situation.
"Arne, you let yourself get surrounded by melee bioforms! What sort of plan was that?" You asked as he straightened himself and seemed ready to argue before the crash of Warpath on the ground and the sight of a rather well healed looking Brood King made it rather clear that you had other problems.
"Okay...I'll distract it, think you can get in its mouth for a power bomb?" He said, shifting his stance into a combat position.
"Always." You said eagerly.
"I'm...fragging okay...mean right hook on that son of a..." Warpath growled, rubbing his head as the Brood king let loose a keening howl that turned into a sonic pressure wave. Too bad for it, you had the resonance suit all fired up and ready to go; letting the energy soak into your suits to fully revitalise their shielding and store a now maximum capacity resonance burst.
"Let's see the beast repeat that." Idaliryn said, full of piss and vinegar after having been brought back into the fight by Ormothin's healing; decapitating a brood of metamorphs in a single swing before they could get inside the reach of Korlanil's scythe swinging as he shot forward with timewarping hyshic magic. He let out a snarl of annoyance and pushed through the strain of the shadow in the warp to join with you two as your time-distortion units activated. The Brood King shifted into the same stopped time skittering on legs that split into additional limbs for greater backwards mobility before recombining.
Ibyraa herself; pushing through the stopped time through raw psionic might; ambushed the creature with a sudden telekinetic whiplash blow to its midsection; bisecting the creature with a spray of acidic offal. Yet the beast quickly pulled itself back together, grotesque flesh flowing into place as fast as her telekinetics swept through it and crackling warp lightning exploding around what it deemed to be the greatest threat as the Yurye started to tear apart the ceiling and launch the pieces at extreme speeds; impacting with explosive force each time.
Idaliryn threw himself into a blade fury, his sword sweeping around to carve apart the broodlords he sensed were trying to adjust to the timestop; not leaving them the chance to do so while his sword raged with sunlike luminescence; scalding everything it touched to dust and ash. He was to put it lightly, bloody furious as he threw himself with the sort of anger you never thought someone dressed like a dainty paladin would manage, his body wreathed in the wind of light and his blows smashing into the creature again and again.
"YOU WILL CHOKE THIS DAY GREAT DEVOURER! AND I, WHO WALK IN TYRION'S FOOTSTEPS, WILL PERSONALLY SHOVE THE FIST OF RETRIBUTION DOWN YOUR MISBEGOTTEN THROAT!" He shouted with wild rage as he tried his best to parry the far larger blades of his foe; dancing around with the grace of a master. Letting Hysh guide his aim, he struck true and stabbed into the Brood King's chest, burning out one of its hearts before he had to back off, letting the energies of the wind of light scour at the creature's side while Arne rolled in like lightning.
Positron beams lanced across the beast's body, his blades wreathing themselves in anti-matter cutting force augmented with his combi-beams; every blow testing the beast's defenses a little more while you pumped gamma beam fire into its body; Iybraa screaming as she sent forth a psychic shriek. Adjusting its physiology to be hardier, with tougher armour, more resilient flesh of biometal, and generating crackling warp fields again, you grabbed onto its maw of tentacles with your grapple beam and flung yourself into its mouth as you transformed into the morph ball.
The sights you saw inside of its body were to put it mildly, not really for the faint of heart as grotesque flesh made and then unmade itself in an ever shifting mass of slime, tissue, forming and then unforming organs, and pulses and throbs that never had a regular rhythm. Your shielding wasn't too happy about you being here, but the conduits of destiny told you that you were right where you needed to be as you let the power bomb drop.
A white flash of a temperature that went beyond description, where the forces of reality begin to collide into each other and become unmade, where perhaps even energy and matter are not meaningfully distinguished; emerged in a cataclysm that erupted from the beast's innards. It wasn't blasted apart, it wasn't disintegrated. It simply ceased to be as its every particle collapsed before virtually inviolable energy. You rolled out, hitting the ground and uncurling before turning towards the beast; most of its frontal body simply gone, two halves hanging by bare strips of fleshmetal, sagging forward.
Shifting Infestation Health: 0%
"Gross." You said, making a rather displeased sound as you looked at the creature's body droop, the fire seemingly gone from its eyes. Even though your shielding had ensured none of the beast's slime would stick to your armour, you were still filled with the unpleasant sensation of having been inside something so grotesque. You were pretty sure that the thing even grew eyes and optic nerves to stare at you as you went inside, leaving a shiver down your spine.
"Uh...well...could be messier." Arne said, doing his best to try and cheer you up as he approached.
"Well. Certainly messier than I would have liked, but impressive bomb." Idaliryn said, twisting his sword into the ground.
"Well, I guess this is where you do your absorption thing huh?" Iybraa said as you turned and looked behind yourself.
Its corpse left behind a pair of upgrades from some particularly large hunks of dead flesh that your armoursuits rendered down into useful components.
The Ymgarl factor allows for the armour and zero suit to alter its properties as is deemed necessary; increasing resilience to damage, strength output, speed, or other similar physical characteristics via distributing a series of "tokens" between assorted physical stats from a reserve. This allows for greatly increased user flexibility, but caution must be advised that changing the distribution of these tokens is not an instant process. Acquire more accel charge upgrades to increase the speed of transformation, and acquire more Transformation tokens to increase the reserve of tokens. Acquire a genoadaptive upgrade to allow this ability to be integrated into user physiology with the added benefit of further immunizing the user to what few infections might still be able to afflict them.
Samus' Notes: Hrm, combined with the adaptive defense systems, all I need is something to add adaptational capabilities to my offensive suite and I think I should be able to maximise my versatility in nearly any situation. Still, the note that this could also apply to my body is...disturbing.
Arne's Notes: I'm really, really hoping that the genoadaptive upgrade won't lead to me becoming as...deformed as the Ymgarl genestealers can become, but given that the regenerator doesn't seem to have made me into a freak, I think I'll manage.
Devourer Components allow for the user to restore and repair zero suit and armour components and shielding by acquiring the requisite energy from attacking enemies in melee or via the grapple beam. Enemies slain in such a manner will give an immediate bumper crop of harvested energy, allowing the user to stay in the fight as long as they are able to cause damage and defeat opponents in close quarters combat. This ability will require additional upgrades to apply to ranged weapons or to allow the armour or zero suit to consume matter and energy outright via touch. Genoadaptive upgrades will allow the upgrade to also apply to the user's body; with the added benefit of furthering resistance to microbial attack as the deaths of these organisms in the body only serves to further invigorate the immune system.
Samus' Notes: Well, given how often I find myself getting into the very thickest fighting, this is definitely going to be a useful upgrade I think? Seems to be better suited to dealing with hordes than singular strong enemies however, and the need to enter melee is restrictive. But I'm finding myself in close quarters combat all the time...
Arne's Notes: Between this, the munitions regenerator, and the regeneration systems, I'm starting to think that I'm supposed to be throwing myself into constantly heavier fighting. I've already killed so many organisms in this one mission. I just hope I don't have to get into fighting so intense I'll have to see whether this will really let me wage war eternal.
INCARNATE LEVEL 2 UNLOCKED, BODY HEALTH INCREASED TO 1500/1500. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS INCREASED. FIRST JUDGEMENT INCARNATE SLOT UNLOCKED. FIRST INTERFACE INCARNATE SLOT UNLOCKED.
Incarnate power flowed into you from the dead creature, quite a lot of it. You felt for a moment, a connection to something deeper, something tremendous. A primordial Source of creative energy and power. You felt stronger, faster, tougher, better. Your body tensed and then relaxed as it let the power seep fully into it, and your mind was already seeing ways to weave the threads of Source power into something new, some powerful new way of smiting opponents. But you felt a tremor in the causeways of destiny.
Your first instinct though, was that the creature still had plenty of biomass to access. And it had survived plenty of things that looked like they should have absolutely killed it. Not to mention, it didn't need its organs. There were still cells that lived, and therefore it wasn't actually dead.
You pointed your cannon towards it, firing away at the corpse as time resumed and the floor started to quiver, flesh peeling away as the Cult started to pull back to guard the body with their lives; throwing themselves at it to melt into its mass if need be to restore their horrid father. You cursed yourself for not dropping more power bombs, angrily castigating your arrogant pride in assuming that the fight was over just because you finished off the foe in a dramatic and cool way. Now you were trying to smash your way through armoured warbeasts who formed a shield wall; scintillating bubbles of energy absorbing shots as they held back your forces.
The Infection pulled in flesh towards itself; its body refusing to die as its tissue took over the functions of lost biomass and the beast's tendrils grabbed nearby Tyranids and cultists who simply melted into its body. It stood up again, gurgling its hatred as it regenerated, Warpath letting rip with his chest cannon through its head only to find it growing once more as it grew a more distended brain at the end of an elongated, sauropod like neck, its wings expanding into a more dragon-like length and its limbs elongating further. It adjusted its stance, moving in stooped over, dinosaur-like bipedal fashion with tentacles emerging from behind its hind legs to balance its body a bit further, each of the tendrils crackling with paralyctic energies as the beast snarled and coiled, bones seeming to melt in its body to allow it impossible flexibility only to resolidify shortly afterwards as it scraped its claws against the hardest portions of the floor.
The Brood Drake is a further evolution of the Brood King into a form better suited for dealing with the challenges your group has been posing to it. It has amplified its focus on the channeling of Warp Energy in an effort to better make use of a tool that you do not presently have in your arsenal. It also makes use of an augmented breath weapon, a warpflame bio-plasmic gout with a strong electrical component in an effort to disrupt power suit and mechanical life form technology. Its warp field is more consistently active than before, and the creature is deepening its connection to the source, absorbing more of the Brood Mind's understanding of the Source into itself to amplify its abilities. However, it is also relying less on large numbers of minions; sensing that the users are able to absorb quintessence from defeated opponents. It will instead focus on smaller numbers of more elite and well equipped forces, with a greater emphasis on biomass absorption to repair damaged elite guards. The creature lacks any individual weak points, but it can only adapt to so many different damage types at a time. Coordinated assault and frequent weapon switching will overwhelm even its rapid transformations. The power bomb is similarly too destructive for the creature to adapt to without warp fields to add impossible durability to itself.
Samus' Notes: Okay, so I really did just need to drop more power bombs on it then.
Arne's Notes: What I wouldn't give for the screw attack right about now.
Group 2:
Arcee (Autobot Commander, Great Resistances, Great Defence, All Rounder): Shields: 30%. Armour: 100%. Health: 85%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 5
Warpath (Autobot General, Sublime Resistances, Extreme Defence, Tanking, All-Rounder Damage): Shields: 95%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Joseph (Shadow Magic Defender, Decent Resistances, Great Defence, Support, Ranged Damage) Shields: 90%. Armour: 80%. Health: 95%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Doctor Black (Bound Shadow King, Great Resistances, Extreme Defence, Support, Control) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress 0
Ten Shadow Formations (Summoned Shadow Creatures, Decent Resistances, Great Defence: Control, Support) Shields: 20%. Armour: 30%. Health: 50%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 0. (Comprised of one Nightblade, Three Shadowmen, Five Dark Panthers, Ten Shades, Fifteen Shadow Scorpions, Twenty Nighthounds, Twenty Five Living Shadows, Thirty Shadelings)
Ten Demonic Cohorts (Summoned Demons, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder )Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of one Demonic Decurion, Three Demonic Corporals, Five Moloch Bulls, Ten Demonic Legionaries, Fifteen Winged-Demons, Twenty Hellhounds, Twenty Five Demonlings, and Thirty Imps stats are for each unit)
Three Warlock Demons (Summoned Demonic Spellcasters. Good Resistances, Good Defence. Control and Support, can summon their own demons). Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Hellknights (Summoned Armoured Demonic Cavalry, Great Reistances, Great Defence. Melee/tanking.) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Fire Elemental Cohorts (Summoned Fire Elementals, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of One Pyrocaster, Three Incendiery Warriors, Five Salamanders, Ten Pyro-Phalangites, Fifteen Bonfire-Born, Twenty Flaming Ones, Twenty Five Pyre-Gargoyles, and Thirty Sparklings)
Three Greater Salamanders (Summoned Fire Elemental Warbeast. Damage out the ass. Great Resistances, Great Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Elemental Pyromancers (Summoned Fire Elemental Mages. Ranged Damage and Control. Great Resistances, Good Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Golem Cohorts (Golems. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking.) Shields: 10%. Armour: 20%. Health: 40%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Comprised of One Golem Master, Three Golem Warriors, Five Golem Watchers, Ten Golem Soldiers, Fifteen Golem Beasts, Twenty Lesser Golems, Twenty Five Golem Men, Thirty Golemlings)
Three Golem Guardians (Golems focused on defense. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking, Support.) Shields: 40%. Armour: 30%. Health: 30%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
Five Golem Wardens (Golems focused on Crowd Control. Tanking/Control) Shields: 40%. Armour: 20%. Health: 10%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
WINTERPYRE AND KAUSTOS ARE SUMMONING MORE FORCES, AVAILABLE PETS FOR EUDAIMONICA INCREASED BY x10; LOSSES REPLACED INSTANTLY FOR TWO ROUNDS.
Ten Ithilmar Warden Claws (Warp-powered automata. Great Resistances, Great Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 40%. Armour: 50%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Each Comprised of One Ithilya Lance, Three Metal Wardens, Five Iron-Hosts, ten Swordbearers, fifteen Spearmakers, twenty Furnace-Spiders, twenty-five metal hawks, and thirty Forgelings; stats are for each unit. Kept in Webway pockets until needed; summoned on the spot when necessary.)
[]: Purge Tyrannic biomass wherever possible: Eliminate Tyrannic matter to reduce the rate at which more Tyranids spawn to reinforce the Brood King and reduce its ability to draw on matter to adjust its capabilities.
[]: Focus on Buff Aura Creatures: Attack the synapse creatures providing synaptic aura buffs to the swarm, lowering their overall capabilities
[]: Focus on the Brood King: Eliminate the Brood King as fast as possible to remove the incarnate buffs it gives to other tyranids.
[]: Focus on the Casters: Take out the casting capable Tyranids and Cultists before they start throwing hands with various forms of esoteric attacks.
[]: Focus on Staying Alive: Put all efforts into avoiding infection by the phage cells, the genestealers, or being eaten alive by the tyranids.
[]: Focus on breaching the Tyranid Shroud: Put efforts into trying to get a ground-bridge connection to the autobots for them to bring in a Sweep team to do a biopurge of this nest, risky but calls in a high-grade autobot crew of Sweeps; wreckers who specialise in eliminating virulent homogenizing swarms like the Tyranids.
Pet Actions (orders given to the characters with attached pets):
[]: Swarm them!: Use the apex of magic unlocked by winterpyre to bury the foe in a tide of instantly replaced losses. Attack without heed for loss or setback.
[]: Unbind Winterpyre Even More: Winterpyre fights with the equivalent of the tip of the nail of his finger threaded into the material world, he could win this fight on his own; but even with his attempt to reform, as an apocalypse demon he will cause collateral damage. Addittionally, the added magical energy will draw attention from other enemies and make the Hive Mind deem Alice a threat.
[]: Support the important people: Have the pets surround and support team members; keeping the chaff out of the way and offering healing, buffs, debuffs, and other forms of support wherever necessary.
[]: Rip the Brood Drake Apart: Have the pets attack the Brood Drake over most other priorities, seeking to overwhelm its adaptational powers by whatever means necessary, slowing down its regeneration as best they can and dealing great damage to it.
[]: Seek Advantage: Look for any possible advantages such as magical leylines, artefacts, potential hazards that can be turned against the foe, or simple opportunities to strike that will offer the team a number of random benefits.
[]: Adapt as the situation demands: Take a neutral, opportunistic stance, act according to the situation's demands but without a preset strategy. This lacks weaknesses but also lacks specific advantages.
Group Actions (Pick three):
[]: Illusory confusion: Kaeliyae is a masterful illusionist who can trick even the hive mind for a time, turn the senses of the swarm against itself; causing them to attack and harass each other and thus leave the Brood Drake open to more direct attacks.
[]: Thin the Swarm: Deny the creature as much help as possible by using your firepower to annihilate its numbers, destroy the biomass it relies on, and weaken the shadow in the warp to make it easier for the Eldar to use their powers on it.
[]: Target supporting Organisms: The creature is making use of support organisms to feed it more power and provide it with additional biomass to replace completely lost tissue as well as give it all manner of extra abilities.
[]: Look for any terrain advantages: Look for where there might be any features of the battlefield that might help, such as volatile energy generation nodes that could burn the swarm if burst or places you could siphon energy from for immediate shield recharge. You can feel two trapped Progenitor relics too, which can provide immediate upgrades when acquired.
[]: Don't let the Brood Drake Move: Immobilise the Brood Drake through any means necessary. Samus and Arne have the raw strength to hold it back where necessary to let Alyrsero and Kaeliyae cut down on its warp fields to render the creature's biomass more vulnerable to attack.
[]: Farm extra incarnate energy from the swarm: Kill creatures with larger concentrations of Incarnate energy, using that power to enhance your team and yourselves. This will rapidly ensure incarnate power progress as well as make your team more able to contribute in later rounds, adding to the time the encounter will last but having long term benefits.
Samus Actions:
[]: Swift as Lightning, Deadly as Thunder: Rush in and out of melee with a combination of your various movement powers, alt-modes, timestops, teleportations, and phase-outs. Never let the enemy focus you down for too long, but they'll soon realise the futility of attacking you and focus more on other team mates.
[]: The Gauntlet Thrown, the Die Cast: Make yourself the most obvious target possible, rushing into the very thick of battle and draw all eyes on yourself as you purge everything you get into melee with. You'll take more damage, but allies will take less.
[]: Spirit of War, Goddess of Justice: You have incredible ranged firepower that could lay low nations and mountain ranges were their energies not precisely contained and shaped; concentrate them to the maximum upon the most dangerous targets your group decides to deal with, annihilate everything you see without pause or mercy.
[]: A glacier's curse, a winter's smite: Make heavy usage of immobilization weapons such as your paralyzers, the ice beam and missile, and judicious usage of time-stop and teleportation to stop the enemy from moving as they please, pushing allies about to get hurt out of harm's way or locking down threatening enemies before they can close in. Lower damage but better support.
[]: Shifting Warrior, Transforming Master: Use your alt-modes for maximum mobility, crawling around enemies like the brood king with the spider-ball, dropping power bombs, transforming into a jet or helicopter as needed; never giving them an opportunity to really grab onto you while hitting at vulnerable points, even going inside the Brood King's mouth in morph ball mode to drop power bombs where possible.
[]: I am a blade of many shapes, a warrior of many forms: Take a neutral, adaptive stance; adjusting your techniques and your style as the situation demands, not really having the benefits of any one of them but none of the weaknesses of any; but mitigates risk the most overall for the entire team.
Arne Actions:
[]: Blazing Sun, Burning Pride: Hit the creature with power bombs every time its warp fields go down, making use of anti-energy weapons to weaken and sap at its warp fields at every possible opportunity and dropping one of the incredibly deadly weapons on it to deal as much damage as possible.
[]: The Lightning Incarnate, the Storm's Son: Make heavy usage of the Shock Coil, the Positron beam, and the Electrowave Beam; frying your enemies and stopping them in their tracks with convulsing bolts of lightning and anti-matter; never missing, striking foe after foe without mercy. Deals a great deal of damage but is intensive on your Universal Ammo and Missile stock piles.
[]: The Assassin's Knife, the Silent Death: Move stealthily, going between foe to foe deal sneak attack damage, keeping the risk to yourself low but dealing intense burst damage well suited for overpowering the healing factor of your opponents, striking at key moments to deal critical blows.
[]: Knight of Honour, Paladin Aspirant: Make yourself the rock upon which the enemy will shatter against. Rushing into the very thick of battle and draw all eyes on yourself as you purge everything you get into melee with. You'll take more damage, but allies will take less.
[]: Pilot Extraordinary, Child Ace: Take the possibly risky option of having the Sleipnir provide air support with its bunker-buster and object penetrating munitions guided by yourself in tandem with the ship's Synthetic consciousness. This will take some of your attention to coordinate the shots in a way that ensures nobody gets hurt who isn't supposed to, but the ship has plenty of firepower and can breach through the complex and rain fire upon the Brood King.
[]: Champion of the Clan, Strength of Sylux: You are just a bit physically stronger than Samus, though to most the slight difference is mostly academic and is more born of being a bit taller than she is. Still, sometimes raw strength is its own weapon, disrupt the enemy formation by grabbing onto its creatures and smashing them into the rest of the foe like a club or throwing them around. Don't let them coordinate, don't let them even stand. Even if they adapt to blunt force trauma, their ability to make a coherent attack will be egregiously disrupted by your crowd control as you simply smash them around or fling them aside; making everyone's job easier. And you'd like to bet that most of the Tyranids aren't adapted to being impaled with their own melee bio-weapons either.
Scheduled vote count started by Spartakrod on Jan 29, 2021 at 12:13 PM, finished with 14 posts and 5 votes.
[X] Plan Buffs and Slaying
- [X]: Focus on Buff Aura Creatures: Attack the synapse creatures providing synaptic aura buffs to the swarm, lowering their overall capabilities
- [X]: Prepare Buffs: Fire up some buffs before the battle is engaged to rebalance the odds in your favour.
- [X]: Shifting Warrior, Transforming Master: Use your alt-modes for maximum mobility, crawling around enemies like the brood king with the spider-ball, dropping power bombs, transforming into a jet or helicopter as needed; never giving them an opportunity to really grab onto you while hitting at vulnerable points, even going inside the Brood King's mouth in morph ball mode to drop power bombs where possible.
- [X]: The Lightning Incarnate, the Storm's Son: Make heavy usage of the Shock Coil, the Positron beam, and the Electrowave Beam; frying your enemies and stopping them in their tracks with convulsing bolts of lightning and anti-matter; never missing, striking foe after foe without mercy. Deals a great deal of damage but is intensive on your Universal Ammo and Missile stock piles.
[X]: Shifting Warrior, Transforming Master: Use your alt-modes for maximum mobility, crawling around enemies like the brood king with the spider-ball, dropping power bombs, transforming into a jet or helicopter as needed; never giving them an opportunity to really grab onto you while hitting at vulnerable points, even going inside the Brood King's mouth in morph ball mode to drop power bombs where possible.
[X]: Pilot Extraordinary, Child Ace: Take the possibly risky option of having the Sleipnir provide air support with its bunker-buster and object penetrating munitions guided by yourself in tandem with the ship's Synthetic consciousness. This will take some of your attention to coordinate the shots in a way that ensures nobody gets hurt who isn't supposed to, but the ship has plenty of firepower and can breach through the complex and rain fire upon the Brood King.
On the note of unbinding winterpyre, it's more that the more he's unbound, the more likely he'll draw magical or supernatural opponents in the long-term for you to deal with.
I'm thinking it might be a good idea to fight more defensively and get support from Arne's ship. Get a signal through and call in the Autobot Sweeps team. Robots are a good match against constantly regenerating bio monsters.
I'm thinking it might be a good idea to fight more defensively and get support from Arne's ship. Get a signal through and call in the Autobot Sweeps team. Robots are a good match against constantly regenerating bio monsters.
That is a good idea, but tyranids/genstealer nonsense makes any plan, defensive or aggressive rather risky. Not much we can do on that.
My suggestion is to look at our options and go "What can give us the biggest advantage against the tide" the Brood Drake is an issue, but we have a option to keep it in place. What we need to do is thin the numbers of the Hive, so calling that Autobot sweepers is a good idea and we can build off that.
I'm thinking on the Immobilization Weapons for Samus would probably be good, won't do as much damage, but keeps our people safer for what they need to do to call in reinforcements, combine that with Arne either going assassin mode or bringing in the firepower of his ship, we have some good means of keeping the enemies at bay.
As for the pet and group actions.
keeping our people even safer is good and causing as much hassle for our enemies is also good. I will have to look over the options in more detail to get a better idea of a plan that fits my idea
[x] plan: the clown cannot honk if you disable his hand
remember kids, enemies can't fight back if you kill them dead with the power of incredible violence!
[]: Focus on the Brood King: Eliminate the Brood King as fast as possible to remove the incarnate buffs it gives to other tyranids.
[]: Rip the Brood Drake Apart: Have the pets attack the Brood Drake over most other priorities, seeking to overwhelm its adaptational powers by whatever means necessary, slowing down its regeneration as best they can and dealing great damage to it.
[]: Illusory confusion: Kaeliyae is a masterful illusionist who can trick even the hive mind for a time, turn the senses of the swarm against itself; causing them to attack and harass each other and thus leave the Brood Drake open to more direct attacks.
[]: Thin the Swarm: Deny the creature as much help as possible by using your firepower to annihilate its numbers, destroy the biomass it relies on, and weaken the shadow in the warp to make it easier for the Eldar to use their powers on it.
[]: Target supporting Organisms: The creature is making use of support organisms to feed it more power and provide it with additional biomass to replace completely lost tissue as well as give it all manner of extra abilities.
[]: Spirit of War, Goddess of Justice: You have incredible ranged firepower that could lay low nations and mountain ranges were their energies not precisely contained and shaped; concentrate them to the maximum upon the most dangerous targets your group decides to deal with, annihilate everything you see without pause or mercy.
[]: Blazing Sun, Burning Pride: Hit the creature with power bombs every time its warp fields go down, making use of anti-energy weapons to weaken and sap at its warp fields at every possible opportunity and dropping one of the incredibly deadly weapons on it to deal as much damage as possible.
-[X]: Focus on breaching the Tyranid Shroud: Put efforts into trying to get a ground-bridge connection to the autobots for them to bring in a Sweep team to do a biopurge of this nest, risky but calls in a high-grade autobot crew of Sweeps; wreckers who specialise in eliminating virulent homogenizing swarms like the Tyranids.
-[X]: Support the important people: Have the pets surround and support team members; keeping the chaff out of the way and offering healing, buffs, debuffs, and other forms of support wherever necessary.
-[X]: Illusory confusion: Kaeliyae is a masterful illusionist who can trick even the hive mind for a time, turn the senses of the swarm against itself; causing them to attack and harass each other and thus leave the Brood Drake open to more direct attacks.
-[X]: Thin the Swarm: Deny the creature as much help as possible by using your firepower to annihilate its numbers, destroy the biomass it relies on, and weaken the shadow in the warp to make it easier for the Eldar to use their powers on it.
-[X]: Look for any terrain advantages: Look for where there might be any features of the battlefield that might help, such as volatile energy generation nodes that could burn the swarm if burst or places you could siphon energy from for immediate shield recharge. You can feel two trapped Progenitor relics too, which can provide immediate upgrades when acquired.
-[X]: A glacier's curse, a winter's smite: Make heavy usage of immobilization weapons such as your paralyzers, the ice beam and missile, and judicious usage of time-stop and teleportation to stop the enemy from moving as they please, pushing allies about to get hurt out of harm's way or locking down threatening enemies before they can close in. Lower damage but better support.
-[X]: The Assassin's Knife, the Silent Death: Move stealthily, going between foe to foe deal sneak attack damage, keeping the risk to yourself low but dealing intense burst damage well suited for overpowering the healing factor of your opponents, striking at key moments to deal critical blows.
This is my proposed plan, I am open to discussion on if there is a more effective option
[X] Immobilize and Obliterate
League Actions:
[X]: Purge Tyrannic biomass wherever possible: Eliminate Tyrannic matter to reduce the rate at which more Tyranids spawn to reinforce the Brood King and reduce its ability to draw on matter to adjust its capabilities.
Pet Actions:
[X]: Rip the Brood Drake Apart: Have the pets attack the Brood Drake over most other priorities, seeking to overwhelm its adaptational powers by whatever means necessary, slowing down its regeneration as best they can and dealing great damage to it.
Group Actions:
[X]: Illusory confusion: Kaeliyae is a masterful illusionist who can trick even the hive mind for a time, turn the senses of the swarm against itself; causing them to attack and harass each other and thus leave the Brood Drake open to more direct attacks.
[X]: Don't let the Brood Drake Move: Immobilise the Brood Drake through any means necessary. Samus and Arne have the raw strength to hold it back where necessary to let Alyrsero and Kaeliyae cut down on its warp fields to render the creature's biomass more vulnerable to attack.
[X]: Thin the Swarm: Deny the creature as much help as possible by using your firepower to annihilate its numbers, destroy the biomass it relies on, and weaken the shadow in the warp to make it easier for the Eldar to use their powers on it.
Samus Actions:
[X]: A glacier's curse, a winter's smite: Make heavy usage of immobilization weapons such as your paralyzers, the ice beam and missile, and judicious usage of time-stop and teleportation to stop the enemy from moving as they please, pushing allies about to get hurt out of harm's way or locking down threatening enemies before they can close in. Lower damage but better support.
Arne Actons:
[X]: The Lightning Incarnate, the Storm's Son: Make heavy usage of the Shock Coil, the Positron beam, and the Electrowave Beam; frying your enemies and stopping them in their tracks with convulsing bolts of lightning and anti-matter; never missing, striking foe after foe without mercy. Deals a great deal of damage but is intensive on your Universal Ammo and Missile stock piles.
This plan calls for alternating between immobilizing the Brood Drake, denying it reinforcing biomass, and dealing maximum damage to it while it's hindered.
from what i remember in the info we have got, this cult showed up and started to spread around the world, but if one hive is blown, the rest will act more cautiously, but still in cover, they still need to spread.
so i'd say it's a major cult at the moment, but not a full blown religion in terms of size
Arc 1: Fourfold Endeavour: Act 1: Mission 2: Aliens in Brockton (Part 11 and end of Mission 2)
-[X]: Focus on breaching the Tyranid Shroud: Put efforts into trying to get a ground-bridge connection to the autobots for them to bring in a Sweep team to do a biopurge of this nest, risky but calls in a high-grade autobot crew of Sweeps; wreckers who specialise in eliminating virulent homogenizing swarms like the Tyranids.
-[X]: Support the important people: Have the pets surround and support team members; keeping the chaff out of the way and offering healing, buffs, debuffs, and other forms of support wherever necessary.
-[X]: Illusory confusion: Kaeliyae is a masterful illusionist who can trick even the hive mind for a time, turn the senses of the swarm against itself; causing them to attack and harass each other and thus leave the Brood Drake open to more direct attacks.
-[X]: Thin the Swarm: Deny the creature as much help as possible by using your firepower to annihilate its numbers, destroy the biomass it relies on, and weaken the shadow in the warp to make it easier for the Eldar to use their powers on it.
-[X]: Look for any terrain advantages: Look for where there might be any features of the battlefield that might help, such as volatile energy generation nodes that could burn the swarm if burst or places you could siphon energy from for immediate shield recharge. You can feel two trapped Progenitor relics too, which can provide immediate upgrades when acquired.
-[X]: A glacier's curse, a winter's smite: Make heavy usage of immobilization weapons such as your paralyzers, the ice beam and missile, and judicious usage of time-stop and teleportation to stop the enemy from moving as they please, pushing allies about to get hurt out of harm's way or locking down threatening enemies before they can close in. Lower damage but better support.
-[X]: The Assassin's Knife, the Silent Death: Move stealthily, going between foe to foe deal sneak attack damage, keeping the risk to yourself low but dealing intense burst damage well suited for overpowering the healing factor of your opponents, striking at key moments to deal critical blows.
Group 2:
Arcee (Autobot Commander, Great Resistances, Great Defence, All Rounder): Shields: 30%. Armour: 100%. Health: 85%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 5
Warpath (Autobot General, Sublime Resistances, Extreme Defence, Tanking, All-Rounder Damage): Shields: 95%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Joseph (Shadow Magic Defender, Decent Resistances, Great Defence, Support, Ranged Damage) Shields: 90%. Armour: 80%. Health: 95%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Doctor Black (Bound Shadow King, Great Resistances, Extreme Defence, Support, Control) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress 0
Ten Shadow Formations (Summoned Shadow Creatures, Decent Resistances, Great Defence: Control, Support) Shields: 20%. Armour: 30%. Health: 50%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 0. (Comprised of one Nightblade, Three Shadowmen, Five Dark Panthers, Ten Shades, Fifteen Shadow Scorpions, Twenty Nighthounds, Twenty Five Living Shadows, Thirty Shadelings)
Ten Demonic Cohorts (Summoned Demons, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder )Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of one Demonic Decurion, Three Demonic Corporals, Five Moloch Bulls, Ten Demonic Legionaries, Fifteen Winged-Demons, Twenty Hellhounds, Twenty Five Demonlings, and Thirty Imps stats are for each unit)
Three Warlock Demons (Summoned Demonic Spellcasters. Good Resistances, Good Defence. Control and Support, can summon their own demons). Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Hellknights (Summoned Armoured Demonic Cavalry, Great Reistances, Great Defence. Melee/tanking.) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Fire Elemental Cohorts (Summoned Fire Elementals, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of One Pyrocaster, Three Incendiery Warriors, Five Salamanders, Ten Pyro-Phalangites, Fifteen Bonfire-Born, Twenty Flaming Ones, Twenty Five Pyre-Gargoyles, and Thirty Sparklings)
Three Greater Salamanders (Summoned Fire Elemental Warbeast. Damage out the ass. Great Resistances, Great Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Elemental Pyromancers (Summoned Fire Elemental Mages. Ranged Damage and Control. Great Resistances, Good Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Golem Cohorts (Golems. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking.) Shields: 10%. Armour: 20%. Health: 40%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Comprised of One Golem Master, Three Golem Warriors, Five Golem Watchers, Ten Golem Soldiers, Fifteen Golem Beasts, Twenty Lesser Golems, Twenty Five Golem Men, Thirty Golemlings)
Three Golem Guardians (Golems focused on defense. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking, Support.) Shields: 40%. Armour: 30%. Health: 30%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
Five Golem Wardens (Golems focused on Crowd Control. Tanking/Control) Shields: 40%. Armour: 20%. Health: 10%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
WINTERPYRE AND KAUSTOS ARE SUMMONING MORE FORCES, AVAILABLE PETS FOR EUDAIMONICA INCREASED BY x10; LOSSES REPLACED INSTANTLY FOR TWO ROUNDS.
Ten Ithilmar Warden Claws (Warp-powered automata. Great Resistances, Great Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 40%. Armour: 50%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Each Comprised of One Ithilya Lance, Three Metal Wardens, Five Iron-Hosts, ten Swordbearers, fifteen Spearmakers, twenty Furnace-Spiders, twenty-five metal hawks, and thirty Forgelings; stats are for each unit. Kept in Webway pockets until needed; summoned on the spot when necessary.)
"We need more firepower, we can't purge this much biomass faster than it regenerates. Especially when it's regenerating from nothing." You said, noting that the scourged mass was starting to regrow despite there not being any visible draw of matter. At least, not to the echo, thermal, or incarnate visor. But the Warp Visor though? A look through it showed that energy was being pulled from that ineffable dream realm and funneled into the biomat, regrowing the semi-organic machinery as the tyranids started to shift and transform.
"Uhhh...Arne..." Joseph said with a gulp of clear terror as the tissue of multiple tyranids started to flow and make the most hideous slapping and glopping sound imaginable as their tissue liquefied and transmuted; Tyrannic particles altering position and form as what had once been perhaps a thousand gaunts flowed into a quivering horror. Black bio-metallic semi-mechanical carapace layered itself over its chitin as additional armour, eyes shielded behind organic-mineral lenses that glowed a menacing yellow. Jaws shielded in interlocking scutes and plates that snapped together and rippled. You quickly realised that it was essentially wearing a living form of power armour bonded to an equally terrible body like an eight-limbed gorilla; four limbs walking, another four holding weapons; a shield of chitin-steel, a crackling bone-crystal sword, a sparking paralysis whip, and a menacing looking gun-hive squirming with abominations.
Evolutions of the smaller and weaker Tyrant Guard developed with the genomes of beings referred to as "Astartes" that according to Eldar records are a form of Human supersoldier native to the warphammer metaversal cluster, these creatures are defensive organisms specialising in protecting important areas or beings from attack. Like all Emperor strain tyranids, their biomass can transform, recombine, split, or even transmute into other purposes or forms and if seemingly overwhelmed, often they will simply break apart into smaller combat forms, shift into alternate ones, or combine with other tyranids to create larger ones. Enormously strong and durable, the Praetorian Predator Guards are a threat at all ranges, but respond poorly to a varied alpha strike of multiple damage types to prevent it from adapting properly to any one of them without creating vulnerability to other attacks. They also typically find it difficult to reorient or pull out of charges once committed to them due to their overwhelming momentum.
Samus' Notes: How does one even start with fighting something that changes forms, strengths, weaknesses, and even numbers so quickly? I need to expand my arsenal, or else one day; I fear that the phage cells already present on the planet will decide they don't need to hide anymore and consume this world. I can't let that happen.
Arne's Notes: Based on what I can see, Space Marines have a very large number of additional organms including metallic musculature implants, redundant hearts and lungs, the ability to spit acid, multiple last-ditch regeneration nodes and more; no wonder why this "great devourer" valued their genomes.
Five of these organisms were created, each as tall as warpath and each rumbling with an unearthly roar as they moved in a parody of what you recognised as squad tactics. But you thought about the data...the shadow in the warp created by the mystic choir of these creatures, the constant chattering of so many minds and forcing impossibility into reality to replace lost biomass while you were busy fighting; annihilating the swarms with an ever changing repertoire of weapons before you vaulted to Samus' side and grabbed her by the hand to swing her around to bicycle kick a mob of surrounding genestealers; releasing her and letting her release a frequency pulse that eradicated all usable biomass touched by its octarine embrace, clear floor briefly being observed as you swept the positron beam's augmented fire across the field to burn and scour away more of the vile living carpet that had consumed the chamber.
Already the Brood Drake seemed to notice what you were doing, and its maw opened up to let loose an iridescent volley of warp and electricity addled bioplasma and corrosive fluid in a stream that forced you to bring up your arm shield, locking your boots onto the ground and holding your ground as you were struck with a cascade of energy that could have torn through cities and armies, the cascade of power roiling against your hoplon as you strained against it, gritting your teeth while it pressed closer and closer.
"Samus, we need to eliminate the biomass or we're going to be here forever." You said, hissing as she interrupted the Swarm's attempts to exploit your preoccupation with a barrage of rockets and multi-missiles that erupted all across the field, destroying inchoate molten tyrannic mass that attempted to change into forms more well suited to trying to take you on. Angling the hoplon, you redirected part of the breath weapon back at the Brood Drake, taking it off of its feet as Warpath slammed a Warhammer into its head followed by ripping into it with a whirling spiked flail; both impacts creating visible shockwaves that threw shifting battleforms around him.
"We'll need more troops then...Arcee." Samus said, turning towards the Autobot as she ducked under what had once been a Carnifex until it transformed into a more serpentine creature, throwing its scythe like claws in wide arcs; splitting them into additional arms and constantly varying its attacks; displaying new abilities and biomorphs with each passing moment until she smashed her arm into the maw it formed in its chest; transformed it into a plasma cannon and then released a charged energon-plasma burst that vaporised the beast and many others behind it.
"Yeah? Bit busy Dawnchild." She said, pulling creatures that had formed tentacles to hold her arm down off their feet and swinging them through gunbeasts to scatter them until she swung it away, latching a grenade onto it to incinerate another pile of the creatures with a scouring flash of photonic heat.
"I checked your files, you've got special biopurge sweep teams right? Can we get a space bridge going?" She asked.
"We're getting a lot of transdimensional interference, we can't send in reinforcements right now unless you disrupt some of the shadow producing organisms." She said, breathlessly taking out hundreds more beasts with deft skill and precision while Samus and yourself stood back to back, fighting your way through ever growing hordes that scuttled over their dead or absorbed them to reach you.
"Then we know what to do." You said, your limbs moving in a flurry as you used the Ymgarl factor to bolter your speed even further to hack out a path through the bioforest. But the situation was as such that you couldn't rest on your laurels, moving to interrupt a psyker duel between Alyrsero and a number of oversized brain-creatures.
"Samus, take out the stragglers." You asked, getting a nod from her in return while Eldar sorceries danced in the background. She gave you an empathic pulse to tell you to go ahead, covering your back as you flashed and disappeared; your lumosuit leaving you unable to be detected by the psykerbeast that you neatly decapitated with a sizzling blade that ignited the rest of it in electrical fire, leaving nothing behind to regrow before the others followed. Strobe pulses of anti-energy enveloping large numbers of targets who grew more and more vulnerable to the blue-white freezing blasts with each shot as resonance accumulated until they had become quark-dust and broken ice as the energy of their bodies was frozen into water; their escorts ripped apart by a tempest of Eldar magics and psyker power.
The endless scratching and skittering and snarling in the back of your thoughts dulled a bit as you shot through other creatures your warp visor identified. You bounced from one target to the next, teleporting, speed boosting, phasing; concealed by the Lumosuit as a virtually invisible killer. Samus made sure to not give away your own position as she flickered in a chaotic series of lights, sounds, and images that gave little indication of where she actually was; ice and frost enveloping many organisms threatening to overrun parts of the team, trying to break through winterpyre's firewall of thousands of demons only to be enveloped in anti-energy even the great devourer struggled to adapt to without "cheating" with warp craft to try and meet the destructive effects of anti-energy nullifying all manner of motive force to create frost with the physics bending empyrean.
"Arne, do you have any eyes on the relic signals?" She asked, your hand pushing off of a crumbling beast that had prepared its defenses for your positron beam only to get a faceful of your wrist-gun firing off a gamma beam instead, reducing it to useless gelatin that not even the great devourer's hyperadaptive biology could recover; rotating yourself around to cleave a winged creature growing far too many limbs into burning halves and landing upon the ground.
You looked down, feeling the Rune of Fate's effects as you felt the presence of something close by; jabbing your hand into the biomass and clearing out a massive section, burning away what seemed to be endless layers of rapidly adapting material that would have shrugged off a meteorite collision. Offal that had a scent that made you turn off your olfactory sensors immediately steamed outwards in roiling plasma waves that torched the creatures touched by it; exposing a Uhmbar and an Ylla reliquary statue. The former was a work of geometric solidified darkness of Inky purple, Black, and Midnight Blue with a spidery lower body and a spindly, six-limbed upper form. The latter a thing of crystallised light, like an upright squid whose tentacles emerged from their sides and whose eyes were mounted on the top in a vague facsimile of humanity.
You pinged your affirmation to Samus, letting her teleport to you quickly as the two of you broke open and absorbed yet another new ability from the ancient Ylla and Uhmbar, the Tyranids seeming to have no ability to comprehend or reverse engineer the magitek within; so much the better for you then; you supposed. The Ylla ovoid and the Uhmbar cube gave way to powerful new relics that your armoursuits fed into you with gusto after you had a moment to touch and examine them.
TALISMAN OF RADIANCE ACQUIRED
MAUL OF SHADOWS ACQUIRED...USER ALREADY HAS MELEE WEAPON...CONVERTING....PROGENITOR MAUL ACQUIRED
TENEBRAL BEAM ACQUIRED
The Talisman of Radiance is an Ylla object of techno-magic that allows the user to project an aura of burning light on command that damages enemies in contact with it, provides healing and restoration for allies, reduces damage passing through the aura, works to dispell hexes and other forms of enervating effects, and restores courage and morale gradually through its presence while giving yourself and allies some additional fighting capability. While the initial effect is small, Damage magnifier upgrades will intensify the effect and the effect is stronger against enemies who are born of darkness or evil, or against effects propagated by such forces. It will also make it much more difficult to summon malefic entities within its glow, making transition between dimensions more difficult for such entities and adding pressure on their material presences to make it easier to banish them. Similarly, undead will be harder to animate and keep animate within the effects of the Talisman. As a techno-magic enhancement, the Talisman applies whether or not the user is wearing armour, so long as they choose to activate it. Finally they can designate some beings as being safe from its effects.
Samus' Notes: Hrm, this should be useful against large numbers of enemies. As well as against any undead I might encounter in the near future, it should also be a huge help to my allies.
Arne's Notes: Ylla magitek is sometimes offputting but always fascinating, I just wish they were a bit less judgemental at times.
The Progenitor Maul offers the user an additional form of melee weapon that can be utilised when cutting force or the user's limbs are not suited for the task at hand. The Progenitor Maul focuses the impact of the user's beam energy in a crushing blow meant to deliver maximum shock, disruption, knockback, and blunt trauma. They typically are more effective against enemies who are particularly more massive than the user than edged weapons tend to be due to the greater area of tissue randomised and disrupted by them, and are also highly effective against fortifications. In tandem with the Ymgarl Factor upgrade which allows the user to transform the equipment on the arms at will into two free-hand and wrist weapon configurations or two arm-cannon configurations or any combination thereof; the Maul also makes for a competent partner to the Progenitor Sword. It also works excellently in tandem with the Tunder disruptor.
Samus' Notes: I'm probably going to be more fond of swords, but the maul seems like it should be useful.
Arne's Notes: I swear if anyone makes a Mjolnir joke...
The Tenebral Beam is an elemental beam derived from Uhmbar shadow-technology that afflicts the targets it strikes with powerful bursts of dark energy that weaken the target as it saps energy from them and transfers it to the user. The afflicted target will become slower, deal less damage, and grow more fragile with successive hits of the shadow energy; eventually also growing confused and disoriented before temporary blindness sets in; typically shortly before death. Targets killed by the Tenebral Beam fade into an unnaturally long lived patch of darkness that will persist even if illuminated for some time before finally vanishing as the shadow energy breaks them down. The charge shot of the Tenebral Beam is the Tar Umbra, which will engulf an area in darkness that slows down targets trapped in it while sapping away at their strength.
Samus' Notes: Well, luckily tenebral energy is rather esoteric and should be able to bypass a lot of more conventional resistances.
Arne's Notes: Well, this should pair well with my endurance based fighting style at least.
Dark Energy...Negative Energy...you looked at the Brood Drake as it wrestled with Warpath, blows shaking the room as Warpath funneled more energon into his systems, shouting, ranting, and raving as he was want to and exhausting the dictionary's list of onomatopoeias at breathtaking speed. Warpath was strong, strong enough that there wasn't really any way to find things heavy enough for him to lift to put an exact number to it. Nothing that wouldn't fall apart under its own weight when he lifted it anyway. A category you also existed in.
Warpath had enough in the way of different weapons to keep the Brood Drake busy as he brought up a shimmering energon-scutum to take the Brood Drake's warp-plasma breath to let you focus on weakening the shadow in the warp instead.
You turned to Samus, red eyes looking over her suit as the two of you fired off your radiant auras, letting the ground burn and the enemy to go beyond simple carbonization as they were consumed by your sacred light. The judgement of the Ylla's radiant energy scouring away vile hive flesh and horrific biometals that tried to push their way through, hissing coils of plasma rising from the burning beings that even as they died; were shifting, transforming their bodies to get to grabs with you; lancing beam and the roar of missiles tearing through more and more of them. But they were adapting all the same, and many were already getting close enough to force the two of you to get into bloody melee work once more, pushing through horrific burn wounds and regenerating even without any source of meat to replace the lost tissue.
"Winterpyre, we need your demons to support!" Samus shouted to the rampaging Demon King as monsters died all around him, yet even he was bleeding as more adapted creatures leapt onto him, cultists bringing up specialised weapons that strobed into his body with perverted holy symbols and their foul priests making loathsome benedictions that made Winterpyre thrash before engulfing them in hellfire. But he acknowledged the two of you, molten blood dripping from injuries as he dug a crackling bone sword out and sealed the injury as multiplying tyrannic tissue tried to grow out of it, the maw forming in the cut growing eyes and bladed limbs just before it burned into oblivion with a lash of Alice's whip as Eudaimonica gave a nod of approval to you.
"Forward my legions, ensure no harm comes to the allies of your mistress!" Winterpyre said before Eudaimonica whistled and directed her troops to where they needed to go; the hundreds of demons already on the field becoming thousands; joined by roiling fire elementals and thundering golems who poured out of rifts and portals that Winterpyre could open despite the shadow through his and Alice's incarnate energies.
The swarm around you was thinned by the hordes of otherworldly helpers sent your way, supernatural beings wrestling with tyranids and cultists, some being cut down; such as those met with the fire of the tanks that the Cult rolled into action or were met with the heavy guns and weapons of the cult's elites; others tearing their way through those that they did battle with, your visor giving you a quick readout on the flames as you looked around. You needed more targets, more ways to contribute to the massive brawl as Dawnmaker smashed two large flying foes into pulp over your head, burning the offal before it could rain on you until the Kheldian let rip with his eye beams; stopping up an entire arterial advance as everything that pushed through it vaporised until shield organisms able to survive the light rushed forward and leapt at him.
You shot at some of the creatures, he punched through dozens, hundreds until a glob of cells shifted from a mass of reflective chitin to ignore his beams and then into a carnifex like beast to slam into him and knock him out of the sky, the two wrestling until Samus' Ice Beam charged and fired; anti-energy engulfing much of the battlefield and sealing the beast and its' escorts' doom. You gave Samus a nod of appreciation while she tested out her new maul, obliterating the upper half of a protoplasm that formed into a warrior beast and then destroying the lower half as it tried to use the remaining mass to become a gaunt.
Part of you wondered if these creatures having flesh this absurdly morphic and infectious was something they always could do or was something they absorbed from new realities, the other part of you couldn't scourge the awful, mewling genestealer...you couldn't call something like that a baby...not something with so much killer instinct already, something that looked at you and saw only food....you raised your wrist-gun and let the magnum cannon obliterate it. Overkill, but the thing's cry would ring in the back of your head for some time.
As you two alternated positions, firing off the temporal distort, shifting the Ymgarl factor to act with greater speed to overcome the raw numbers of your foes, barely dodging ever increasing thickets of the cultists and Genestealers, using every single trick to keep yourself from getting surrounded while not leaving behind the demons that Alice was bringing into this reality and finding yourself starting to make a mental blur of how many foes you were dealing with; countless stray hits landing on your shielding anyway whenever you weren't phased out or when they figured out the pattern of phase-out, teleport, time-stop or other tricks. You looked for important fights, taking out the gun-beasts, the psyker creatures, the cult heavy weapons, the threatening vehicles.
You soon found yourself coiled around by balls of warp-active tentacles as the creatures breached through the circle of demons, writhing, loathsome beasts of organic metals, minerals, slimy flesh, and pulsing bi-electricity slithering their way through and sending wave after wave of tendrils around you. You pulled, sliced, shot, smashed; they did not relent until they had surrounded you; using stolen superpowers to alternate between phasing their limbs out, hardening them, electrifying them, and other means of protecting themselves to prevent you from getting the cycle of kills needed to keep your shielding maxed out, darting away from you every time you used the shock coil. Samus similarly finding herself being mobbed by indescripable horrors with enormous mouths lashing out with entrail tendrils all around her, seeking to find weakness in her shielding. You were preparing to fire off power bombs, unsure if the creatures thrown at you had adaptations to them, but they wouldn't get your flesh, you would not be a servant to the creatures.
Samus Health: 133/1300|1300/1300|2000/2000. Super Missiles: 03/46. Universal Ammo: 140/360
Arne Health: 267/1300|1300/1300|2000/2000. Super Missiles: 02/46. Universal Ammo: 170/360
Then a pulse came in the warp, the gentle laughter of the Eldar followed by rather more maniacal giggling as a fog seemed to descend over the eyes of the Great Devourer's beasts as strands of shadow and illusion and a Laughing God's joyous merriment brought confusion and disarray to all the foes. You caught brief glimpses of the illusions as the creatures seemed to see only enemies in each other and began horrific processes of tearing apart and eating one another, blasting each other to bits and seeking to destroy each other's mass, your devourer upgrades feasting on the bounty of fallen life and rejuvenating your shielding as the tendrils around your neck released and you looked around, giving a thankful nod to Kaeliyae who gave you a kiss blowing gesture that made you blush before she giggled and disappeared into mist.
Samus tapped you on the shoulders as the fighting died down slightly, getting your attention as she froze a creature that seemed to have figured out Kaeliyae's deception as it had slammed its talons into her after ascertaining her position based on where her shots were coming from, grunting slightly before she looked at you.
"Arne, those psyker beasts, if you can get rid of them...we'll have enough firepower to end this." She said, gesturing to a choir node contesting the biomantic and ghyranic powers of Ormothin and the shadow magics of Lelithax as the two Eldar strained against a growing tide of psychic beasts. You gave her a quick nod of acknowledgement as you jumped into the fray, letting her go about tossing the frozen, disintegrating body into the Brood Drake as it slammed Warpath's head repeatedly into the wall; drawing on incarnate power to overcome the immeasurably strong Autobot and work on smashing him until his shielding finally burst and it started to dig its claws into him.
The creature flinched, turning slightly towards Samus and letting loose with a cascade of radioactive eye beams, a swing from your blade deflecting one into a cultist with a power pick who burst into ash while Samus leapt to the side. Elendria jumped into the fray, smashing her sceptre into the eye and making it howl until she jumped out of the way, dodging tentacles and clawed limbs erupting from its body while its whole physiology seemed to just melt into a new shape.
You started to run, your form becoming a cascading series of multi-coloured, unplaceable lights and noises until you, the speedbooster activating and the psychic choir exploding into quark dust as you smashed through them, stopping yourself after the last Zoanthrope disintegrated around you and then digging in your heels before launching yourself through the chest of the Brooddrake, incinerating a vast tide of creatures dropping from the ceiling as the biomass birthed more creatures and giving yourself a brief but unpleasant view of the thing's innards that'd probably linger in your immediate memory longer than you liked as you grimaced.
As the shadow in the warp started to weaken, Iybraa threw every single tank in the room she could get her telekinetic hands on and hurled them at the beast; Clarioli blessing them with the winds of Chamon and Alyrsero with his psyker-might to turn them into death comets that rattled the whole chamber and would have rumbled much of the city above to dust had the warp fields enclosing the chamber not absorbed the impact. The beast writhed, it wriggled, it howled, it did not die. Its tendrils stabbing into dozens more sources of replacement mass and absorbing them into its loathsome body to replace the half of its frame that was lost.
"Now, together; combat this icon of shadow and let the machine woman call her compatriots!" Alyrsero said, chanting as his spear started to glow with power, Clarioli's powerstone fuelled robots forming a defensive arrangement around them as the Eldar withdrew to the group. Energies danced, flickered, and then leaped out to scourge the psychic cultists whose bodies writhed and pulsated before exploding into white flame, giving a brief clearness to the ether even as Korlanil staggered to his knees from the exertion, his usual laughter drowned out by cries of pain.
Doctor Black stepped in, seeing the strain, and took a bit of strength from the swarm and pushed it into the Eldar while you bounced once more, leaping at some enormous biometallic armoured brain on spidery limbs that had rolled forward, waving tentacles to cast spells until you slammed on top of it with your magnum cannon firing a charged shot to rattle it, your munitions launcher letting loose with a mortar to disrupt it, your wrist gun firing off a charged tenebral beam to weaken it, your rocket pods to clear out its escorts, and then finally slamming your progenitor maul into it to splatter it; letting your talisman burn the rest of it away.
And with that, the barriers in the empyreal realm had dropped and Arcee was able to call in help just as Warpath was run through by the Brood Drake's scythed tail, straining as he tried to stop the tail from slicing upwards or forming cutting surfaces inside of him; firing off plasma vents to burn out the injury while coughing out energon. The Genestealer cultists were the first to notice something, hissing and howling as they saw green circular portals open up.
"They bring more machines to disturb the sanctity of our broodfathers?!" One snarled, snapping his mutable jaws shut before he was evaporated by a gamma beam streaming from the portal as an entire company of elite autobot Biopurge Sweep-Wreckers rushed through. Bearing the blue modified symbol of that elite subunit.
A rotund, Green Autobot lead the charge; one whose body was festooned with every sort of gun he could possibly carry including a....is that....is that a gatling gatling gun? Why....yes...six hextuple barelled...what the fuck? Why does he have a bullet casing cigar? Why is a robot smoking? Why does he have a beard!?
"Alright wreckers! Let's waste this hive of nasties. Ten hut!" He said as his gun spat forth bullets loaded with special corroding incendieries that made the creatures struck by it spasm as their bodies exploded with melting acid that erupted into fire shortly afterwards, others simply being chewed to pulp through raw physical force and ammunition expenditure from his utterly ridiculous weapon as it had to continually teleport in fresh ammunition.
The Brood Drake growled with its discontentment as Warpath was picked up and dragged back by Autobot recovery grabbers, twisting beams of green energy moving him to safety as the tyrannic biomass in the room was being struck with a combination of enough brute force that adaptation could not fully overcome it and enough variety of attack that it couldn't adapt to all of it at once. Disgusting and best left to the imagination sloughs of alien tissue came off, crumbling and dying as the autobots; after determining the scale of the boil; called in five extra companies in short order, clearing the path to extra reinforcements with targeted strikes that told you they had done missions like this millions upon millions of times before.
The brood drake formed two fingered sickle claws and swung them through the autobots approaching it in melee, one strike to pierce shields, a second to carve the machine men apart; bringing a few to their knees instantly. Its other limbs forming clusters of venom cannons to retaliate against the intruders while lascannon and krak missile fire pulsed back into the autobots alongside anti-tank weapons wielded by the hive; rippling warp blasts spearing into other cybertronians while it hissed, crackling while the Eldar directed their warp energies into its body, their bodies guarded by the vast swarms of demons that Winterpyre had called forth from the frostflame hell who by now were keeping the Cult at bay.
The Brood Drake would not go down easily though, Its Praetorian Predators moved quickly to intercept shots as a living shield wall, their armour virtually inviolable even to the Autobots and their strength enough to smash some who approached back or even to the ground.
Kaeliyae's trickery got to work once again, slipping beneath the Broodrake's guard as the other seven Eldar concentrated their warpcraft in a direct offensive that forced it to use its power to counter in a multicoloured duel of magics and psychic might; soon assisted by Eudaimonica and Joseph and fair Iybraa as they threw their own power into the concoction. The Praetorians who were buckling parts of the autobot offensive thrown at them hissed and turned upon each other, driven to disarray by Kaeliyae's illusioncraft while smaller creatures leapt at and swarmed them, swinging all manner of weapons or firing into their bodies.
Samus and yourself rushed in, shielding once again recovered. A Praetorian Guard who had shrugged off the fire of an entire autobot platoon froze once Samus dropped an ice-elemental power bomb on it, engulfing it and the swarm around it in anti-energy that made frigid quark-dust and vast sheets of frozen water that you landed on and kicked into the brood drake to disrupt its concentration, letting the backlash of magic explode its upper body and send its legs reeling back following a spray of substances you honestly could have done without your suit's play by play of the composition of.
But the Drake still did not die, its flesh tatters grabbing onto more and more tyranids and cultists and pulling them in to regrow itself, melting back into shape as the creature seemed to have something approximating rage. its mind rippled and Kaeliyae shouted warning before a scream in the warp emerged from its mind and animal soul, sending many autobots, demons, shadow men, and elementals to their knees as they felt the blast tearing at their souls; some of them simply falling as their souls were shredded to pieces, spark chambers going empty and demonic essences being ripped asunder.
Your spirits however, ignored the blast entirely; and the Brood Drake looked with surprise at you as Samus latched on and dropped a power bomb that obliterated its legs and you; with most of its escorts now cleared out after it had consumed so many of them to keep itself alive; used the speedbooster to fly straight into its chest before its torso could grow new appendages or steal them from the rapidly dying biomass in the room and then released your frequency suit pulse as soon as you were in the chest cavity.
What you saw was stuff you'd probably not want to think all that hard about for a while, but the massive frequency suit pulse, built up across the entire battle, was enough to incinerate the great majority of the creature left standing.
You landed hard on the ground, solid, normal, not gross ground, and looked around as ash particulates dropped all around you, a squirming mash off flesh from the creature collapsing into an amoebic blob that tried to find an escape somewhere; anywhere.
"No." You growled before letting your shock coil obliterate the last remainder of it, taking no satisfaction in its final death.
BROOD DRAKE HEALTH: 0%
You breathed out, tired of dealing so much death. You checked your kill counter and boggled for a moment when you noticed it had breached the seven-digit point. The infantry organisms you figured were just that cheap to make and replace.
Autobot sweep teams and demons were busy scouring the rest of the facility, going into other chambers and catacombs until the hive mind cut off this facility from the network. You briefly sensed the future, and knew they would be going to ground for some time. Other factions in play would sense their weakness, the loss of so much tissue, the death of something with so much incarnate power that infused its way into new hosts; yourselves and your allies.
This was one of the hardest fights you've ever had, and you lurched against the wall and for a moment, looking to Samus who pulled you in for an armoured hug, dismissing her arm cannon to do so and getting one of your own in return.
"I thought we were going to lose someone there..." She said as the team's healers took care of the injured, the last few creatures having some of their life force stolen by Joseph to imbue into fallen autobots with his spell of howling twilight, bringing the Boy to his knees and forcing winterpyre to catch him before he could fall off of his mount from exhaustion.
"Well...we have some form of insurance against that at least." You said gently while the screams of dying beasts and the roar of increasingly distant weapons was heard.
The dead creature left behind two...unusual looking upgrades. Ones you recognised were not necessarily for your armour. You didn't hesitate though, there was no such thing as an unsafe upgrade for your system, anything unsafe was "spat out" by the suit in the very rare cases it could not simply be made safe after anything useful was absorbed. Samus accompanied you, letting the two of you absorb what power the creature had left behind besides its incarnate threads, spread throughout your group. Not enough to bring you to yet another incarnate level, but enough to elevate your compatriots anyway.
The upgrade process felt...different, something more in your gut as you almost doubled over from the sensation of your genome evolving and something inside of you awakening, Samus clutching at her head and making a grunting sound while you dropped briefly to a knee. Your mind's eye, usually half-lidded at most, fully opened into a realm arcane, whispers of the sea of souls, the mists of magic, the plane of thought, all drifting around you for a moment. The immeasurable, crushing shadow of more voices than the observable universe had atoms or dark matter particles curling, snarling, and hissing, assessing their setback and feeding reports to a gestalt chorus that was one and many at the same time. A collective that infested, devoured, multiplied, absorbed, and conquered. The souls of its fallen assets simply riding into the shadow, waiting for new sleeves.
You stopped yourself from following. You weren't ready to try to speak to something so immeasurably vast. No more than a bacterium was equipped to speak to the endless collective of cells that made up a human body, though in comparison to that collected shadow you were so much tinier than a simple bacterium. Was this something the Progenitors intended you to stop? How? There must have been some sort of way if they wanted you to do it. But you couldn't even imagine it at the moment...not when your mind seemed to almost shut down, wanting to think of anything else besides how many voices were in that choir, snapping yourself back to reality all at once.
"User diagnostics." You said, you could have just thought it and made it so, but you needed to hear a human voice right away. And your suit soon uploaded the information into your memory, informing of what had changed. Nothing negative, nothing phenotypical, but a transformation all the same.
The user has received the Genomorphosis upgrade, breaking down the power of the Tyrannic genome into something usable with their own genetic code, improving and altering it further without negative side effect. The Genomorphosis upgrade will improve all physical characteristics of the user, unlocking enhanced regeneration, the ability for the user to create and devise more genetic upgrades, and for a number of upgrades to now affect the user's physiology without needing the medium of the power suit. This includes the full power of the regenerator, the ymgarl factor, the devourer, and many other upgrades derived from organic biology. In tandem with user's own enhanced physiology, regenerator, and ymgarl factor, this will serve to render the user essentially immune to the few infections capable of eventually overcoming Inheritor biology given enough time and infectious tissue. It will also awaken the user's Mentat psionic potential, though training and discipline will be needed to properly utilise the power within the user's mind in finesse intensive manners. Mentat psionics draw from physical and emotional stamina.
Samus' Notes: I know the armour is telling me I have nothing to worry about, but the idea of this upgrade coming from...that...still makes me worried. What am I going to be at the end of all this?
Arne's Notes: If it's useful, it's useful. I'm still going to run regular diagnostics, just making sure there's nothing unwanted in that genome. I don't want to grow tentacles.
HEALTH INCREASED TO 2000/2000
The user has, following absorption of the Genomorphosis and the Brood Drake's Empyreal capabilities, received a metaphysical awakening of magical and extradimensional potential. The user may now learn and cast mystic effects from regenerating resevoirs of energy. The three resources for these abilities are Mana, Ether, and Aeion; broadly referring to the three types of metareal resevoirs; Mana from ambient forms of sorceries coextant with normal reality, Ether from extradimensional realms of power, and Aeion from localised but concentrated sources of metareal power. Training these abilities and collecting tanks for these resevoirs will improve the amount the user can store and the rate at which they will regenerate; and training will also allow the user to build and gather their potential in these abilities as well as unlock new ones. For user protection, if risk of backlash is detected, these abilities will be temporarily shut down unless the user specifies that they are willing to accept the risk of unintended consequences. While the user will not suffer from the worst forms of backlash due to their Inheritor Soul, environmental effects can be severe.
Samus' Notes: I...I guess I'm going to get started on my mystical training a lot earlier than I thought. Well, I'm glad for that at least. I've always been so curious about how my teachers' powers worked. And now well, I guess I need to learn fast then.
Arne's Notes: I'm probably going to get headaches from this at some point. But if I need to use it, I'm going to use it. No sense in not making use of helpful tools. Just, more confident in things rooted a little less in narrative; that's all.
Group 2:
Arcee (Autobot Commander, Great Resistances, Great Defence, All Rounder): Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 15
Warpath (Autobot General, Sublime Resistances, Extreme Defence, Tanking, All-Rounder Damage): Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 20
Joseph (Shadow Magic Defender, Decent Resistances, Great Defence, Support, Ranged Damage) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 20
Doctor Black (Bound Shadow King, Great Resistances, Extreme Defence, Support, Control) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress 15
Ten Shadow Formations (Summoned Shadow Creatures, Decent Resistances, Great Defence: Control, Support) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Optimal. Stress: 0. (Comprised of one Nightblade, Three Shadowmen, Five Dark Panthers, Ten Shades, Fifteen Shadow Scorpions, Twenty Nighthounds, Twenty Five Living Shadows, Thirty Shadelings)
Ten Demonic Cohorts (Summoned Demons, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder )Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of one Demonic Decurion, Three Demonic Corporals, Five Moloch Bulls, Ten Demonic Legionaries, Fifteen Winged-Demons, Twenty Hellhounds, Twenty Five Demonlings, and Thirty Imps stats are for each unit)
Three Warlock Demons (Summoned Demonic Spellcasters. Good Resistances, Good Defence. Control and Support, can summon their own demons). Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Hellknights (Summoned Armoured Demonic Cavalry, Great Reistances, Great Defence. Melee/tanking.) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Fire Elemental Cohorts (Summoned Fire Elementals, Great Resistances, Good Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0 (Each Comprised of One Pyrocaster, Three Incendiery Warriors, Five Salamanders, Ten Pyro-Phalangites, Fifteen Bonfire-Born, Twenty Flaming Ones, Twenty Five Pyre-Gargoyles, and Thirty Sparklings)
Three Greater Salamanders (Summoned Fire Elemental Warbeast. Damage out the ass. Great Resistances, Great Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Five Elemental Pyromancers (Summoned Fire Elemental Mages. Ranged Damage and Control. Great Resistances, Good Defence) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: Impetuous. Stress: 0
Ten Golem Cohorts (Golems. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking.) Shields: 10%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Comprised of One Golem Master, Three Golem Warriors, Five Golem Watchers, Ten Golem Soldiers, Fifteen Golem Beasts, Twenty Lesser Golems, Twenty Five Golem Men, Thirty Golemlings)
Three Golem Guardians (Golems focused on defense. Great Defence and Resistances. Tanking, Support.) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
Five Golem Wardens (Golems focused on Crowd Control. Tanking/Control) Shields: 100%. Armour: 100%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE
WINTERPYRE AND KAUSTOS ARE SUMMONING MORE FORCES, AVAILABLE PETS FOR EUDAIMONICA INCREASED BY x10; LOSSES REPLACED INSTANTLY FOR TWO ROUNDS.
Ten Ithilmar Warden Claws (Warp-powered automata. Great Resistances, Great Defence, All-Rounder) Shields: 40%. Armour: 50%. Health: 100%. Morale: UNBREAKABLE. Stress: UNBREAKABLE (Each Comprised of One Ithilya Lance, Three Metal Wardens, Five Iron-Hosts, ten Swordbearers, fifteen Spearmakers, twenty Furnace-Spiders, twenty-five metal hawks, and thirty Forgelings; stats are for each unit. Kept in Webway pockets until needed; summoned on the spot when necessary.)
As soon as your suit informed you that all threats in the nearby vicinity were neutralised, you tore off your helmet and dismissed your zero suit hood to take in a breath of air. You wiped your brow and slumped to the ground, letting Samus rest on you with her helm removed. You looked at her face once again and felt instantly more fortunate, in the company of such a valkyrie whose beaming smile made it feel impossible to be afraid. White teeth and intense blue eyes accompanied by hair the colour of gold and supple features that made you almost want to pinch her cheeks. You were...afraid that the path that would lead you down to becoming Sylux may not be fully averted...the path where you would lose her and retreat into that blue and green shell...you hugged her a little tighter, not wanting to let go.
"Need a moment there kids?" Hound asked before you nodded, running a hand through Samus' silky golden hair and smiling before the two of you exchanged a brief kiss, just glad to be alive.
"Right, we're going to torch all the nasty scrap we can find so hang tight." Hound said as he rolled into his alt mode and drove into the distance where gunfire could be heard. Nothing that would threaten you soon, and so for a moment you pushed it out of your mind.
"You okay, Samus?" She was usually the one who asked you that first, but you wanted to surprise her a little, getting her to sleepily look up at you with those dreamy blue eyes and raise her brows before making a little cat smile and nodding, holding you closer.
"Mhrm Arne...just don't go into the nearest pit of tentacles like that again." She said with a little giggle before you breathed out a chuckle, leaning your head back and scratching at her scalp a little.
"So, Samus and Arne are your names hrm?" Alyrsero said before he removed his own helm; noble blue eyes looking down at you. His face slender and youthful, free of flaw or scar, black hair messy and toussled but cut in a boyishly charming way while thin lips spoke. Hrm, you looked at Samus' lips...hers were better but...those would be nice to...you were getting distracted and shook your head.
Elendria followed suit, letting down long red hair and opening fierce magenta eyes, fire patterned magenta facepaint on her cheeks. She was radiantly beautiful, as you suspected all Eldar were. Like the Aelva of your own native reality really...very much like them even, even the glow to her irises and the features that seemed at once fit and youthful but wise and cunning. You had to admit, you might have a thing for cute people with pointy ears. Samus also seemed to approve, looking towards you and sharing a bit of a smirk before she pulled herself up into sitting straight.
"Yeah?" Samus said, interrupting you before you could give a long-winded rundown of your long list of epitaphs, names, and titles.
"Looking at you now, I can see that even before you...took in that...you're somewhat more than human." Alyrsero said before Samus scowled at the "more than human" remark while Elendria seemed completely unaware of any offence caused; the others discussing amongst themselves while Kaeliyae tried to take their minds off of the horrors they saw with a little magic show.
"I'm not part human or part Chozo. I'm just both." She said with a frown as Alyrsero finally seemed to catch on and then whispered something to the warrior mage who briefly tinted her cheeks an interesting shade of rose before she regained her dignified posture.
"Apologies then. I've noticed something inside of you awakened, and Elendria and I since well..." He said before looking to her; slightly shorter than the quite impressively tall youth.
"We currently do not know how to return to whence we came so, for the time being, we are going to be...here...with mon'ke-" Elendria said before one of Kaelyae's illusions harrumped right next to her to remind her to be polite as she muttered an apology beneath her breath. "Twenty-first-century humans. We might as well take some time to help, train you in the experience? Alarielle knows that I'd probably get complaints from some in my Shrine for trying to befriend...your kind but...you are interesting, and for your species well...aesthetically ple-" She said before Lelithax shouted over the distance.
"She savours the taste of Alien!" She cackled before Kaeliyae gave her a glare that, despite her face being hidden behind a mirror mask, oozed such intense disappointment that even Lelithax made a squeak of apology while elendria flushed red and made a snarl before shouting a curse in her tongue at the Druchii that translated into...choice commentary about the state of her genitals and choice of bedroom partners followed by a lurid description of her mother's sex life that made you and Samus turn a few shades yourselves. All while the other Eldar simply stopped and stared at the shrine warrior-maiden while Alyrsero gave a few, long, slow blinks.
"...You know she's my mother too...right?" Alyrsero finally said while Arcee looked positively stunned, mouth slack.
"...A thousand apologies Alyrsero, it is merely that your sister is...herself. To borrow a term from the local language, she's an awful bitch." She said with a scowl but an apologetic tone.
"Yet she is one of the those Druchii who resist Malekith, Vect, or Morathi-Khaine's dominion. We need to have some patience with her given her circumstances." He said as if he had explained this a thousand times over, making you quickly realise this was a friend group that had probably been together longer than you had been alive. What you wouldn't give for some context on these shenanigans.
"Yes, yes, a chance to redeem herself and grow beyond the culture she was raised in. I'll believe it when I see it." She said curtly.
"You should let her try." You said, getting Elendria to turn towards you and quirk a brow.
"Even if she's from the worst sort of culture...you should let her try. In this time, they let Germany try again, and they proved themselves to be every bit as capable of decency as anyone else. And in our time, even the Dismori; the Space Pirates, or the Krikens...they're still people, not monsters. They aren't things following a program, they can change." You explained, looking towards Samus who gave you an enthusiastic thumbs up and a small clap before she made a wide, beaming grin.
"And while she's rude sometimes, she's been pretty helpful so far too! So...even if you don't like her, Druchii culture, if you don't give her anywhere else to turn wouldn't she go back to the things you don't want? I'm sure that if we're patient, we can be friends and she'll be as nice as anyone else in your group!" Samus said while Elendria almost started to laugh out loud.
"You two are adorable. And don't know Lelithax. One day, when she proves you wrong, I'll be there to laugh my way to the Black Library itself." She said with a kitten smirk while Alyrsero rolled his eyes.
"And you say I'm patronising." He grumbled.
Dawnmaker returned from his excursions, folding his arms as he looked upon the group after materialising in a luminous flash, hovering in the air surrounded by his shining aura and his living-metal armour, his cape fluttering in the wind behind him.
"The local authorities are here now. Vanguard and PRT." He said, a frown immediately forming on your face as Arcee sputtered out words you probably shouldn't say in front of polite company while you focused your attentions, not on the sounds of distant battle but on the sounds of what you recognised were boots on hard surfaces. Some rubber, some much more metallic. Why were they...Gods of your clan why do people not listen to you?
"Are they crazy? This kind of combat zone is way out of the PRT's fire grade! They're lucky the upper levels are clear!" Arcee shouted.
"Higher-ups apparently did not wish to make it seem they were completely passive in the face of an alien incursion. And it seemed they also wished to demonstrate solidarity. Admirable I suppose, and I am sure Vanguard could handle itself against smaller numbers of these creatures, but it seems that the politics of unelected officials saving face override safety concerns in this occasion." He said, making you wonder just how much of the seventeen-year old that the Kheldian was sharing bodies with was really there in that hybrid.
"Who's in charge?" You asked.
"Someone named Armsmaster requested and was given leave to begin the raid, while the local director told him to wait, I am told that someone above her overruled her decision. Seems a bit glory hungry honestly." He...They said. Taking another look at them didn't really give you the impression they responded to conventional ideas of gender; removing their helm and showing an androgynous face, perhaps somewhat more masculine than feminine, with pointed ears, glowing sunlike eyes, and hair as orange as the...fruit yeah that's about the shade of it. They tightened their expression and held their helmet close, pointed ears listening in to increasingly less distant movement. You wouldn't call them handsome or pretty or even hot, simply beautiful in an ethereal way. But their attention turned fully to the entrance you came out of as Armsmaster came rushing in with a blood stained halberd, PRT and Vanguard troops behind him.
You let your scanner in its zero-point state go over them quickly and breathed out a sigh of relief when it didn't detect any trace of the infected genome through its multi-spectral analysis. But your relief turned to anger as you sensed the bluster, the arrogance that was filling the man's heart as he approached you. Something to prove, something to show, a need to demonstrate that he was still top dog. Already seeking to make an argument of things. You weren't going to have it. Not now, not here.
He had changed his armour, analysing the leftover Rikti and Weltreich technology he had managed to get his hands on, making use of rapid fabrication systems from Primal Earth he spent hours studying to understand. It was now made of the Impervium he had managed to cajole out of Vanguard, convincing them that he was someone important enough to get access to the metal, with trace sof absorbium to protect himself against shock and blunt impact or heating up the armour should his new shielding fail. He had devised new halberds, incorporating Rikti and Weltreich technology and weapons. He certainly felt confident after beating on some stragglers.
"Are you crazy?!" You said as the PRT swept the area, the autobot sweep teams and demons seeming to have concluded most of their work as the last distant screams of battle faded into silence. Your voice snapped above the silence, Kaeliyae's illusory show dispelling almost immediately after the Protectorate barged in, the Wards following suit.
"Not in the least kid. This is our city, and we can't leave its defence entirely up to outsiders." He said, having the troops check the perimeter while Kid Win gave a small, sheepish wave over to Samus and the Eldar turned at once to the sudden influx of humans.
"Why are there elves?" Chris asked.
"Eldar, the term is Eldar; or Aeldari if you would prefer." Alyrsero said as he stared down the human approaching him.
"Alien then?" Armsmaster asked.
"Indeed, from the grim darkness of the far future of the forty seventh millennium. The same reality these creatures originated from." He responded.
"I hope you don't mind us taking a look at this tech for ourselves then." He said bluntly. "Or coming to have a chat with us." He said, clearly not making a request.
"Why?" Elendria asked bluntly.
"There are systems here, systems that need your presence registered regardless of species. Based on the scorches and signs of your passage left behind, I'd say that letting you run around without supervision would even be outright dangerous." He was even blunter. If she were a flanged mace, Collin was a sledgehammer without the slightest hint of roundness or edge to his voice whatsoever, and the Eldar was for a moment, impressed.
"We also need the data you've all acquired. Otherwise we're going to be fighting in the dark." He said as Samus slowly pushed herself up and cracked her neck. Arcee looked down at you and gave a nod.
"We'll meet at your headquarters then. Next time though, I'd like some warning before you put low-level combatants in a high intensity combat zone like this." She said to the PRT officers as some took a look at the left over guns dropped by the cultists.
"Some kinda...laser rifle sir." One said before taking a test shot and punching a torso wide and man deep hole in the wall; now bereft of protective biomass; on the other side almost instantly; steaming rock vapour curling out as he whistled.
"Can I keep it?" He asked before a curt no came back.
"...Killjoy." He muttered under his breath in a tone Collin couldn't hear but you could. This did not inspire confidence.
...Brockton Bay PRT HQ; Cafeteria, three hours later...
You couldn't believe they just asked you and the Eldar to not be present at the meeting while they discussed "matters not pertinent to extra-terrestrial minors". But the Eldar in particular seemed incensed, especially with the request to wear masks and ear covers. Any attempt to get Kaeliyae to show her face was flatly and bluntly refused as she and Ormothin were sent up to the meeting room, while Lelithax simply took on a glamour rather than debase herself with any human made coverings. You weren't privy to every detail of their telepathic conversation, but it was clearly one full of roiling outrage.
"Why does Dawnmaker get to attend?" Joseph grumbled as he stabbed into his dinner once again.
"Because Dawnmaker's as old as the dinosaurs." Alice said with a mouth already full of food while you were busy trying to force down the food even knowing full well what was in it and used to cook it, Samus being even less pleased with her meal.
"I am seventy of their years old, why do I not get a pass then? " Alyrsero seethed.
"Because you're pretty clearly still a kid." Vista answered.
"So Kaeliyae and Ormothin are there..." He asked.
"Because they need someone to talk, they seemed the most level-headed, and they never showed their faces." Zach answered.
"And the two of us?" Samus asked, sleeve brushing against the table as she stabbed at more of her food, zero suit flexing with her.
"Probably mad at you for bypassing protocol. But you're not part of us so not including you is the worst they can do." Lola said, chugging some of her soda afterwards.
"How serious is it?" You asked, daring to try some of the Soda and finding it...tolerable. Not bad, not good, tolerable. Which is about as much as anyone can ask for.
"Well, the president and a bunch of other heads of state are teleconferencing in so...pretty serious. Potential world ender level serious thing you saved us from." Chris said with a confident smile, eyes on Samus and studying her reaction as she gave a bit more of a happy expression. There was satisfaction to be had from that after all.
"How is Emma?" Samus asked.
"She'll probably need therapy for years but she'll live." Vista said solemnly.
Well, that was good at least. As was Bumblebee reporting a rather successful mission, managing to see four of the fleshmetal ninjas in action hunting down some highly adaptive robots; kids sometimes popping out of them to deal with their nemeses' adaptations with blasts of energy before returning to their frames and continuing their work, disappearing shortly after, but still inadvertently providing the Autobots with a wealth of information. Including what sorts of signatures to look out for should they ever return. The new hero, Black Moth, seemed to be well; largely doing what she wanted, still new to the scene.
Looking at the dataslate beneath your chin, the figure in Paragon City that crossed over from Brockton Bay was known as Lung, and had duelled the eightfold masters of the Tsoo gang and seemingly came out on top in the six or so hours that you were gone, combing through that large temple and fighting seemingly unending hordes of monsters. That seemed concerning...you guessed, but it was also mostly Street crime stuff. The Oranbega situation left more questions than answers as the demons of the sunken city battled with daemons of kinds very rarely seen before as well as a few power armoured cultists who could more than hold their own against many heroes. Though they were driven off, they had stolen something from the servants of the King of Hell. More worrying.
The Clockwork King's menace was dealt with; mostly nuisance raids for scrap metal to be animated into more of the clockwork. Some regarded him as a serious threat, others mostly saw him as annoying. But it was dealt with at least. The Autobots would be going through the salvage you had gathered, but it was a pretty hefty chunk. Enough so that whenever you got to crafting you'd probably have a bunch of ideas to sort through...but you could also just use a break after six hours of high intensity fighting against unending swarms of creatures. You could have gone on longer, much longer, but not having your mind in fight mode all the time would be nice.
Kaeliyae slid into the room through the door, making a brief "ta-da!" gesture as she cartwheeled inside and spread her arms with vibrant cheer.
"The discussions are concluded. My apologies that so many were excluded!" She said as a few others filtered in through the door, Arcee, Dawnmaker, Ormothin, Kalros, Piggot.
"How were the talks?" You asked as Arcee made a "so-so" gesture.
"We'll probably have to have follow-up debriefings tomorrow, I can push for the day after though but you won't be able to avoid them. You're also going to need to take at least a few days off. Jetfire's orders." Arcee said as Samus almost flashed with red rage before she choked back her words before she could shout them out.
"Why?" She asked.
"Because you were in a hell of teeth and claws and the entire team nearly got wiped at least twice. And we need to monitor your health to make sure the genomorphosis has no side effects. It shouldn't from what I know of your tech, but Red Alert is pretty pushy on that. Workbench will be usable later too but for now...R&R time. We'll increase the contribution we make to patrols to take the load off you, don't worry; we're getting in some shipments of fresh troops and things should be calming down for a bit." She said, resting a hand on her hip.
As much as it pained you to sit back and let others take your burdens...she was right. You did take a lot of unneeded risks and let people get hurt. You probably did need time to clear your mind.
"It's not like you have to sit out action entirely, just...nothing full mission scale for a bit." She said to reassure you.
"Well, we will have work to do regardle-" Alyrsero said before Arcee wagged her mechanical finger at the Eldar boy.
"No, you're not. You are children without parental supervision. Extraterrestrial children at that. Now I had to twist some arms to get this, but you're going to be under de facto autobot custody for the remainder of your stay or until your guardians find you." She said sternly, but kindly, voice born of concern rather than disappointment.
"But they got to choose!" Idaliryn said, gesturing towards you.
"Because a precedent hadn't been set yet. Section 13 will also help with some of the burdens, but before you start thinking your warp magic will let you get away with violating curfew, we are present in your metaversal cluster as well. We know what to look for." She said as Lelithax almost spat out the drink she was sipping until she checked that it was indeed, from her personal flask and kept on going through it.
"So what now?" Elendria huffed.
"Slumber party?" Vista asked hopefully.
Night time Options:
[]: Slumber party at the Ward HQ (Get to hang out with basically all the wards who sleep at the PRT base, get to know more of the protectorate and maybe speak to Piggot a bit)
[]: Slumber party at Eudaimonica's Hell Castle (One of the best places to learn of magic if you're comfortable learning it from demons, meet Alice's parents.)
[]: Slumber party at Joseph's Shadow Palace (One of the best places to learn of magic, less of the lore comes from actual hell, meet Joseph's parents.)
[]: Slumber party on the Autobot moonbase (Hang out with the Masterforce, some of the Autobot new arrivals, work with Wheeljack a bit and more)
[]: Slumber party at the Starsetter base in Paragon City (Hang around the cool kids in Paragon City and its eclectic repertoire of superheroes who can help you learn stuff like magic; get introduced to the City of Heroes, and to some new friends)
[]: Slumbder party in either Arne or Samus' ship. (Full access to your armouries, best crafting systems you've got. Can turn a lot of the SRI you've acquired into gear and also wow your friends with your fancy ships)
[X]: Slumber party at the Ward HQ (Get to hang out with basically all the wards who sleep at the PRT base, get to know more of the protectorate and maybe speak to Piggot a bit)
Now to think where would be best to sleep and debrief after that nonsense. I think we should consider either one of the magical options, to best get started on that or the Wards, Piggot needs to at least hear what we experienced with the Hive, as much as she would rather not have to deal with what is comparable to her worst nightmares about a Bio Thinker
[X]: Slumber party at the Ward HQ (Get to hang out with basically all the wards who sleep at the PRT base, get to know more of the protectorate and maybe speak to Piggot a bit)
