The suit walks through the forest, its plasma fusion core pulsing gently within its chest. As gently as a tiny neutron star can when sheltered and controlled by machines advanced enough to be considered magic. No longer is the heat from the star burning everything around it, the fires that would start would more than likely burn those that followed in the machine's wake.
The utter carnage it is causing is barely an afterthought to the machine, nothing near the density of foes, and those few scattered groups it fights are weaker by far. Massive trees are uprooted by invisible tendrils of solid air and thrown from its path, bushes and plants, so corrupted they weep blood and scream, grow thorns and lash out at the suit as it passes, trying to entangle it in their magically enhanced roots.
The suit does not care, the bushes and plants are killed with bursts of radiation, cooked and burnt by microwave radiation. Heat and energy can be transferred through a myriad of methods, and nearly all are deadly in excess. Occasionally a beast large enough that the radiation would fail to kill it instantly arrives, in those instances a molten bullet barely larger than two inches immediately removes its upper skull.
The suit's limited fabrication uses its similarly limited stores of metal to fashion replacement ammunition, its magnetic cannons getting fed new ammunition types. So far no explosive shells have been needed, the suit notes that as optimal as explosives are harder to fabricate with its limited fabrication systems. It's energy to matter conversion systems taking hours to make a single grenade or mortar shell, rather than minutes for a simple metal bullet.
The suit could not make ammunition faster than it could use it, but it could make enough to function behind enemy lines and without support without concerns of becoming overly reliant on energy weapons. Some things couldn't be easily killed by the application of heat, light, or radiation.
If it wasn't an armor, with the hollow core that entailed, the suit would have been far stronger than it was, but the suit could not and did not care for this knowledge. It was what it was.
The suit walked on, and its foes fell on it with a desperate fever, trying to slow the metallic font of violence for just a few moments. They failed, their deaths doing little but cause the suit to have a use for its ample power generation. The Elves and Dwarves walked in safety behind the machine. The few beastmen who made an attempt on the considerably more killable creatures of flesh soon learned that the armor was much better at defending a creature than it was at killing them. Even if half its methods of defense were just murdering the enemy.
Loosed arrows and bolts of piddly magic did not even have the chance to fail against the masterworks worn by the dwarves and elves. The magic was disrupted by explosions or redirected by the very air refusing to move from its path, the arrows and bolts and even the occasional thrown rock were outright disintegrated through precision application of intense vibration causing the object to fall apart.
And eventually without even suffering a scratch the armor's sensors led it to the source of the foul energy and to where the energy forms and fled once the suit had torn them asunder. A massive tear in reality outputting the foul radiation like water from a dam. The suit had its attention split between monitoring the portal and planning just how it was going to kill the odd creatures guarding it, the things had to be some ten meters tall, larger than it by 3 meters, and at least one could manipulate the energy.
Well the portal would most likely close once its guardians stopped maintaining it, and they were just creatures of flesh. Even the tide of daemons rushing from the portal would fail to stop the suit from just launching a missile into the odd four legged creatures. So while its laser point defense dealt with the smaller creatures rushing it, a section of the armor's back lifted up exposing its missile bays, ten high explosive missiles launched in rapid succession, one for each of the large beasts.
The missiles screamed as they tore through the air, rapidly shattering the sound barrier and accelerating faster and faster, even if they had just been solid metal the missiles were traveling at enough speed they would have sunk deep into the beastmen's flesh, but these were made to rip holes in much larger and far more armored creatures. The missiles sank into the beastmen's flesh like the air it had flown through to reach them, its sharp angles and form serving to part the flesh with little resistance.
Then they detonated, before the beastmen could do so much as recoil all that was left to show they had existed in the first place were the various pairs of legs just now starting to fall over, and the raining viscera falling everywhere but on the armor and its entourage. The flesh was tainted, and could arguably be considered a bioweapon, so the armor simply didn't allow the flesh to fall upon its metal form.
The portal began fluctuating, its ragged edges losing even more cohesion as its size seemed to both grow and shrink at the same time, the energy it put off rapidly destabilizing and tearing at the few surviving daemons just as violently as it tore at its surroundings.
But the foul energy was not done, it writhed and screamed, audible even to those without the suits' advanced sensors. And the portal snapped into stability for just a few instants, before slamming shut with an explosion larger than the armor's missiles had been combined. That had been long enough for something to come through, something just as large as the beastmen the armor had killed. And the amount of energy it had was considerable even by the armors standards. A portion of the ambient taint and the energy from the portal's collapse had been funneled into the energy form, making it even stronger than it should have been and giving it the power to remain in the material world for a time.
Not that the suit cared, fear was a hormonal response and even if the suit had been capable of that well…. The thing was far smaller than what it had been made to kill, and there was only one of it, rather than a never ending tide.
It did note that the dwarves and elves behind it began spreading out of their group and fanning around the clearing, but besides noting that it was probably an attack formation and that it'd make them more difficult to shield the suit did nothing to stop their preparations.
It just strode towards the massive energy form, who let out a roar that was more than physical, brandished its massive blood soaked axes, and charged. The suits' lasers and bullets tore into the beast but failed to slow it down or even meaningfully harm it, the creature seeming to relish in its bleeding wounds. Which the armor noted shouldn't have been bleeding regardless given the heat of its lasers. Its vibration disintegration didn't have any matter to destabilize, energy forms being made of solid energy. The armor's missiles might have been able to kill the thing, but its estimated toughness based on how the bullets had penetrated showed that it'd take twice as many missiles to kill this thing as it had taken to kill all of the beastmen.
No, this was a foe of much greater quality than those it had just finished killing. It would actually be able to reach the armor before it died. And those blades likely had some esoteric effect granting them greater cutting power than the edge implied. But still the suit walked closer, its analysis had already shown the best way to beat this thing. Simply cut it into small pieces with the armors mounted blades. Resource efficient and relatively effective.
The energy form reached the armor and lashed out with one of its blades, seeking to bisect the armor. The armor however showed that it's sedate pace wasn't because it couldn't move quickly, rather that it just hadn't needed to. To the eyes of the dwarves and elves the armor became a blur, the earth under its feet shattering as it lunged forward using both its legs and it's maneuvering thrusters, with its wrist blade held in just the right position that as the armor dodged towards and past the greater daemon it's blade tore the daemon in half in turn.
Still, a greater daemon was no weak thing and it's second ax lashed in a counter strike, the daemons form bending in a way no flesh could to strike the foe now behind it, the armor simple kept moving out of it's reach, then turned on a dime and rocketed back towards the daemon, who was still in the midst of both it's swings and lopped of its right arm, then it's left, and finally with one last lunge, the daemons head fell to the ground.
The armor dropped out of its combat stance, its wrist blade sliding seamlessly into its shell and monitored the clearing. The energy levels were dropping rapidly, and the armor made certain to scramble the energy forms retreating self into an even more chaotic form. It wouldn't stop the thing from coming back, the suit not capable of outright destroying memetic energy. But it would take the energy longer to assume its previous configuration.
With that the battle was done, the elves and dwarves stared at the suit who even though its form remained stationary, stared back. The suit had options here, it was obvious these creatures had some civilization, given the primitive but well crafted tools. It could follow them, and learn about them, maybe even protect them from danger as it was made to protect its maker.
Or it could simply stay, let time wash away the blood, let the plants regrow and slowly be buried yet again. Waiting for the day its maker returned.
- follow them
- With stealth
- Blatantly (this was chosen)
- The threat is gone, go back into standby mode
AN-
one issue with this format is that the chapters are necessarily shorter. still fun to write though.
