You threw yourself to the floor just moments before the launcher barked and eighteen electromagnetically-accelerated spikes crashed through the back wall of the house, sailing off into the building behind. You barely had time to scramble along the floor and evade the burst of micromissiles that followed, throwing yourself into the kitchen as the floorboards burst apart behind you.
"Fuck, it's
armed?" you gasped, in awe of the absolutely recklessness of these engineers, when suddenly you realized you could see yourself in the camera of the laptop on the counter. You shifted onto the ceiling just in time to avoid the next set of flechettes bursting blind through the wall, targeted through the networked camera, and the laptop burst apart in a hail of fragments at about the same time that the sink began to spray water from a breached pipe.
There were further blasts from the other room, not targeted at you, and you realized that Justine was coming into this blind and unprepared. You raced back into the living room along the ceiling just in time to see a burst of steel darts punch through the red cloak billowing across the entrance hall.
You stuck a line to the back of the machine's shoulder and pulled, spinning it around before attempting to clamp onto its head with your claws. It grabbed and pulled, and once again you felt the horrible sensation of duct tape being ripped off bare skin as your fingers and feet were forcefully detached from the ceiling and you were thrown hard into the wall.
You crashed through the drywall and flimsy wooden framework and tumbled outside, your head ringing, vision swimming. Okay, it was strong, probably because it was a high powered exoskeleton build over an equally strong endoskeleton. That's double-dipping, unfair.
"
Also hardly the most efficient way of doing things, but the engineers here don't exactly seem to be playing with a full deck." Athena whispered. "
What a mess."
"I'll register a bug report after." you groaned, kicking yourself to my feet and throwing yourself back through the door.
Justine was still fighting, dodging her way up the hallway. The lights in her billowing cloak were flashing in random directions, against her direction of travel, making it nearly impossible to track her position among the articulated bulletproof fabric. The robot was clearly having difficulty tracking her, but then its arm suddenly shot out, extending down the hall in a long sweep that would surely catch Justine. You threw out two lines of silk onto its back and pulled with all your strength, and the machine wavered a moment, letting Justine slide under the attack and get close. Her cloak wrapped around its legs, and between the two of you the machine pitched onto its back with a
crash, smashing the worn hardwood floor to splinters.
"Blind it, blind it!" you yelled, and Justine's cloak wrapped over its eyes, lights flashing like lightning through the fabric. You were struggling to get a hold on its processes in your tech-sense, the structure like water in your hands, but you managed to disable the reload system on its launchers and did your best to pin both its arms with your claws. It thrashed wildly, in blind terror as you tried to figure out how to shut it off or slow it down. The power cable at its back, if you could get behind it, or get clear to sever the cable...
"Stop! Fucking stop!" Justine yelled, "We can explain-"
"Cowl, the power cable-"
Suddenly it pushed down through the floor with one arm and rolled over, arms wheeling and throwing you over. This time, you landing on the wall feet first and stayed, watch it kick to its feet with Justine's cloak still entangled, still swinging blindly, extending limbs crashing through furniture. Justine tumbled to the ground, her cloak automatically flowing behind her to cushion her fall, and a steel fist descended toward her head.
[ ] Liv throws herself in the way of the punch, breaking several ribs and giving Justine room to blind it and pull the plug.
[ ] Liv desperately punches a claw through the machines back, and the cascading failure through the system knocks the machine back to sub-sentience.