"We got her, we got her!" LGY exclaimed.
"Yeah! Now we just have to go pick up the shards-" DCC began.
"No, wait," NYV said. "EBL, look."
EBL looked through the scope again. Another target had shown up, about 140 degrees to their right... and it was moving. Coming at them, in fact, and at high speed! "Second shot! Get ready! ROLLING...!"
"BLASTERRRRR!"
pheeeeee-BWWOOOOM...ckckck
The explosion was the same, but it was followed by an odd after-sound - like something scattering onto the ground. And then, a frame came speeding into view out of the smoke, carried on a little cart propelled by a... chemical rocket?
RME stuck her foot out into its path. The cart ran into it, tumbled through the air a couple of times, then crashed onto its side and skidded to a halt. The frame was made of metal, and formed the rough outline of a standard Peridot; at its base, on the cart, was a small green crystalline box lit up from inside with blinking lights.
"...a decoy," EBL said, in the flat tone of someone no longer surprised by anything. "The Peridot prepared sensor decoys."
"I swear, she gonna turn out to have a giant slaggin' robonoid..." DCC grumbled.
"We have a cannon! Bring! It! Ooooooon!" RME announced.
The situation was getting worse, EBL realized. Except for LGY, they'd all been on grab-and-go missions before, and this was the first time a Gem had not only been expecting them but also prepared with adequate countermeasures. It was… no, it was a waste to just take this one back to Homeworld. She caught herself chuckling under her breath at the oddity of it all - how long ago was it, the last time she'd been out on a mission this challenging? "This is gonna be a shine of a report…" she said to herself. "One for the textbooks-"
"EBL? Another one incoming," NYV said.
She looked down at the scope again, her reverie broken. It was coming at them, from a different angle this time, but at the same speed as the last one. "Okay, we'll-"
"And a second one," NYV added.
It wasn't showing up on her scope. "Moving?"
"Stationary."
Two targets, and no way to figure out which one was real before it was too late.
The Rubies looked to EBL, each one of them in a state of growing anxiousness and looking for reassurance. Under her excitement for a mission worth her mettle she had doubts, doubts that were beginning to boil up to the surface. The Peridot's tactics had been strike-and-fade, never getting into a strength-vs-strength situation and even rigging the terrain in her favor. They'd deployed obscenely heavy armaments against her, and she was still unnerving them: they all knew now that she could beat them one-on-one on her own terms, and if she'd prepared sensor decoys it meant she had a plan to use them effectively against them.
But there had to be something, some advantage they had. A weakness? No - Peridots were weakness walking on two legs compared to Rubies, and she'd been winning. How, though? Every time she fought them, she avoided extended combat…
And then it started to dawn on her: she had to start thinking like her opponent.
The Peridot had been compensating for her lack of strength by striking where they were weakest, focusing maximum effort on a pinpoint. She'd disabled their Roaming Eye by attacking the distracted pilot, provoked the trigger-happy RME into a trap, and let her eat dirt before striking from behind.
But now there were five of them, and they had the Rolling Blaster. If she had some sort of equivalent weapon, or a long-range option - no, she didn't. She would have deployed it by now, or even just shot the Roaming Eye down during their approach. It was too much power to overcome with trickery, which left only one option: a frontal attack, obfuscated with decoys.
"...the moving one!" EBL barked, every bit the hardened veteran her squad looked up to. "ROLLING...!"
Their confidence restored, the Ruby Squad turned, aimed, and fired as one - at the moving signal. "BLASTERRRRR!"
pheeeeee-BWWOOOOM
Whatever they hit, it wasn't a decoy...
-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-
At just the right moment, Peridot jumped as high as the boots would let her.
The Rolling Buster beam passed harmlessly beneath her, and exploded somewhere in the smoke behind her.
It had been a risky tactic, provoking what turned out to be artillery blaster shots to learn what kind of weapon they were using - but it had paid off. The Rubies had all but spelled out their weapon's characteristics and shortcomings to her with the previous firings: charging time, termination distance, beam vector relative to the ground.
Most importantly, that they could only fire it after shouting out the weapon's name.
She drew the Negotiator and charged a full-power shot. And as she arced over the Rubies, she fired down at them.
One shot: PEW
One hit: GSSHH
One disabled cannon: VVVVVvvvvvwo'wo'wo'wo'wo'wooo...oo
She could hear the Rubies panicking when she landed. They weren't far off, but between the beams they'd been firing, the explosion of their cannon and the smoke that was still floating around - they couldn't see her, even if they could hear her.
But stealth and sneakery were no longer realistic options; with their cannon blown up, the Ruby Squad knew she was coming.
There was a maneuver she'd been practicing, an all-or-nothing attack that seemed likely to catch them off guard in their confusion. First she activated the Diplomat, but this time had it form into more of an open claw shape ahead of her. And then she deployed the 'spurs' in her boots again, wheels that popped out and spun into the ground, dragging her along at decent speed... but this time, she activated the boosters.
This time, they could hear her coming. But it wouldn't help them.
She charged at where she had heard EBL, leading with the Diplomat's claw, cutting through the smoke, until!
WHAM
The Ruby only had a moment to react, but she couldn't - instead looking very surprised at what had just come out of the smoke. Peridot plowed into her with all the force of a ('smol') freight train, knocking the air out of her and dragging her away from the others.
When they were just out of sight, she made a high-G 180-degree turn, fast enough to keep EBL pinned against the energy claw through acceleration and centripetal forces alone. She charged at the other Rubies again, this time (WHA-WHAM) ramming into NYV and DCC, pinning them to EBL with every-increasing speed.
Again she spun back, and again she rammed into some Rubies (WH-WHAM). By this point she was moving too fast to identify them individually as she hit them or even see where she was going, but that was where being a Peridot came in handy.
There was no need for her to see: she'd calculated where everything and everyone would be after the explosion. All five of the Rubies, all of the Rolling Blaster debris, various rocks and changes in ground angle - everything.
Though she could feel the approximate weight of the others on the claw, she could only see EBL immediately in front of her, dazed and unable to get free. And she would, with enough time, since this assault/combat maneuver wasn't actually meant to hold them.
The boosters on Peridot's boots (PD-C09 'Gliss/Gallop') continued to accelerate, driving her away from the barn at ever-increasing speeds away from the barn, the five Rubies caught in front of her like bugs in a truck grill...
...But more accurately, they were like a car bumper, the kind meant to crumple in a high-speed collision against, say, a giant rock in the field somewhere?
KKROOOM