Chapter 5

As she thought about it, Skye had to adjust her calculations upon realizing that she really didn't need nearly as many nanobots as she had calculated.

With their upgraded optics, one nanobot for every meter squared of the planet would be perfectly fine, meaning only a count of 510 trillion, a quantity her sprayers had already produced. Deciding to play it safe, she multiplied that by a thousand, so a thousand nanobots would be in every square meter of the surface of the planet, a quantity of only 510 quadrillion, which was a quantity produced after only 60 seconds. That then led her to her next problem, handling the oceans, lakes, and anywhere else Fenris or other organizations could be hiding secret bases.

Submersibles had existed on earth since the 1600's after all. Granted, wooden ones propelled by oars, but that still left plenty of time for that technology to be realized and upgraded. Maybe nothing at the bottom of the oceans, but at the bottom of lakes and things, where the crush depth wouldn't be enough to break the hull of an underwater base. With the tech currently available to them, bright enough minds would be able to rig together crude air pumps to filtrate the base. Her nanobots could go underwater, though they'd have reduced speed and visibility. So it wasn't really a huge problem, but still something she'd want to fix in the future.

She also had realized a handy use for the Unit Cannon. She could use it to deploy swarms of nanobots across the planet quicker. It could fire pods of Locusts at various locations, which would break apart in the atmosphere, the shell disintegrating into nothing long before hitting the ground while the Locusts spread out to fulfil their objective of a thousand to each square kilometre.

Since the moon was something she wanted covered in nothing but defences, factories and economy, she had a dozen Unit Cannons built at her ground base. Then she had them start producing Locusts, ensuring each pod was entirely filled before loading it into the belt and filling the next. Each pod was about 5mx5mx3m, so to fill one entirely was 75 cubic metres. 75 multiplied by 1 quadrillion was obviously 75 quadrillion, meaning each pod could hold about 6.8% of the nanobots needed to cover the planet with a thousand nanobots for every square metre.

If the pods broke apart in the atmosphere, they could even use the air current to carry themselves pretty much all over the world, their own internal propulsion assisting that action. Rather than letting the unit cannons produce them alone, she enlisted the assistance of all of her ground factories, as well as having a bunch of teleporters temporarily built on the moon and temporary redirecting the factories there to producing a stream of nanobots. With the assistance of so many factories, each unit cannon quickly loaded their entire payloads, twelve cannons holding twelve projectiles which each held 75 quadrillion nanobots meant that when fired, 10.8 quintillion nanobots would be scattered across the world.

That was 21 times the amount she needed for her task, which just meant she nudged their orders a little, so that every square meter would instead have 21,000 nanobots, rather than 1,000. That sounded like a lot, except to make a single straight line of them a meter long would need 100,000, and that was a straight line, which would be invisible. Even if they all clumped up into a box they would only be 210 micrometres across in each direction. That was just over the width of two human hairs, except in every direction, so practically nothing.

When dispersed across an entire cubic metre, they would be so small as to be unnoticeable. To even be visible to the naked eye would take quite a few of them to all clump up together to break the 50 micron barrier of unaided human vision. When just flying around, they would be too small to be visible. And with their in-built stealth systems, even if they did clump together, they wouldn't be seen. As long as they didn't fly under a microscope or something, nobody would notice that anything was amiss.

Following the order package she'd thrown together and had some of the Colonels look over to correct, the Unit Cannons all swivelled in different directions, firing their projectiles then adjusting their aim and firing again, each shot sent on a different trajectory. Some were going to land in various places in Europe, others in Africa, some in America, and basically every land-mass that was deemed necessary. Even those that weren't would still receive nanobots, they just weren't the ones directly targetted with pods. She had 144 pods being launched, and that meant she couldn't really target every single location on the planet with a direct launch.

Just most of them.

With the launch of her nanobots having gone perfectly, she ended up having to disable the IFF tags that appeared visibly for her.

That didn't disable anything, it was just that she changed her sensors to no longer display nanobot IFFs, because they were literally everywhere. Honestly it was a little bit freaky to think about, knowing that she was walking over her nanobots and yet if she didn't know of their existence she'd have no idea. They were kinda like invisible, odourless poison gas in that way, since if they needed to they could actually infiltrate the human body and wreak havoc, severing important nerves and generally causing all sorts of damage.

And the main threat of them was that, for the people of this world, there was basically no way to purge them. Sure, if this was Planetary Annihilation the enemy Commander could counter her swarm with fabricators, since there were so few nanobots that a stream of nanites would easily overwhelm and dismantle them, but she wasn't in Planetary Annihilation right now. There was no enemy Commander for her to face.

Using that fact to the fullest, she basically had given herself the best spy network possible. They'd already uncovered several Fenris bases in Polanian and Rusviet territory, the nanobots scanning papers and sending those documents to her for perusal. It also confirmed that Fenris had already learned that Colonel Zubov was dead. Curiously enough, they also noted that an experimental cyborg who was supposed to be guarding him had vanished, and when relayed through the network of nanobots they quickly discovered that the Cyborg was in the city of Kolno, apparently searching for Heinrich.

Setting him as a target of interest, she let her nanobots keep an eye on him, something sticking out to her. Surely if he was meant to be Zubov's guard, he would have been at the train-station fight and should have perished with the rest of them. Of course, maybe Zubov tasked him with something else, but then, why didn't he report back to Fenris? They would have gotten their intel sooner if he had. Even still, why was he staying rogue? Maybe he was trying to get his own hands on Heinrich so that he would have a bargaining chip so Fenris didn't kill him for losing their pawn in the Rusviet military.

Something about the situation just didn't add up, so rather than just killing him, keeping an eye on him was easier and safer in case it turned out he was actually being helpful. Fenris definitely had enemies, considering how Tesla knew of their existence, as did Heinrich and Piotr, and definitely didn't like them. Their want to rule the world made it pretty easy to figure out why. If those men knew, then chances were high that others knew and despised them as well, but weren't able to operate openly against them since Fenris were dug in like rats into governments, militaries, economies and basically anywhere they could hide could be suspected of being a Fenris member.

Skye already knew a few high-up Fenris members thanks to the intel located by her nanobots. Two of the advisors to the head of Clan Albion, one to the strongest king of the Nordic Kingdoms. From there it spread out more, members subtly placed to nudge the countries along. By piecing it together, she could see pretty clearly that Fenris were perfectly poised to control wars themselves, engineering an incident here, an insult there, pushing the countries over just enough for the dominos to fall and for the war to flare up again.

The first one was definitely caused by them, it was meant to help them get access to the Factory after all, but it failed terribly thanks to Tesla and his overwhelming technological superiority. She basically stripped the entirety of the Fenris bases of every scrap of usable intel using her nanobots, their locations noted for further involvement, before her nanobots brought another interesting subject to her attention, though this one was more for leisure than anything else.

There was a woman roaming through the Crimean Khaganate with two pistols that were advanced enough to have to be Tesla inventions, as well as the thing that prompted her attention, a robotic fox. Rather than being stupidly robotic though, it acted like an actual fox, shaking as though it had fur, loping around, and being far more like a fox than a machine in even this version of 1920 had any right to be.

She had quadrupedal mechs accompanying her, that upon investigation from her nanobots were fully automated, and pretty massive, at least five times as tall as the woman herself. Mounted with large cannons that operated on electric coils, they were another obvious staple of Tesla's inventions, making her even more curious. She had a unit cannon construct a T2 Fabricator and launch it in her direction to build a humanoid chassis, for two purposes.

First was because she wanted to investigate this more personally. Secondly was her wanting to test the range of her transmission system. It was now tied into her quantum communication teleporter system, so it should theoretically be able to go any distance, even across dimensions as appeared to be the case for her separation from the Home System. But in order to make sure she'd need to test it, and a few hundred kilometres or so was a short enough distance for that.

It would take a while to arrive, and then longer to actually create the entire chassis, which was using the improved model with the defensive AI and in-built teleporter, as well as upgrades to armament and sensors, with the singular downsized Dox Cannon being replaced with four miniaturized guns from the Single Laser Defense Tower, while the middle contained a smaller Uber Cannon, the same one that was located in the main chassis of her Commander. Located within each of her shoulders were several small batteries of Galata Turrets, and that was the extent of her offensive armament.

Her left hand now had the sprayers of an Advanced Fabricator, one to each finger, which would immensely increase her own ability to fabricate material. Inside of her chassis were several hover-pads taken from the Drifter Hover Tanks, downsized of course and adjusted for her use, as well as thrusters from the Phoenixes. Using them, she'd be able to independently fly and even leave the surface of the planet and fly to another, it would just take a while.

Defensively, her armour had been upgraded and thickened just a little, owing to the increased internal space from the much smaller components, and while it meant she was a little bit heavier, that was again offset by the lowered size and mass of the internal components. She obviously now had her own in-built teleporter to which her in-built AI would use to defend her as it did with her main chassis, a teleport spike launcher placed in the index finger of her right hand, and in case of emergencies the teleporter could be used to teleport the chassis away from danger, something she pondered about doing to all of her units.

Being able to pull them straight out of danger if damaged or about to be destroyed would be incredibly useful after all, though it would also substantially increase their cost. As it stood, she wasn't worried about the expensiveness of her humanoid chassis, not when she had her resource pods generating basically infinite energy and matter. Speaking of the pods, those too had been upgraded. Each one contained one singular MPC and the rest was filled with grainlets of matter replicators, the single Metal Planet Core being able to power them all at capacity and still have energy to spare.

Idly, Skye adjusted her own chassis, spraying a small fabricator arm into existence on top of her right arm using the fabricators in her left, then using that to start reconstructing her left arm, upgrading them to T2 fabricators. When that was done, she then used her upgraded arm to spray nanites over herself, having them upgrade her body and remove the temporary fabricator arm addition. There was nothing much happening after all, so upgrading herself was perfectly reasonable.

It did feel a bit...strange, not painful but just bizarre, as old systems went offline then came back online vastly improved. At one point her optics went offline, returning a few moments later with an improved variant. She'd been exceptionally firm that her body still had to be able to imitate a human, so there was no downscaling of her eyes or anything freaky like that, they were just improved a little. The AI of her nanites had been tweaked and patched to more perfectly adjust her skin to reflect things. Not just emotions, but reactions to various environmental situations were added.

When she was done, she rolled her shoulders, shaking her legs and testing her chassis both electronically and manually to make sure all her components were operating correctly. As far as she could tell, the upgrade was successful and she was 100% operational. MPC's were connected correctly, an array of three of them, one in each leg and one in her abdomen. Her matter replicator pods were also fully operational, hundreds of the little devices working away to turn the energy given by the three MPC's into matter for her to use. Weapons were all online and ready to emerge at any moment, and her defensive AI was online and using her sensor suite to scan for incoming projectiles.

She got up from her seated position on a box on the back of the train, hearing the rejoicing of the Polanians in the train as they celebrated their victories as well as their good fortune that they had been breaching Rusviet lines without being stopped or even attacked. Of course, that was her own forces doing, and while it seemed that Lech knew she had to be responsible, the others mostly just seemed to be happy that they weren't having to fight so much. For them, fighting meant burying friends. For her and her creations, as long as she wasn't the one defeated, it meant reclaiming the scrapped vehicles and constructing more troops.

Not that she'd even lost any troops here. When clearing out Dox in the Home System she'd lost a few thousand units, but compared to the sheer numbers she possessed, that wasn't a big deal. She activated the hover pads located within her chassis and adjusted the altitude to bring her above the train, then de-activated them to land on the roof of the next carriage, walking along it and hopping each gap until she came to the front carriage, sitting down to the side to avoid the smoke from the engine as she looked ahead of them.

In the distance, Kolno was already visible, and as they sped along she could see battle marks from where her aircraft had killed Rusviet troops that were in the way of the train. A safe route all the way into the city that was being maintained by her units. It wasn't exactly interesting watching the footage of her aircraft as they strafed helpless infantry, blasting open mechs with their superior technology. Even an Icarus Solar Drone would be able to fire bolts straight through the mechs, they were just so utterly inferior. Steel and iron simply weren't a match for plasma and lasers.

While she sat there, she focused on the nanobots that were buzzing after the Fenris Cyborg, who was actually now making his way towards the warehouse that Heinrich was cooped up in. If he was hostile or intended to capture the man, he'd be dead before his arm could even raise. If he was a turncoat, trying to warn him, she'd let him leave, though she'd need to keep a wary eye on him, A turncoat meant they'd already changed sides once, they could easily do so again.

But no, as he entered the factory and was surprised to see the blimp that Heinrich had been working on, he called out to the scientist, not exactly being subtle. In turn, Heinrich poked his head out from one of the smaller rooms and groaned. "Great, I didn't even get to finish my self-inflating life-boat." Well, at least he recognized Fenris technology, or at least knew somehow who the Cyborg was, as he stepped out of his room and examined the Cyborg. "Ehh, shoddy craftsmanship, evident copy-pasting of Nikola's designs. So, I suppose you're here to bring me before your shadowy master."

"I...no. I need help. Zubov was searching for you, and for Piotr, to get into the factory. I want to get out of this suit, and most people want to see Fenris taken down. Zubov thought I was someone else, though that was the work of a friend, who switched me for one of their own, to save my life, but...it hurts, constantly. Can you help me?" Heinrich looked the Cyborg up and down before shaking his head.

"I'm afraid not. That technology was after my time I'm afraid." The Cyborg dipped his head at those words. "I don't doubt Nikola could easily fix up that suit or make you a better one, though convincing him to do so would be practically impossible, even if you managed to get into the factory. Not that either of us could ever reach the factory, not when the Rusviets are surrounding the city."

Raising his head up, the Cyborg gestured at the walls. "They surround the city, but something is attacking them. I don't know what, I was never able to see the fight, just the aftermath as I ventured into the city. They are completely outmatched, so if we can find a way to get the attention of their forces without having bombs dropped on our heads, we might be able to secure a route out of the city, not just for us, but for all the civilians still left alive."

Now, there was always the chance he was just saying that for Heinrich, to get his support, but he seemed earnest enough to earn a modicum of trust from her. If what he had said was true, then that meant he wasn't a turncoat, instead he was just an incidental infiltrator. His life had been saved by a friend switching him and putting him in a tight spot in regards to what he could do. Skye left the pair to talking as she drew her direct attention away from them, pondering what had been said.

Didn't mean she wouldn't tear him apart if he attacked Anna or any of the Polanians.

As the train pulled into the station amidst yells of happiness and pure relief, Skye was busy contemplating where she wanted to go next.

She was going to wait for her fabricator to make that second chassis so she could go have a chat with the woman who had a robotic fox, but really, she wasn't to sure if she needed to hang around much. Her nanobots had found plenty for her to go through, like the fact that this Universe had a Rasputin as well, and he was actually the leader of Fenris. He started it, got others to join with his cause, and was basically the perpetrator of it all.

Obviously this wasn't a case of cutting the head of the snake to make the body die, Fenris weren't built like that. Cut a head off, and they'd just become a Hydra. She'd need to purge them all, root and stem, if she wanted to make absolutely sure that Anna and her family were to stay alive. Of course, she couldn't account for every possibility, but by dealing with Fenris in its entirety, their chances of survival until the average age of death was significantly increased.

The Polanians were now unloading the cargo of the train, including crates of weaponry that her nanobots had long-since swarmed over. When Anna found out, understandably she was pissed off, to which Lech dragged her off. Curious to see his side of things, Skye stopped blocking her systems from making her invisible and the suite of other detection nullifiers, hopping off the train and jogging after them.

Her nanites informed her that Heinrich and the Cyborg were also nearby, both of whom had been investigating the arrival of the train. As Anna and Lech got to arguing, she had to resist the urge to do something to Lech, as he spoke about literally encouraging thousands of civilians to rise up, just to be brutally massacred by Rusviets. They stood no chance against trained and heavily armed soldiers, and that was the point.

Now, she was no stranger to that kind of tactic, she'd even used it in RTS games, using a unit that couldn't possibly win to distract the enemy as she got bigger and better units. His plan was the same idea in theory, but massively magnified and utterly unacceptable. She wanted to see what Lech would say, but she was not going to allow them to arm civilians just os they could charge to their deaths. Using the nanobots swarming over all the weaponry, she had them eat their way through them all, disintegrating them into dust.

With the weapons all gone, she waited as Lech then said about how she was an idol, and that the only thing better was a martyr, cementing his place as scum in her mind. She would have directly intervened, but Heinrich was already poised to smash Lech on the back of the head when Anna herself feinted left, then as he moved to block her grabbed a brick and smashed it against his skull, knocking him clean out. "Ah...seems you have it handled."

She and the man got to talking, though Lech was stirring and they decided to postpone the conversation and move away. As they rounded the corner, Heinrich introduced Anna to the Cyborg, though realized he didn't yet know his name. Several rather interesting events then occurred. Firstly, Anna seemed to recognize the Cyborg, even under all the metal. Secondly, the Cyborg recognized her. Thirdly, that was when Piotr decided to come see what Lech and Anna were arguing about, having been told that by some of the men, to much the same reaction as Anna's. "...Janek?"

Almost like a record being scratched Skye's mind came to a halt for a good second or two. Anna had told her about her brother, he was literally her idol, but had died in the war. To find out that...well, it made sense now that she added that information to what else she knew. Her nanobots had uncovered plenty of Fenris intelligence in the time it took the train to reach Kolno, including details on the project that had Janek, or as the report called him 'Victor Popov', upgraded into his current form.

While Anna, her father and Janek re-united and spoke, as well as Heinrich being glad to see Piotr alive, she pieced together the rest of the picture. Janek had been horribly disfigured and injured, such that the only chance of survival, which was slim in its own right, was augmentation into his current form. Fenris were operating under the assumption he was a Rusviet soldier who was actually a member of Fenris, albeit at a grunt-level.

Whoever his friend was, Skye decided she liked them. Even when he ended up telling the others that said friend was actually Olga Romanova, who wasn't just a 'Rusviet Head of Security', but was in crude terms a Rusviet agent specializing in assassination and sabotage. That explained how she managed to switch Janek out with Victor and not raise questions.

It wasn't that Skye had decided Rusviet in its entirety was bad, the civilians were just that. And of course every country has the evil, the good, and the neutrals. Olga probably straddled the line between neutral and evil thanks to her actions, but the fact she had saved Anna's brother earned her a lot of leeway in Skye's mind. Sure, she was a hypocrite, letting personal feelings sway her decisions. She was a super-powerful robot being piloted by a human mind, she was allowed to be that.

Supposedly the plan was that Janek would infiltrate Fenris and find a way to break their cloak of concealment, to reveal their existence to the world. The reason Fenris worked so well was because the world didn't know they existed, and that to break that advantage they had to reveal their existence. It was a stupid, ill-thought-out plan, but also the only one that had a reasonable chance of working in their capabilities. Deciding to interject, she disabled her stealth systems, revealing herself sat on the bin beside them as they spoke. "That might be so, but I think my plan would work better."

Maybe not the best idea to jumpscare someone who was probably afraid of being caught by Fenris since his first instinct was to swing. Skye rolled off the bin, whistling as it was flattened entirely. "Janek, stop, she's a friend!" Anna quickly yelled, putting herself between Skye and Janek. The guy looked at her, and even though she could only see his eye and a little bit of his face, she could tell he was sorry for what he'd done immediately.

Skye rubbed her neck as she dipped her gaze down. "Sorry, you're probably worried about Fenris finding out about you. But don't worry, I have no intention of turning Anna's brother over to the same fucks that tried to kill her and her father...and to a lesser degree the fact they want to start another big war to get more control over stuff." Deciding to be upfront about some of her intel, she sprayed her fabricators at the bin to repair it and hopped onto it, the casual show of her abilities enough to keep those who hadn't seen it yet surprised...which was actually all of them.

She'd told Anna she could do it, since she trusted her the most despite being the youngest one there, but hadn't gotten around to showing her it. "Fenris reaches far wider than you presumed. Rasputin is, in fact, the leader of Fenris. Prince Wilhelm of Saxony isn't a member, but Fenris is whispering in his ear constantly. And Polania were being tugged along by Zubov, and though his life met with a sticky end, the plan was still in motion." When Anna opened her mouth she shook her head. "Lech was playing right into his plans. Incite Kolno into an uprising, giving Rusviet the justification it needs to restart the war. Then, with Wilhelm hating Rusviets so much, he would kill his father, taking the position of Kaiser and declaring war on both the Rusviet Tsardom and the Polanian Republic, citing that both are enemies to his country."

"The restart of the Great War." Janek added quietly, though his voice was easier to hear thanks to his mechanical nature. "You say that Rasputin himself is the leader of Fenris?" Skye nodded at him. "Then I need to warn Olga, she has no idea it's him!" As he turned to run off she stepped over and put a firm grasp on him, his leg digging a furrow into the ground as she held him back with one arm. "Wha-"

Skye dragged him back a pace, then forced him to turn around. "You aren't just running away from this. Besides, I can get word to Olga about Rasputin far faster than you could leave the city." Letting go of him, she folded her arms. "Unless you'd want to piss off your sister and father any more than necessary?" She added with a raised eyebrow as she shifted her body to the side slightly. Turning to face them, he let his body droop slightly, his sign of surrender to the inevitable interrogation.

"No, I wouldn't."

With Anna, Janek, Piotr and Heinrich all discussing things, she turned her attention to the chassis that had just been completed in a snowy Crimean field.

Telling them she was going to be out of focus for a while and that if they needed her attention just poke her, she hopped back up onto the lid of the bin and shut her eyes, focusing on the consciousness transmitter located within her, connecting it to her other chassis and testing the connection. Once she was sure it was stable and all working correctly, she sent her consciousness across, the distance being the same thanks to the system the transmission used, the same as her communications, which meant it would now even work across whatever weird dimensional gap was between her and her Home System.

Appearing in the second humanoid chassis, she started running a few diagnostics, making sure she had come across correctly, mostly just assuring herself even if it was unnecessary. Flexing her arms, she got up from the folded-up position she was in, which was similar to the ball-like shape that inactive B-1 Battle Droids were deployed in, and tapped into her nanobots to learn where the bizarre woman was, quickly finding her location and adding it to her sensors, running off in that direction. She also got a chance to properly test the abilities of her new body, leaping and spinning, activating her hover-pads and folding out her Phoenix thrusters, blasting through the sky and accidentally going hypersonic, creating a rather devastating sonic boom that blasted the snowy-fields below her.

It honestly sounded like a bomb going off, forcing her to massively scale down the power her thrusters got, having slightly forgotten that they came from an aircraft capable of flying between planets. Idly she wondered what the top speed of the Phoenixes were in-atmosphere now. She got back the response that they were capable of flight up to just over ten kilometres per second, or about mach 30.

Her chassis was theorized to be able to reach higher speeds, though her anti-detection systems, which included some kind of weird air-warping that stopped sonic booms and also air-wakes from being generated, was only rated to work at mach 40 when at one atmosphere of pressure. The reason she had caused one was because she was flying with her anti-detection systems offline, a fact that made her wince and turn those systems back online. But apparently because she was smaller yet had thrusters just as powerful as the Phoenixes, she would be able to reach increased speeds.

Through simulations, she could potentially hit over fifteen kilometres per second, a significant speed increase. Of course, that was in atmosphere. When outside of atmosphere, using correct slingshot trajectories, she could reach some pretty crazy speeds. Flying to the moon would take a while unless she flew all the way around the entire planet and used that to majorly increase her speed then slingshot her up at the moon. How exactly that worked she didn't know, some kind of gravity manipulation mixed with the influence of a significant enough celestial body like a sun, planet, moon or even really just a big enough asteroid.

Stopping herself before she got sidetracked further, she re-adjusted her heading and sped up a little, though not without enjoying the feeling of actually flying. It was pretty forgiving considering her hover pads would stop her before she hit the ground or any other obstruction, and more than once she decided to just skim along the top of the snow, running her fingers through it and digging a big groove in the whiteness by doing so.

Flying over the woman and her mechs, she stopped in front of them, observing them all with her own eyes. Aside from her weapons and her companions, the woman herself looked pretty normal, though as she observed closer, calling her a woman was a bit of a stretch, since she looked like she was in her late teens. Beside her, much as Wojtek was to Anna, her robotic fox companion kept close, eyes and ears constantly looking around in an imitation of an actual fox, though it was probably also searching with a few other methods.

There were also four of the large mechs wandering with her, guns raised as they scanned the horizon and trundled along. She was really curious about her and her creations, so she had her nanobots examine the mechs, the fox, as well as her guns. She wasn't quite curious enough to have her nanites actually enter her body, that was just creepy and weird and...and just not something she wanted to think about. The mechs and the fox was fine, they were autonomous machines, but she was a living being and...well, that then drew her to the conundrum that the fox itself acted a lot like a living fox.

She quickly located within each of the four mechs, in the same place, the same transponder that was in Piotr's metal arm. The fox also possessed one, meaning that the woman, since they weren't present in her guns, either didn't know and had just found/stolen the tech, or more likely she had a transponder implanted within her. After her nanobots confirmed that her two pistols weren't sufficient to even scratch her armour, she moved to the treeline the group was heading steadily towards, breaking her invisibility.

Immediately one of the mechs swivelled its gun to aim at her, the other three still scanning all other directions. Intelligent target acquisition, since if all four had locked onto her, a flanking attack would be far more effective. The woman had drawn her two guns, and the fox was moving around her legs, agitatedly. Rather than move, she simply stayed there, watching the group with her arms folded as they approached. Obviously, the woman was wary of her, she had literally just appeared, at least according to her mechs. "Identify yourself!"

"Well, if I say Fenris are you going to shoot me?" The woman's fingers twitched just a little at the mention of the faction, making Skye grin. "So, you know about Fenris. That narrows down exactly who you are. Tesla told some of the world leaders as well as a couple of his scientists, and your usage of his tech suggests that you have to have come from the factory. That means-" Her words were cut off when the woman, apparently annoyed at her dissection of her, shot a blast from one of her pistols, blasting out the bottom of the tree she was leaning against and making her hop to the side as it slowly tumbled over. "Rude."

Skye was pretty unphased at the guns of three mechs aimed at her, as well as the two pistols the woman wielded. They were powerful enough to blast through the trunk of a tree at the base, but that was a far cry from the power needed to break through her armour, considering it took 8 Gil-E's to destroy the version she had used previously, who each had far more power per shot than her little pistols. "For the second and last time, identify yourself." The woman said threateningly, flexing her guns slightly.

"Well, for such a polite introduction how could I not? I am Skye, genius, fighter, and magician extraordinaire! Would you care for a magic show?" Before the woman could reply Akari turned her detection tech back on, deciding that since the woman wanted to be so confrontational, she could endure a little bit of teasing. Walking to the side, she re-appeared, the mechs snapping to aim at her again. "Perhaps...-" She went invisible again, firing a teleport spike from her finger, then teleporting to it and breaking invisibility again, all in less than a second. "-you would simply prefer to explain who you are, so that I may respond politely in kind."

The woman sighed, her guns only lowering slightly though her mechs kept them aimed, and her fox kept itself between her and the woman. "Well, only if I get to do some deducing of my own." Skye waved her arm in agreement. "You obviously aren't hostile, with your technology and ability to hide from detection, you could easily have assassinated me and vanished. With a flair for the theatrical and an interest in entertaining yourself at my expense, I'd place you as being curious but that with your theorizing, you are more interested in simply knowing more about me than about getting my tech for yourself." Skye smiled, giving the woman a small amount of applause. "As to your request, I am Vesna Tesla, the only daughter of Nikola Tesla."

That...actually brought her up short a little as she recalled from her storage information on Nikola Tesla, curious. He had never had a child in his life, remaining chaste instead. That was another divergence from reality then. "Huh, I didn't know Tesla had a daughter. None-the-less, you told me of yourself, so I will do the same. I am Skye, a traveller who has an interest in breaking Fenris over her knee." She then glanced down at the robotic fox that was now sniffing around her legs and knelt down, reaching out and petting the fox.

"And also learning more about this cutie of course."