III
Memories
"-you don't understand what it was like! Water drips, cold air and that burn in the back of your throat. God, it felt like they were making us drink motor oil mixed with our own distilled piss.
That was how it went for days, and days, and days on top of those. There wasn't anything except the concrete, that stuff they made us drink, and the cheering. All it was. Cheering, cheering cheering. Cheering and gunfire.
I went in that place with three guys. I… I don't know where they are. I don't know if they made it out. I don't know if two of them made it out. I know about Martin. Martin's fucking dead. Those things, they carted him out of the cell, fed him that piss-drink, made him see stars, he said…
Then there was that-"
-For however impressionistic and elongated the rambling tirade had been, no matter how convincing its rapidity and allure had sounded, nothing was going to save that man from Sanford had earlier encountered.
After but a brief flicker of static, the grim-faced Sanford Tobs allowed a cold frown to play down his mandible when the gunfire started.
The radio's muffled connection to the disc's contents made the sounds soupy, and though they lacked accuracy and crystal tone, the burn and hiss of carbon-based battery rotators was unmistakable to his experienced ears.
ClapClapClapClap- the reverberating chorus of cracks that ultimately spoke miles of a Laser weapon's ferocity, it was present, in the background. Judging by the following lack of the man's voice, and the calamitous thunk-thunk~! –given off by the receiver recording, Sanford assumed it safe to say that he was listening to the Assualtron assassin scoring a direct hit on the subject in question.
That had been the entire recording. It had gone on for a long and confusing four or five minutes. It was nothing but that dead man- or, who Sanford assumed was the dead man –reeling and rambling.
The man spoke of jail cells, piss-tasting solution being forced down his throat, cheering, gunshots, people vanishing and bright lights.
One could easily pawn off the rampant flurry of nonsense as nothing more than a narcotic-induced mirage, or an episode of sleepless, waking nightmares.
Though, insomnia, chemical influence and even madness this was not. It all made sense, actually, and really. All the stories going around in Diamond City about Helios were coincidentally running amok. The disappearances and the strange noises were all over the Commonwealth radio. Now, Sanford had been personally led to the discovery of an Assaultron custom modified hunter-killer and its victim.
If nothing else, was Sanford morbidly curious about two things.
One: who or what was this mysterious faction or person that had taken up residence in the old mall?
Two, and most disconcerting: hadn't he only recently wiped out the Institute, driven away the Enclave, and broken the Gunners' jaws? Things had seemed pretty cleaned-up a few days ago. Where the hell did all these psychopaths come from?
Excellent question, that one.
Sanford sighed and clicked off the radio's volume dial, stewing for a long moment in the darkness of his workshop.
First, a battalion of lunatics led by a murdering, rapist warlord, then an army of body-snatching machines, then a military-grade gang, and now…?
Now what? Some… tinkerer? A robotics tinkering kidnapper who made his or her prisoners drink urine? What a combo.
What was next? A Super Mutant chieftain wearing a skirt, bonnet, and a name-tag from a Wal-mart vest reading 'Bill'?
This whole damned wasteland was insane. Helios used to be such a cool hangout place. There had been the old arcades and the cotton candy stands, and those boring women's shoe stories, and the appliance outlets.
Sanford had to admit, that the idea of his old childhood stomping grounds being turned into an apparent murder-pit cored a deep hole in his heart. It was as if nowhere on Earth was safe from this spreading corruption.
Figures, something rolls around. I guess it was only a matter of time.
Sanford tiredly left the disc in the radio and stood up from his workbench.
I'm too tired for this shit.
The faint chirp of crickets melded was the slow and haunting coo of the nighttime breeze. The rustling of papers was a distant and interruptive insurrection amid the evening atmosphere. The glare of the moonlight flowed as transparent curtains of silver and into the lobby of the kiosk.
Sanford stood on the black-white tiled floor of his commercial home, stepping away from the door to the garage with an air of normalcy.
It's actually really quiet here. I never notice that as much as I should.
He leaned on the edge of one of the window-lined diner tables and glanced outside at the hydroponic crops spreading from the center of the dirt-gardens like a bushel of probing, green tentacles.
Those plants were ancient by this point. Old men, or, perhaps, old women who had bore their fruits for years, left to exist in purgatory because of the ruined ecosystem of this blasted planet.
Sanford sometimes wondered about snow. He hadn't seen it since the bombs dropped and he'd woken up on ice. He'd been out here for over a decade, and it had never once been kissed by Winter in Boston.
Ain't that curious.
Perhaps, if time had ever allowed him to, Sanford would migrate, as always a part of him had wanted to in the back of his mind. Maybe instead of migrating west, he'd migrate north. North and north, until he reached the old Canadian borderzone.
Maybe it still snows there. I wonder how Nyx would-
"High-aye, and say; 'Democracy'~!" –a shrill, metallically touched voice screamed.
Before Sanford could even quirk a brow, the air became buzzed with the distinct heaviness of preposterously loud vocal volume, and the stinging sensation of pain.
Clang~! –Hancock couldn't help himself. The flat of his buzzsaw attachment rebounded off the back of Sanford's head with the vibrant velocity of a hurled and blunt object.
"-Ouch~!" Sanford barked, slamming his fists into the dining table to steady himself. The blow had nearly knocked him off his feet. The enraged scavenger shoved off from the table's rim, spun around and glared at the cackling robot with a bullish snarl. "-Son of a bitch, Hancock~!"
"-Ha-haaa~! Oh, the look on your monkey face was just priceless!" The Mr. Gutsy laughed, bobbing in the air gleefully. "Metal to skull; guess who wins yet again? The Han'! Pre-packeged, red-blooded, American-brand whoopass in a can!"
"Yeah, can." Sanford remarked, his face turning a bright shade of crimson as he tenderly rubbed the back of his scalp. "You always interrupt people's thinking like that?"
"Only on Sundays!"
"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"
"'Cause that's the day all those bible-thumpers swarm on the streets and ring their damned church bells!" The robot growled, floating backwards in his space with an afterburner's hiss. "It's a god-damned travesty! Every bit of it! What do those tie-wearing, wife-beating Catholics know about faith anyhow?"
"You've got me, bud', I'm not Catholic." Sanford spat glumly, looking back out the window at his modest, walled-in property. "…Not even dad was." –He added in a slight whisper. "Ya' know that? That man tried to escape what he did in such… weird and unusual ways."
"How so, sir?" Hancock levitated by the scavenger's flank, trying and failing to find the intrigue with staring out the window sill similarly. "War's just as much a part of the man who wages it as the man who starts it. We're all guilty of it, so what difference does it make when everyone's to blame and we all have our different ways of denying the truth? Sounds like a cavalcade of pansy-ass fudge-packers to me!"
"I dunno', it's- gah, fuck it, man, what did you do to me…?" Sanford hissed, rubbing a welt on his skull. "-It just feels like most of the time, soldiers come home, and if they have something to run from, they either grab bottles of booze, beat their loved ones or go to church every day. Ordy didn't do any of that. He… he like… buried it, in his work."
"Hm." Hancock vocalized a grunting sound, his ocu-lenses lowering in perplexion. It was funny; seeing as he lacked a brain, and he still underwent these periodic pauses like he was lost in thought. Could machines think? Or was it all processes and code-linings?
I've interacted with enough of them to know that answer, Sanford mentally chimed. Hancock's alive, like me. He's just a bloodless life, where I'm a remorseless life. This isn't remorse, it's trauma.
"A wise man once told me; that the world keeps on a-frikken' turnin' with or without our say-so. Mother Murica' may be dead and rotting, but we still have to claim what we can off of her corpse." Hancock turned a single lens on his longtime companion. "Her fat, bloated, STD-ridden corpse. Ah. Ah-ha. Yeah. Fuck! I just sounded like Kennedy with his rousing speeches! That toupe-wearing bastard!"
"…I liked Kennedy." Sanford mumbled, finally ending his laboring over his wounded head. "Where'd you hear all that from? You never struck me as an inspirational speaker. No offense."
"None taken! People don't need emotional support, they need a good foot in the crotch!" Hancock cackled. "And I'm looking at the man who said those things, you idiot!" The robot poked him on the ribs with his claw. "You looked me right in my grizzled lenses and spoke your mind. Years ago. Not too long after I saved your ass and joined your little one-man posse!"
"You didn't save my ass, you just…" Sanford shrugged with a deep chuckle. "-took off some pressure."
"-I call a steaming pile of horseshit!" Hancock snapped. "You would've been dead without me, you scab! Brothers in arms! The G.I to go with your Joe! We're the American Badasses! The two man army!"
"We were right?" Sanford laughed. "Then Nyx happened."
"Yeah, and then the smelly French toad with opposable thumbs plowed in and shit on everything." Hancock groaned. "Ya' know, sometimes, when that narcissistic, Parisian gecko gets on my case like she did tonight, it just makes me wanna'- wanna'-~!"
Sanford snickered, ducking, as the whirring blade of Han's buzzsaw sliced the air from the west and then the east.
"-Watch that thing." He said with disinterest.
"-Can't I turn her into a crocodile-skin pair of boots~?" Hancock pleaded. "I'm telling you! I have a hidden passion inside this rusty self! A passion for- for- lizard-skin art!"
"Hm." Sanford scrunched his lips. "…So lemme' get this straight; you want to design women's clothing products?"
"No! No! You're putting words in my mouth, you flea-bitten skank!"
"Let's just paint you pink, and give you a sparkling silver wig while we're at it." The scavenger winked. "We can call you 'The Fabulous Han'.'"
"-Son of a pig, I'm gonna' be ill!" Hancock cried, much to Sanford's loud amusement. "You're a cruel man!"
"You're wondering why you've stuck around this long?"
"No! I'm wondering how I'm still functional!" Hancock shook his chassis, listening to some of the loose bolts ricochet around inside his hull. "All this crap and somehow I haven't met the maker! What a miracle!"
"Up against the world, handcuffed to me and Nyx." Sanford tisked. "You've got it rough."
"Forget that, what I've got is worse than a pair of handcuffs, you demented turd!" The Mr. Gutsy ranted. "It's worse than two! It's- It's…"
"Yeah?"
"-ah, who the hell am I kiddin'?" The robot sighed. "Sir? I'd have been scrap metal if wasn't for you."
"Really?" The latter's eyes met his lenses.
"Damn straight, and you're not getting any more of an emotional response from me on it!" Hancock wiggled his claw smugly, as if he'd won some sort of unspoken bet. "Just- take that knowledge, and… and just… know, alright? Don't ever question yourself, you big fat-headed douche! I-I'm here for ya'!"
"I understand completely."
"Really?"
"Totally." Sanford grinned. "You're a good man, Han'."
"A man?" Hancock harrumphed, sounding the oldest he had in a very long time. The scavenger laughed at him and patted the robot gruffly on the side, hand slapping against the rusty metal.
"You're a man to me, my friend." Sanford said. "-Even if you sneak up behind me and hit me in the head when I'm thinking."
"Necessities!" Hancock snapped. "Gotta' keep up my image! By the way; any of those thoughts shareable, sir?"
"Sure are." Sanford nodded.
"Roger that! What's the battle intel?"
"I listened to that disk." The scavenger conceded. "You were right about one thing at least; that guy had a lot to say before… you know, the end."
"Figured as much." The robot grunted. "It's just something about the facial features of you people! I just look at some of you, and I can tell which of you are gutless bitches and which of you aren't! I looked at his dead face, and in the face of my mind, I could just hear the echo…. Bitch…. bitch… bitch…"
"-Yeah, well, anyhow, I listened to this guy-"
"-Bitch! Bitch… bitch…" Hancock jammed his ocu-lenses into Sanford's face. The man sputtered and swatted the incessant machine back.
"-Han', c'mon." Sanford growled.
"Alright, alright! Spit it out!"
"The problem's at Helios Shopping Center, like we suspected." Sanford said. "There are bad things happening over there. People are talking about loud noises, gunfire and disappearances. Well this guy says he escaped from there, and that he was being kept in a jail cell, was being forced to drink foul solutions, and he even described the same noises other people have been describing."
"Huh," Hancock muttered. "and that little shit didn't say anything about how he got out?"
"Didn't have time." The scavenger shook his head. "You can hear the Assaultron shoot him. He didn't talk about how he was captured, or how he escaped before it happened."
"Fantastic, 'cause there's always gotta' be this ass-end annoying sense of foreboding to everything we do!" Hancock growled. "I'm wondering how he even recorded himself onto that disc without a device! We didn't find one on him!"
"Maybe the Assaultron destroyed it." Sanford shrugged. "It doesn't matter; we've gotten his message. Scumbag or not, he just might have tipped us off to a really important problem here, Han'."
"So what's our approach?" The robot asked. "We go in guns blazing, treads rolling, virgin-girls screaming and throwing us their panties?"
"Something like that." Sanford grinned. "Tomorrow, I'm taking a stroll over there after morning runs. I'll get you and Nyx and we're gonna' find out what's going on in Helios."
-0-0-0-0-0-
The crisp wasteland air always tasted like cold sulfur to her in the mornings. That probably had more to do with her heightened sense of smell than the actual purveying wreak that was in the world these days, but she digressed. It was nothing more of a plaintive note anyhow. The place stunk the worst at this time of day and when the sun was at its highest and strongest.
To her, Boston merely carried the scent of old bones. Here was a place tortured more by its distant past and immediate present than a longstanding historical sense of grueling apostasy. New York and Pennsylvania hadn't smelled like that during her migration, and neither had Connecticut.
Those places were home to too much death from the ICBMs to escape such dramatic, and sour tastes from her perception. For someone whose olfactory and sensory organs were so linked, Nyx could wittily grovel down her experiences and put them into fancy, stylized sentences, like the people who wrote the books she read.
Boston smelt of old bones, because it was a tired land stained with blood infrequently. New York carried the smell of a rotting cadaver. The dirt of maggots, the swell of swine shit, and the stabbing mediocrity of lost humanity.
Rang et degoutant.
The slight taste of rotten eggs made her snort, more from the prior memory than anything else.
Boston wasn't as lifeless, and that she'd give. But it did remind her of darker places, places filled with nothing but dead hills, dead woods and blast craters. That migration, and her fleeing had been an utter nightmare that had lasted years, where the sky, earth and horizon were all so black, that she had felt like she had been wandering in the void of space.
Nowadays, problems had become much more domestic, in a sense. It had been months, and this attempt on Sanford's head had been the only action they'd seen in half that time.
Nyx wasn't eager as the usiner was for bloodshed. Though it contradicted her very nature and her species' ethics by design; her passions lye in the realm of the written word and the eccentric. Books and languages fascinated her, not the ripping of flesh and the screams of the dying.
Thud~! –went the earth as the Deathclaw landed on her palms and knees, rumbling deeply behind her shaped breast.
The thought was almost amusing to her; just how misunderstood she truly was to the rest of this pig-shit world. Humanity pulled all the strings on Earth as they always had. Something seemed unadulterated in the realization that those same strings had pulled back and shattered everything on the first try.
How many times had the world made to sunder their kind from the planet's surface? What with hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and wild predators?
And yet humankind was able to sunder away everything they'd accomplished on their own throughout all that? And even on the first attempt?
And they say my people are the mindless animals.
Nyx vaulted from her placement on the dirt, her limbs spreading in a quadruped flower for traction, as she sailed twenty feet through the air, and landed expertly on the flanking face of a large boulder mound.
En fait, I suppose that assumption is half correct.
Most Deathclaws were mindless animals, not that she thought about it. But the comparison was no different for her than comparing Sanford to Feral Ghouls was for him. Both of their species had their bad-eggs, and their mutated ones too. One just had to remember the division between them and stay on the ride side of that border.
I fancy myself having done that with finesse.
Nyx slid on her leathery heels down the boulder's other face, and landed with a quiet summersault on the hill beyond. Head over hips, the Deathclaw was a quiet, large and scaly stone rolling through the grass.
At least that migration taught me something.
Nyx grinned toothily, and her balled travel was terminated with a swift unraveling of her slender body.
Whoosh~! –whistled the air as she flew, her tail wriggling in passage behind her, armored and thick.
Nobody is faster than me.
Parkour, Sanford had described it as. Nyx had never offered her abilities anything more than a mere shrug of nonchalant disinterest whenever the subject had been brought up.
The Deathclaw had spent so long learning to evade Enclave aircraft that she could cross virtually any terrain without excessive difficulty. Hills, rocklands, ruins and forests; nothing slowed her down. She could vault, roll, slide and barrel through anything.
Avec perfection.
The reptile landed gracefully on her heels, hunched her armored back, and tested the air with a few flicks of her forked, daggering tongue.
There it is.
Nyx's yellow eyes dilated at the meat-smell wafting on the morning breeze. Though the gray sky above doted on her with a slight glimmer from the revealing sun, to her prey she was nothing more than an unseen ripple of color in an already drab background.
Nyx slunk in the fingery extrusions of the dead ferns, and halted briefly, hunching like a patient feline around the foot of a large and burnt oak tree.
Staying as still as she was, her dark scales and her dark horns blended perfectly with the dead foliage of the woodland. The sun highlighted her a slight white, and that further acted to blind the less-intelligent other her focus was glued upon.
Turn your back, Nyx silently asked, being careful though, to not allow weakness in herself through begging it. So it may be quick, animal.
On all six hooves and this close, the Radstag actually appeared much more intimidating than it had from farther away. Its two buck-heads were bowed, their fanged mouths undulating in a bovine's twist as they grazed on drably colored grass. The mutated animal's wolf-like tail swept like a raggedy feather-duster behind it, and its exposed spine gleamed in the morning sun.
An ugly beast, Nyx licked her nose, opening the fingers on one of her claws, with slow precision, in accordance to how a Venus-fly-trap would unfurl and prepare for an unsuspecting victim to land within it. But they make delicieux steaks.
-That had been her latest craving these last few weeks. Ever since Sanford had run out of those fantastic Salisbury boxes (which she still denied what she knew, in that she'd eaten all of them like a glutton) –it had been Radstag Steaks, the ones Sanford made in that little field kitchen out back.
Something about the game-ish taste set her appetite alight. Nyx was not a fan of the coppery taste of blood, and she had abhorred her life in the wild and the necessity of raw-meat she'd been forced to subsist on for so long in the past.
It was curious then as to why deer appealed to her so much. Maybe she just liked the bloody tange with proper cooking.
Sanford is very accomplished. He can cook, Nyx enjoyed a second of distraction, baring her sharp, wicked fangs in a smile as she shivered from the belly-down. –And he pleases me on top of all that.
Hunting was the least she couldn't done, she supposed. Whilst Sanford and Hancock were off on their morning patrols, she had opted to find them lunch, or, perhaps brunch. It was still pretty early. Needless to say, the local Radstags had never been brought so low in population as to ration their demises. There were thousands of the ugly things running around, and this fat, juicy buck was just the perfect morsel out of that endless tide.
Viens a maman…
Nyx's talons slid slowly from their sheaths within her claws' fingers. The reptile's neck hunched, her face modeling an expression of strict concentration. Nimbly, her draconic foot compressed into the dry, bone-like humus of the woodland floor, and managed to do so without the slightest indication of sound.
Ahead, the Radstag kept on grazing. It did at least raise one of its two heads, and crane the hideous snout around to survey the trees with disinterest.
The motion was futile, as its eye-sight wasn't anywhere near good enough, and it was being caught off-guard. Nyx- even though she was right in front of it –was all clear.
Parfait, she licked her nose again. Now show me your back, so I may-
The Radstag snorted, and its hooves clopped into the earth quietly as it looped around, and bent over another patch of grass that had been to its south.
Nyx's eyes dilated fully, her muscles tensed and her legs spasmed, like springs being flicked by a dragging finger.
With a shrill outcry did the massive reptile whip from the thickets with the speed of a bullet. The Radstag seemingly ran in place, its hooves moving, but taking it nowhere as it reacted to the panic stabbing into its breast.
It ran ruts in the earth before it started to gain traction. All of this was measured in the span of two seconds, and it was still too late.
Bones crunched, Nyx landed across the animal's back, and took it and herself into a heavy roll across the earth. The Radstag's terrible bleats were silenced in moments. The dust settled, and the wind howled. Nyx snorted, rose on a knee from the animal's corpse, and let her talons slide agonizingly from their impalings at the base of the stag's two necks.
The corpse twitched, and with a brief flick of her wrists, she took the momentum of her talons west and eastward. Flesh ripped and blood spattered on the grass. The two gory craniums flapped free and rolled onto the earth separately, their stump-necks gushing deep crimson spouts of syrupy detritus.
Belle.
Nyx grunted a moment later, and the animal's heavy corpse was cast over her shoulder, rendered near weightless by her enhanced strength.
I'm certain mon cher will be delighted with this find of mine.
Nyx felt the brief adrenaline being whittled down by the satisfaction she felt, even as the corpse left a trail of blood behind her.
The satisfaction of the hunt was only topped by the satisfaction of enjoying its fruits after the fact. She had no doubt that she would relish whatever culinary delights her significant other would carve up from the meat. Such fantasies were rampant in the Deathclaw's mind, and it distracted her enough to make her feel giddy.
What a life I live, she thought, an embarrassed grin working itself onto her chops. What a story I've led.
She fondly remembered last night as a sort of accomplishment, and that, in turn, did make her modestly remind herself of the depth in that.
But perhaps there was a logical answer in that. She's overheard Sanford and Hancock's discussion last night about Ordy, Sanford's father.
Now, Nyx did not have an understanding of human religions worth her life, but she knew enough about them and what they meant to the people who practiced them to say her following statements with confidence. Sanford had been talking about how so many people ran from their past deeds through the use of religion; and more and more was that idea of a higher being… intriguing to her. It was very odd.
Perhaps I should hunt down books on the matter. A copy of a bible?
She snorted.
Lest I indulge in the works of the people who are responsible for this world. But what else is there?
Sanford was always suffering the ill effects of what he had done, and the life he had lived. Nyx was not a fool to the human condition; her male was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, usually, something acquainted with soldiers, rape victims and maliciously placed positions of misfortune.
Nyx could not say that Sanford was a free conscience, and certainly, he had done things in the past that she had struggled with, but Nyx had always learned to live with those things as past events. To her, what was done was done. She supposed that was easier to accept in saying than in action.
He has taken many lives.
(-And she doubted she'd ever know just how many, but she digressed.)
-He has always taken lives in just cause. He doesn't fear hell, and neither do I.
Nyx listened to the blood pattering on the ground behind her from the Radstag's gushing necks. A warm dabble on her tail told her that her distractions had allowed that mess to extend to her hide.
Thus, with an annoyed grunt, did the Deathclaw let the corpse slouch off her shoulder, and land on the ground beside her.
Clmp~! –the cadaver went. The earth hissed as she grabbed two of its hooved feet and proceeded to drag it the rest of the way home.
The rapport sexuels seems to take his mind off of it, she hummed in thought. Maybe I should attempt to use my mouth like he does. Do males not enjoy those kind of things?
-But Nyx thought about that a moment longer, and the point was decidedly reinforced when she stuck a thumb talon into her maw, and scratched the tip down the long length of one of her many large fangs.
D'autre part… I do kiss him nicely with these. It would help if-
Nyx stopped herself, even as her free claw wandered to, and brushed over her slender chest with a hiss of scale to palm.
It would help if I had those…
Nyx snorted again.
What was she thinking? To Sanford, she was beautiful, and powerful. She didn't need a human woman's body to attain that with him. Even last night! Distracted or not, he'd looked at her like she was a freshly cooked Brahman steak!
Tu parles betement, she thought. You are intricate.
Nyx dragged the corpse with a lofty smile.
Then, when she tasted the air with her tongue again, she caught a whiff of something peculiar.
Wait, Nyx slowed her trot to a crawl. Her golden eyes narrowed, and she tested the air again, this time, with dutiful purpose. That tastes… metallic.
Snap~! –went a nearby twig.
The Deathclaw snarled and turned on her flank, letting an animalistic hiss rumble out through her teeth. She purposefully snapped her finger joints as to cause her talons to erupt outwards with noise.
Shssk~! –they snapped loudly, extending from her tips, and hanging sharply.
"Who goes there?" The reptile thrummed, her tail whipping. "Come out, or I will go in there and kill you."
For a moment, there was nothing. Nothing except the whip of the wind, and the hollow dim of the woods around her.
Nyx squinted, and she licked her nose.
…This is…
She huffed.
…Bon dieu, I am paranoid.
Just when she was letting her claws slide back into her fingers, the air crackled, and Nyx was rocked back onto her heels when a pair of hot projectiles smacked into her right breast.
The blow would've felled a human, but due to the armored carapace the Deathclaw enjoyed, these shots merely ate into her exterior scales and singed the more supple flesh beneath.
Still, her bark of pain was evidence enough that her being able to deal with the damage did not render it pleasant. She dropped the feet of her hunting kill, rolled her shoulders, and advanced towards the hedge-line on all fours.
I see you, connard.
There, in the ferns and dead shrubs.
The humanoid shape rose from a crouch, materializing out of a branch of flickering, thin air on a whim. The blackly colored creature was made of metal, with a single, glowing red eye in the center of its narrow head.
A machine, like the usiner, Nyx observed in her sprint. Assaultron.
More Laser fire crackled out, and Nyx stormed through it with a defiant snarl, letting her body take the brunt of that assault.
Is that the best you have, demon?
The Deathclaw sailed through the air, smashing the spindly bodies of ferns beneath her hails as she landed in her attacker's midst.
The Assaultron slipped back in an errant side-step, ducking through the resulting hail of plant shreds and wood chips as Nyx bellowed in rage, and swept the air in its place with a clean strike of her talons, missing by inches.
Fuck.
Stumbling through the brush, with her stomping through it to reach it, the Assaultron retreated backwards sluggishly, brandishing a pair of arms tipped with razor-sharp claws and wrist-mounted Laser blasters.
I don't like your toys.
Nyx flicked her wrist in an underhanded swipe, drawing shreds of blackened steel and sparks as her talons ate through the Assaultron's breast.
Give me them.
Wrapping one of the robot's forearms between her thumb and index, Nyx did not even experience a moment of sensitive resistance from the machine's internals. She merely yanked backwards, and the Assaultron's arm up to the shoulder popped out of its socket, leaving an airborne seepage of black drippings and scrap in its wake.
The robot produced a hideous garbling sound from the damage, falling back onto its rear in the foliage.
You're mine.
Nyx went in for the kill, but then, she noticed the crimson glare that was stabbing into her eyes.
In that split second, the Deathclaw gasped, seeing the swirling, building energies warping around the Assaultron's center eye-lens like some kind of sorcerous touch of witchcraft.
The reptile ducked, and the center-beam Laser's scream echoed virulently across the woodland. The armor-piercing pylon of carbon energy stabbed right over Nyx's head in a near miss, and vanished into the sky above.
Enough of this, Nyx hissed and barked, she tackled the prone, smaller assailant, and soon its garbling, metallic jerks and pinging ended with a crunch of metal. Die.
Nyx allowed a satisfied and victorious purr to thrum in the back of her throat. She rose from her straddling of the sparking, soot-belching remains, and promptly leaned her face over to her side.
"-Pa-thoo~!" –The Deathclaw puckered her snout, and the Assaultron's crushed, severed head bounced wetly away nearby.
Black, with cloaking, Lasers and precise aim… Nyx sneered as examined the destroyed robot. Is this…?
She stomped over to the thing's spit-drenched head, and bent lower to view its cranium, marked from her fangs and shredded effectively.
It is.
Sanford had been onto something, and whoever this was didn't appear to like that.
The same white skull symbol Sanford had described to her was there.
It seems that Raider was not this felon's only target.
Nyx swept her eyes about her surroundings, and turned around to gather up the Radstag's corpse on the path.
I have to warn Sanford.
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