V
Jumped
The city was quiet mostly, save the faint whisper of the wind, and the occasional scattering of dust from a high ledge or rubble pile.
Old and blasted apartments clawed up at the sky like a series of mangled fingers, hopelessly trying to rip themselves free of some massive hand beneath the air, to shoot for the clouds above. The sun's glare played strangely off old automobiles and the sprawling, rectangular hulks of passenger buses. They passed one of the old monorail lines cutting over an avenue, where the railbridge had collapsed and spilled a three-car trolley into the pavement.
The air howled and garbage sifted. There wasn't the faintest sign of anything alive for what seemed like hours, at least, visibly. In terms of the naked eye, Boston City was devoid of life and barren.
Sanford and Hancock's scanners told them a much darker truth, however, and thus, they were not plagued with ignoble ignorance as they braved the dangers here.
In fact, right at this moment, despite the everpresent lack of anything save rubble, shredded cars and blown out buildings; Sanford's suit was screaming bloody murder with the amount of pings popping up on his sensor screen.
Nine hundred and eighty six.
He still couldn't believe the count of local heartbeats and heat signatures. Most of them were underground, purely heat sigs, lacking the HBM tag that humans or large animals would net. These were most likely monstrous arthropods, the mutated denizens of the Old Earth that had persisted for generations in the haze of radioactive glamour.
Radscorpions, Radroaches, Mirelurks, Bloodbugs and Stingwings. The list was expansive, and they only got bigger and nastier as you followed it up. Sanford could remember a choice few encounters with things like that, especially in the old days when he didn't have the X-01 suit. Bloodbugs always bothered him the most. It was strange, because they certainly weren't the most horrible mutated beast one could encounter out here.
Radscorpions could melt your insides with their barbed stingers, Mirelurks would literally chop you into bits and feed you to their hatchlings, and Stingwings would swarm and kill you with tens of acidic doses from their tails.
They were all ferocious. But something about having your blood being sucked out just gave Sanford the heeby-jeebies. Bloodbugs were weak, and most of the time, when they tried to bite people, they couldn't stay on long enough to get more than an initial taste of their life fluids.
But they bothered him the most. Bloodbugs freaked Sanford the hell out. It was why he graced the city with the first crack of gunfire it had probably heard in a good while, what with all the calm out here.
Splat~! –went the giant mosquito's singed corpse. It fell from the sixth or so story off the flank of a smashed commercial tower, and terminated on the sidewalk with a repulsive, and wet spatter.
"Good aim, sir!" Hancock commented, watching as the dead insect landed amid a cluster of its fellows on the pavement. There had been a small flight of them, maybe ten or so. Sanford had seen them and had resorted to raking the wall left and right with his Laser rifle. The results hadn't been pretty for the bugs. They were just fine for the scavenger.
"I fuckin' hate those things." Sanford mumbled under his breath, switching the battery faces on his gun. "At least there's some action."
"You're telling me!" Hancock snapped, glaring with all his lenses at the steaming corpses of the dog-sized insects. "All this prancing around without anything to shoot! Technically, you've bore me insult, Monkey-Man! Those could've been my kills!"
"Stop bitching." Sanford remarked as he stepped away, and turned to Nyx, who remained silent throughout the exchange. "How you doing?"
"Bien." The reptile sighed, her golden eyes scanning the sides of the street with caution. "How much farther away might we be?"
"Helios is just past that street there." Sanford pointed down the road, around the flipped girth of a rusting, scorched tanker truck. "High time we found out who this bastard is, huh?"
"Affirmative!" Hancock said. "Only I get to shoot at the lizard! If there's anyone who's gonna' pop a cap in her Bordelais ass it's gotta' be me-"
The Deathclaw's resultant growl was the least pervasive sound eating up the air in the following seconds. Sanford didn't even have time to blink before a large, bladed claw clapped over the top of Hancock's round chassis body, and hurled the robot through a nearby store window.
"-Man-down~!" –Came a garbled scream through Sanford's helmet uplink.
Crash~! –went something inside the building. Luckily for Hancock, the window was already broken, so the flight had met with no resistance until its termination. Still, judging by the sound of breaking glass and tumbling mounds of debris, the landing couldn't have been pleasant.
"That, was for the skank commentary, usiner." Nyx snorted, and spat a wad of Deathclaw-gob on the street in the robot's direction. "Rust in pieces."
"He called you a skank?" Sanford blew an amused sound through his lips. "That's actually kinda' hysteri-"
The scavenger was thankful the helmet hid his facial features. She was able to silence him with a single, inhuman glare. He was used to the predatory look she'd get when she was feeling frisky, but this expression of foretelling his cold, imminent and painful demise was off his own charts of a happy moment.
"Ah-hmm. That was very wrong of him to say." Sanford corrected after a long pause.
"You expressed to me in times past that this place was once a center of commerce?" Nyx flicked her tail, stalking back towards the direction they'd been headed.
"…Uhhhhh-yeah." Sanford tore himself quickly from the window she'd flung Hancock through. Behind him, he could hear the robot stringing together a long cacophony of vulgarity and insults directed at parts of who he could only assume was Nyx's mother. "Helios Shopping Center; one of the biggest malls in Boston for a long time. I used to go there when I was a child."
"Incroyable," Nyx smiled a little bit, an amused puff emerging from her snout. "I do not mean offense when I say I cannot imagine you as a hatchling."
"A hatchling." Sanford chuckled, hoisting his gun over his pauldron. "I dunno', I guess I can't really picture you as little either."
"Non?"
"Nope." The scavenger shook his head. "I mean, simply put; being little, and tiny, and helpless, is so against your image."
"Mm." The Deathclaw hummed, intrigued. "What is my image with you, Sanford?"
"Your image," Sanford grinned, nudging her long arm. "-why, one of power so great, you could rip off my legs."
"-That sounds like an idea!" Hancock screamed from behind them. Nyx rolled her eyes at the shattered moment when the robot zipped beside her. "Hey, Godzilla's Mother-in-Law! I found a present in there for ya'!"
"Usiner, might the day ever come where you-" Nyx never finished her sentence, for a half-filled spray-can bottle ricocheted off her scaly forehead with a loud, metallic clank~! –noise, and bounced by her cloven feet.
The impact had to hurt, because the Deathclaw gave off this wheezing, serpentine hiss. She rocked back on her heels and even butted into Sanford a little bit.
"-my nose~!" Nyx whined femininely, clutching her snout with tender, bladed fingers.
"-Eat my carbon-fiber shillings, you deranged mother fucker!" Hancock yelled, his thruster flaring as it took him in a swift dive for the end of the street.
"Usiner~!" Nyx roared at the top of her lungs, her tail thrashing madly like a whip, her talons extending out with slippery kicks of chitin to scale. "I'm going to recycle all of you~!"
"Holy Shitballs-! In the name of Democracy; run for your lives!"
"Wait a minute!" Sanford called out, but he was already too late.
With a vibrant cry of metal, and ignited fuel solvents, the street was bathed in a blackening cloud of soot that belched from Hancock's underside. The robot careened high in the air, catapulted by his own self-ignition, and vanished over the lip of a rooftop overhead.
"God damn it, Han'…" Sanford cursed lowly, craning backwards to stare in shock at the now empty sky. "-C'mon, let's see if we can find where he landed- Nyx?"
The scavenger's jaw dropped.
He finished seeing the Deathclaw's heels as they kicked dust from the rim of the rooftop, her tail flicked once in her passage and she was gone. He could see the claw marks up the bricks where she had climbed.
"-Usiner~!" –Came in a distant howl of rage upon the air, followed by a crazed glaze of Hancock's fading laughter.
"Guys~!" Sanford called, and started rapidly pressing buttons in his suit's internal HUD. "Hancock! Come in! Where are you? Stop!"
It was no use. Hancock must have silenced his com unit, or, he simply wasn't listening. Sanford stomped the pavement in anger, actually cracking it underneath the suit's heel.
This is just what I need.
"We're not supposed to get separated…" He mumbled, brandishing his Laser rifle from the hip, he glared at the end of the road, towards the direction of Helios. "…God damn it."
SIGNATURE DETECTED
Sanford quirked a brow at his suit's helm display, and his eyes immediately whipped to the little text bubble popping on his map.
Out of all the signatures for pests and common wildlife infesting Boston City, one newer arrival stuck out predominantly.
It was a robotics signature.
That's close. Sanford gasped, and he whipped around on his heel, aiming the reticule for his gun skyward, and to the west. That's right over my-
-Just a glance of it. Sanford stared at the nearby rooftop with wide eyes, and he caught just the ending shadow of whatever had been standing at its ledge as it retreated. The signal faded, but didn't disappear.
Oh shit.
"Hancock?" Sanford wired, not taking his aim off the building behind his position. "Hancock, you and Nyx need to stop right now. We're not alone. Hancock? Hancock?"
Mother of hell, had his friend gone insane?
Why the hell am I asking a question I already know the answer to?
-But Hancock had limits. He never took things so far that it risked all their lives. At least, not usually.
This wasn't good.
Sanford backed up towards an alleyway to cut through, and he advanced in heavy-footed steps towards where his companions had run off to.
-0-0-0-0-0-
The Wasteland was not a place to be alone for most folks, and the dangers manifesting in that fact were ten-fold when walking around the city.
Boston had become an interweaving web and maze of intersecting killing fields, trapping dead ends and murder slots. There were too many prepared positions, too many monster dens, and too little room to maneuver around with.
Sanford had engaged in some form of combat nearly every time he had chanced the city's inner sections. A lot of the times, one could easily get away with a quick patrol or sweep in the fringes and downtown areas without much trouble. But in the commercial and industrial districts, and even outside the immediate aura of Diamond City, things tended to get pretty hairy, pretty quickly.
Super Mutants were always a concern, but so were Raiders. The city outside of Diamond was always locked in that eternal turf-war between tens of underlords who had carved out like fiefs for themselves in the ruins. Granted, Sanford had crisscrossed the city so many times and had taken out so many of the threats here that the action was dwindling. But still, reduced or not, Boston City was not a place to fool around.
It was unfortunate for him that Hancock just didn't understand that logic.
-Scratch that.
That was inaccurate to say. Hancock understood the logic behind caution; he just didn't give a shit.
Tracking him and Nyx was easy, however. They were on his scanner board, and nothing was taking them off of it. Sanford stormed through cramped alleys, passed crumbled brick walls and hurried into sun-lit open spaces across streets.
If everything wasn't such a mess, it'd be a beautiful day today.
The scavenger breathed as he maintained a steady jog. He kept an eye on his scanner overlay, minding Nyx's signature, Hancock's icon, and the mysterious robotics sigs on the fringes of their aura.
His blood pressure was rising. It was the trepidation about what was happening here, and there was something happening here, outside of Hancock's antics. There wasn't just one robot stalking him anymore. Now there were two.
Three, he corrected grimly, his eyes hanging over a third symbol that materialized from the proverbial fog at the edges of his suit's home-symbol. Guaranteed to be Assaultrons.
Whoever this person or group was that wanted them dead seemed to have a thing for that model. Black colored Assaultrons with cloaking and that skull symbol on their foreheads. It was pretty high tech stuff. The elite nature of these would be assassins still had him worried.
"Hancock?" He grunted into the suit's com connection, looping around the hood of a car chassis. We're headed away from Helios. "Hancock, you gotta' cut this out. We have a really big problem and you're gonna' get us all-"
Sanford's speech cut away for a surprised gasp. He hadn't even heard the gunshot before the pavement right beside his boot kicked from the bullet's impact.
The armored scavenger screeched to a halt, digging gravel rinds into the street as the servo-joints in his limbs forced the suit's weight to bottom out. He spun to the left, fell to a knee, and aimed down the sight of his rifle.
"-Wha' kinda' shot was dat?" –Came a faint, and gruff voice in the distance.
Son of a bitch, Sanford felt a bead of cold sweat run down his forehead inside his helmet.
"I was aimin' fer' the tin-can-man's foot!"
"You're a waste-a-skin, Gungi!"
"Someone. Shoot. It. Pwease."
It was like listening to a room of bickering school children. Big, green, bulbous and freakishly muscular school children, who all had attitude issues and violent mental instabilities.
Sanford couldn't tell initially from naked sight alone how many of the Super Mutants were inside the old storefront, but judging by how many of them were hanging out the building's windows in the addition to the one who'd shot at him, he'd say there were plenty to go around for a risky encounter.
I don't have time for this.
The scavenger didn't even bother with a potshot. There was no use. He was out in the open, and if one of those fuckers had a missile launcher or Gatling Gun; he was screwed.
More bullets bounced off the street. Sanford felt his arm jerk as a trio of bullets smacked harmlessly off his gauntlet.
Getting lazy in this thing.
Sanford almost grinned as he dove behind a smashed ambulance chassis, rumbling the earth with a deafening crash~! –of reinforced steel to concrete.
I would never have just run out into a street when I was younger and out here.
Sanford Tobs reasoned, as he switched the scope back onto his rifle's spine, that he would make it his personal mission to disassemble his robot once this was all over.
I'll kill that stupid idiot for this.
"-He behind carr!" –One of the Mutants faintly cried, its barbaric, rugged voice crackling like a bundle of gravel being crushed underneath iron. "Shoot carr!"
"Wat a carr again?"
"Gungi! Stupid man!"
Sanford aimed over the ambulance's scorched hood, found a window and its exposed occupant, and yanked down on the trigger.
The rifle kicked, producing that oh-so-familiar pop~! –sound in a repeated train of noise. Crimson bolts lashed over the street, peppered the plaster of the window sill, and hit the Super Mutant inside.
Sanford saw his bolts tear off the creature's left arm and eviscerate its pectoral. Seeing the Mutant twist on his heels like a ballerina and drop was enough of an incentive to make the man voice a victorious- 'Ha!' –as he ducked back into cover.
Score one, you green freaks.
"Holy crap! He got Nill!"
"Stupid. Man~!"
Nill can eat my ass in hell, Sanford winced when bullets started to clap into the ambulance behind him. Time to move.
"Hancock? I know you're out there somewhere, playing with Nyx, like a good robotic dog," The scavenger grit his teeth, his heels tapping into the street as he saw a vantage point, and prepared to sprint towards it. "-but I just want you to know; there will be retribution for this. Almighty hell of retribution, ya' hear? You bastard."
Sanford stormed out into the street. He twisted his hipline around and sprayed the building from the hip, firing until his battery was half-depleted, and he made it to the building corner he sought.
Diving into its protection, Sanford shouldered against the wall and breathed, turning his helmet back when rounds spat dust in his face, hitting his new form of cover in his stead.
One of them at least is a good shot, Sanford shook his head, switching battery faces on his gun. How many are we dealing with here?
He checked his scans briefly, still seeing the robotic signatures from before. They were clustered to the east, hanging back, and not engaging on either his or the Mutant's behalf.
On the subject of the Mutants, there were eight of them, not including the one he'd shot. Eight green monster men to kill. He'd have to do this carefully.
We've dealt with them before, the scavenger tried to cheer himself up as he aimed around his corner cover. We've got this, I mean-
Sanford's eyes went large.
"-Mother-!" –He couldn't finish his sentence. The man tore from the wall and sprinted down into the alley behind him. A second later, and the miniature comet he'd beheld finished whipping across the street. The entire corner he'd been hiding behind vanished in a bursting plume of soot and smoke. Bricks and chunks of concrete bounced and rolled everywhere, and flames licked the ground in a choice few strips.
"-Mother… fucker." Sanford heaved, crouched nearby, he heard the almost musical pitter-patter of pebbles bouncing off his suit's plating as he knelt in the smog. "-There's some cover at least."
He rose and strode through the smoke, switching his helmet's lenses to a proper filter to pierce the veil.
My friend with the bazooka; Sanford picked out the Mutant's yellow outline in his blue-tinted vision above. Linking with the scope, he lined the crosshairs through the building's window, and compressed the trigger for three seconds. Time out for you.
The smog and soot prevented a clear confirmation of the kill, but judging by the way the glowing, yellow and muscular person in his vision twisted this way and that, and collapsed, he could say with confidence that he'd hit something important.
Bullets whipped through the smoke, but it was so thick and dense that the Mutants couldn't see exactly where he was. Sanford sidestepped, knelt, and fired through another window, his suit's modifier filters enabling him to negate the difficult smoke.
Three's the charm.
The Mutant's head popped like a balloon. Some of the fragments and shreds of material cast from the hit were highlighted yellow too, just like the rest of him. It was like watching a glowing person made of golden gel splat and come apart like a jelly jar being thrown against a wall.
That all you got?
Sanford advanced alongside the ribcage of a bus as he gained proximity to the building's face. It was only two stories, and the Mutants had nowhere to hide. He could hear them down the street, barking at each other with all kinds of guttural nonsense, and threats about how they were going to eat him, or crush him, or a plethora of other unsavory fates.
We'll see about that, Sanford growled. First I'll kill all of you, and then I'll kill Hancock.
-0-0-0-0-0-
Though he should've known that once he'd expended his airborne jumps, he'd never be able to outrun her on thruster-power alone, Hancock did have to admit that despite that foolish decision, all here was worth the effort it endowed.
At least, it had been before she caught him.
"-Looks like the shoe's on the other misshapen foot now!" The robot cackled as he zipped down the street. "-How's the view from back there? I hope ya' can see my American spirit while eating my contrails! Ha-haaa~! For Liberty-!"
Nyx released a roaring wail that wouldn't jave been outside the normal vocalizations of one of her more feral cousins. The Deathclaw vaulted on all fours over the smashed remains of an overhead highway sign and aluminum tin~! –upon the air, and drop-kicked him when she got close enough.
Wham~! –the impact would've been bone-shattering to a creature of flesh and blood. But Hancock was tougher than those squishy pansies that this world was so overrun with. It merely just put a dent in his armor, and there were already a million dents before that one.
It was the statement of being tossed around like a ragdoll that royally pissed the Mr. Gutsy off. So, as he bounced like a rogue soccerball down the street, his bounding statements were riddled with speech conjured as a result of his enraged demeanor.
"-YouuulLLll-ppaaAAA-yyy-Heeell-FOORRRRrr—ThissSS-!" –An old street-cleaner vehicle bucked as Hancock terminated his tumble into its flank. Plates buckled and it scraped against the street from the force of the impact. The robot sank down and clattered to the pavement, giving off a resounding racket that mimicked the song of a bag of tin cans being dropped. "-Agh-! I think you dented my circuit-coils, you Scalie Dyke!"
"Vous etes hors de controle." The Deathclaw vented, stomping towards the downed machine with vengeance burning in her golden eyes. "This, is the last straw, and this I promise on my blood!"
"Oh boo-hoo, so the little newt got bopped on her fat, ugly nose!" Hancock shot off the street as if nothing had even happened. With the vigor of a cartoon character, having been kicked, thrown and smashed into a vehicle, the robot was back up and levitating anyway. It almost stupefied Nyx enough for her to pause.
But she didn't.
"This rivalry, between you and I?" The Deathclaw hissed, her talons flexing from her fingers, her armored back hunching as he prepared to leap. "It is too long."
Nyx swept her tongue over her fangs, and placed her palms on the ground between her knees.
"It is fatigant."
"Nope, see, that's where you're wrong, spunky," Hancock's buzzsaw whirred as he pointed it at her. "you're the fat one, not me! All those years of 'Nam strengthened this G.I.! Ha-haa!"
"You were never in the Vietnam War, you aren't an American soldier, and you can't even get fat!" Nyx almost sobbed, unable to comprehend the robot's mania as she ranted at him. "I seek only to put you out of your misery. That is all! Usiner, by all that is good in this horrible world, see how I am trying to help you?"
"Help me? All ya' did from day one was screw shit up for me, tootse!" The Mr. Gutsy snapped. "You rolled in, tried to kill Sanford, and now, I can't even get a word in edgewise anymore! You ruined my pre-teen badassery duo of amazingness fantasy! You convoluted bitch-in-heat!"
"I'm going to kill you." Nyx snarled, and the ground quivered as she leapt off her own heels. "-Stay still~!"
"Like a dumb, cross-eyed frog? Ha! I think not!" Hancock weaved westward, zipping right between the swipes of her claws with an expertly placed dodge. "-Ha-haaa~! Looks like the Han's too slippery for ya', Gator-Biscuit!"
"-And your insults~!" Nyx wailed, spiraling around and performing a gutting swipe with his index and middle fingers. "None of them even make an ounce of sense!"
"Of course they don't, you dumb animal!" Hancock cackled, zipping left, right, and avoiding the two subsequent underhand and overhand strikes from her claws. "Angry little Commie' beasties like you were never meant to understand American-Age speech! Do you know what it's like to live under the same roof as some bug-eyed Godzilla wannabe' like you? You think I'm maddening? Holy toilet-paper streamers!"
"-Shut. Up~!"
A cluster of newspaper distributor boxes were ripped from their moorings by a colossal swipe of her claws. Hancock weaved low and the Deathclaw's bore hands passed by in a doubled pair right over his chassis, impaling the boxes and tearing them free of their bolted bases.
"Be careful, you might chip a nail!" Hancock scoffed by her flank. "Let's not overt the presses here! You started it!"
"I started nothing!" Nyx defended with a high-pitched tone of indignant offense. She leapt backwards through the dust kicked from the boxes' destruction, wriggled her talons at her flanks, and prepared to leap at the robot a second time. "I merely sought to end the endless torrent of merde constantly spewing from you! I must relent, usiner, I have heard of the Fountain of Youth; I have never heard of a Fountain of Shit!"
"The lizard just slapped me with a cheap, folklore based punchline!" Hancock screamed. "You heartless bitch~!"
Nyx tackled the robot in a quick flurry of blurred scales, drab metal and slashing claws. The two of them landed onto the pavement with a thunderous report, steel screeching, Nyx howling in rage. It was that moment that the reptile came closest to ending things. She was merely seconds away from having the vulnerably placed robot reduced to scrap.
She was close to finally ending this nightmare of his existence, that she could taste it.
-Then, she heard the distant racket. The same distant racket that chimed into her anger-fueled thoughts, and reminded her of something more important.
"Go on, you fat, fly-eating salamander! Gimme' all ya' got!" Hancock ranted, struggling, as his buzzsaw whirred and screamed in the air, pinned at the joint to the street by one of her claws."I don't need Clarice to do you in! I'll chop you up and turn you into Liberty-Mystery-Meat for the boys on the Front!"
"Sanford." Nyx was looking north, her snout piqued like that of a bloodhound's to a strong scent of quarry. She could hear the faint cracks and reports on the air, some of them repeating in long, drawn-out efforts.
Gunfire.
"Son of a mis-wired Chinese antenna outlet!" Hancock gasped, lowering his weapons, despite her pinning him to the street. "Look at all of those heartbeat sigs! Sanford's at it all alone! I just knew he still had that badassness in him!"
"You imbecile," The Deathclaw hissed, lowering her chin and directing a burning stare down to him. "we stand in the city, a zone of risks, and you risk everything with your incessant comportement."
"Can you blame me?" Hancock rebuffed. "A year ago, it was just me and the San-of-the-Ford! We were the pals of ages! He the Peanut-Butter to my Jelly, for Christ's sake!"
"Stop talking." The Deathclaw shook her head.
"-Why would I ever listen to you when your sanity's at stake?"
"That is an excellente question." Nyx growled, leaning her snout closer to the machine's raised ocu-lenses. "Is that was this? Childish jealousy?"
"He was my C.O. and now some stupid lizard gets all his attention!" Hancock barked. "Do you even see how screwed up it all is, or do I have to break it down in plebian terms? Who has to deal with losing their compadres' to a monster?"
"Monster." Nyx parroted, snorting, as if something had been caught in one of her nostrils. "I should expect no less of insulte from the likes of you, and for some reason still does your ignorance prove painful."
"Touche, Nyx." Hancock's speech stilled her for a good while; as it wasn't common for him to address her by name. In fact, Nyx couldn't remember the machine ever doing so in the past.
I suppose today is a special occasion after all, she licked the space on her nose where the spray-can had hit her, where it was still a bit tender. His offenses are only stacking.
"I do not hate you, usiner." The Deathclaw admitted out of the blue.
"Well I totally, perpendicularly and extravagantly think you suck balls!" Hancock ranted, his thruster kicking sparks as he struggled on the pavement beneath her claws. "-But where's the double-edged sword in that, eh? It's not like you've got as much on this end as I do!"
"Everything close to me is 'On that end'." She quoted angrily. "Sanford is in trouble, and I do not have any more patience for this."
"Ya' had patience enough to chase me this far." He pointed out.
"Be quiet."
Nyx was just letting up on her grip, when she felt a sudden, and jolting pain stab into her thigh. The Deathclaw yipped and jumped clear off of Hancock, landing unsteadily on her heels like a drunken cat.
"Que diable se passé-t-il…?" Nyx- wide eyed –pinched at a peculiarity jutting from her leg, her mumbles wavering, and uncertain.
"-Ha! Take a long, nice look at my tactical ingenious!" Hancock zipped off the ground in a slight devil of dust, and flew up to the appalled reptile with an air of eagerness. "Utilizing my artistic sense of distraction, I've caught you with your proverbial pants down! Ha-haaa~!"
"Usiner…?" Nyx teetered, her arms raised to steady herself, her heart racing at the uncertainty of what was occurring. Still, wavering or not, she snarled angrily when the robot pinched the distinct, silvery dart that was sticking out of her flesh, and pulled it free to hold between them in his claw.
"My dart gun told you what-for, Lizard-Buns!" The Mr. Gutsy guffawed, twisting the hollow, needled capsule in his grasp. "It's all about the- …."
Hancock paused stupidly, his ocu-lenses focusing on the dart now solely. It took a moment, but gears ground, and realizations came to pass. He saw that perhaps this time around only, had he spoken completely out of context.
"-wait a minute," The robot grumbled. "-I don't have a dart gun."
"-Agh~!" Nyx yelped, clasping at her chest. The Deathclaw stumbled back, bladed fingers wrapping around and quivering over a second dart. It appeared comically small in her clasp, vanishing as a flicker of reflective silver whilst she plucked it free and threw it away. "Usiner! Look!"
"I see 'em!" Hancock would've followed his sensors anyhow, but Nyx's pointing claw was all the more of an express option to finding the angle of their attackers.
It was just a brief visage on the top of a nearby rooftop, brief enough, but sustained, for Hancock to start aiming and firing his Plasma Gun like mad.
The street lit a sickly green, and blobs of incinerating energy stabbed out towards the building.
"-Nobody shoots the alligator except for me and gets away with it!" Hancock ranted, draining his battery, floating away from Nyx even as she teetered and stumbled after him. "Come back here and face your deaths like men! I'll end your faces! Rip out your nuts and feed 'em to the Russians! Face me-!"
One moment, Hancock was his normal, violent self, and the next, he wasn't.
Now, Nyx was certainly not as technically adept as Sanford was. Sanford could identify probably most if not all of the current weapon systems being used out here in the Wasteland. But she knew enough to process what she was seeing, and understand the depth of what was occurring.
The device that hit Hancock looked very similar to the darts that had been used on her seconds ago, except, this munitions type was by far designed with mechanical prey in mind, and not organic.
Where the darts pierced flesh and delivered their toxins, this thing pierced Hancock's chassis right at the front, and zapped him.
Bzzzkkk~! –Nyx had to shield her face from the brightness of the flash. Hancock looked like a cartoon character that had just touched a live electrical wire. He was almost arachnid, splayed in midair, with pulses of destructive, blue lightning coursing up and down his limbs and chassis.
"Usiner!" Nyx called out.
Hancock fell as a steaming, blackened heap onto the street, clattering against the pavement, trailing soot, sparking, and unmoving.
Could life not be so horrifying for more than a few weeks?
Nyx snarled as she lumbered over, and knelt over the robot's body. She felt another sting on her shoulder, and merely flicked the dart out without so much as a glance.
I must reach Sanford.
"…Oh, usiner…" Nyx slurred, her vision blurring, and her limbs feeling impossibly heavy. The Deathclaw scooped her talons under the robot's form, and hefted his burnt mass into her arms. "-do you see how… the world… has a sense of humor…?"
She was only doing this for Sanford. If it were up to her, she told herself, she'd leave the Mr. Gutsy and make a run for it solo.
At least, that was what she told herself.
Stupid machine.
Nyx didn't even glare at her assailants, andthough whatever she had been shot with diminished her speed significantly, she still managed to take off in a heavy-heeled run towards the gunfire, her tail draping lazily behind her, her eyes continuously battling her for a field of encroaching dark.
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"Gungi! He inside da' buildin'! Use the Platta-Board!"
"…Uhhhh… W-What the Platta-Board?"
"Dat' fing! Dat' fing by you foot! Wit the nails and the hurty!"
"Oh, this fing-"
-Sanford shot Gungi in the head, and sent the Super Mutant's headless, blood-fountaining corpse careening out the window he'd been leaning against.
Fuckin' idiot, the scavenger thought as his rifle ran dry, and he snarled in agitation down at its spine. Fuckin' gun.
"-You killed Gungi~!" The other Super Mutant in the upper story room screamed, his green, underbitten face alight with childish shock and appall. "Stupid man! Stupid man~!"
"Buddy, it sounds like I did you a favor!" Sanford winced when the Super Mutant pointed his Assault Rifle right at him in the room's doorframe, and pulled the trigger. The trigger clicking emptily hastened his movements. "Take it with some grace, huh?"
"Daaaaaggghhhh~!" The green monster screamed, tossing his gun away like it was a broken toy, he ran over to the other window in a series of thundering, heavy footsteps.
Casting some detritus about on the floor, the Super Mutant picked up a drab, reflective bar of metal from the floor, duct-taped with bits of shrapnel, construction nails and what looked like railroad spikes.
It was a lead pipe that was almost as long as Sanford was tall. Even in the armor, it made the scavenger go wide-eyed.
Holy shit.
Sanford experienced a classic moment of what he called 'Battle-Panic' –and even though, he'd been down this violent, risky road a million times; he still had moments where his reaction timing was quite poor.
It was a trademark of being a soldier, he knew. Not even seasoned veterans had it all down a hundred percent of the time, and when the need for quick thinking came-a-calling, everyone in this line of work had their moments of royally fucking up.
Thus, the scavenger found himself fiddling with the battery-face on his gun like a fumbling child. He couldn't get to shooting again quick enough before the hollering, massive Mutant was on top of him.
Shit!
Sanford grit his teeth, dropped his own gun, and brought up his palms out of instinct.
Clang~! –he caught the massive lead pipe in his armored palms, right as the Mutant brought in a devastating, two-handed swipe from the side.
Sparks flew and metal crunched. For a moment, the scavenger and the Mutant were locked together, arms quivering, faces drawn in taught, wild snarls. The Super Mutant was truly ugly this close up. It's green, heavy forehead almost angled over and threatened to swallow up its tiny, yellow eyes. Its teeth- (for what few were left) were uneven and canine-like. Rusty, improperly applied stitches ran down in an infected sprawl down the Mutant's jaw, where they had been used to seal some ancient wound and had never been removed.
Jesus Christ, Sanford suit groaned metallically as he slowly, but inexorably forced the Mutant's pipe lower and lower from the chin of his helmet. I'm almost forgetting that this is all Hancock's fault, that little shit.
"Kill – you-!" The Mutant snarled in broken English, spittle flying through and around his ruined teeth. "-Kill –you – hard~!"
Get in line, shitbag.
Sanford grunted, and ripped the pipe and the arms wielding it to the side. The Mutant hollered and reeled westward. Sanford planted his armored heel into and shattered his hip, hearing the pelvis and what he could assume was a rib or two cracking over the din of the fighting.
Once you get over the muscles, they break just the same.
Sanford cried out angrily, and he battered into the Mutant, using his suit's throw-weight to smash into the creature's vulnerable flank.
Lemme' just take out the trash.
He drove the screaming, bellowing Mutant back into the room from whence he came, the two of them stamping through piles of garbage and bits of rubble. The lead pipe flew from the Mutant's fingers, and for just a second, Sanford recognized the expression of horror born on the monster's face.
Yeah, the scavenger grit his teeth, and kept his heels down as the Mutant's calves bumped into the window sill. You know what's going down. You.
"-Stuuupidddd-maaaaannnn-~!" –The Mutant landed on his head. It was a result garnered from the mess of a ripe tomato spattering against a wall. The body clambered, twitched, and lye down on the street, still as a board, and green and red all over.
"…Do you people ever shut up?" Sanford breathed, wriggling his fingers into fists as he stood triumphantly in the building's second story window. What a trip.
The room was already a mess given the amount of trash and detritus that the Mutants had accumulated camping out here. But now, it was littered with a quad of twisted bodies, two of them headless from eviscerating bolts gifted by Sanford's Laser Rifle.
Hancock and Nyx didn't even show up to help me.
Sanford's anger failed to keep itself in check. His gauntlets creaked metallically as he clenched his fists, and stalked back inside the bloody, messy room with a lumbering enragement.
They're both unbelievable.
Sanford nudged a Mutant's corpse out of his way, stepped around it, and picked up his gun from where it was lying on the floor.
Nyx is better than that.
He knew Hancock wasn't, but, even that statement was a dark one to be had.
Hancock never took things this far. Purposefully sitting out of a firefight with a bunch of Mutants? Even if Han' was being an ass, he would never give up an opportunity to shoot and kill things. After all, where a painter loved to paint, and a singer loved to sing; Hancock loved to kill. It was his art. At least, in a way that he viewed.
"Han'? Sanford here, 'cause, ya' know, who else would it be?" Sanford belatedly switched the battery faces on his gun, stalking around one of the headless Mutants at his feet. "I just want you to know, wherever you are; that I'm very much still alive, and I'm going to fucking kill you when I-"
Sanford cut himself off and stared at his helmet's internal scan screen.
"…Oh my god." He mumbled, and the room shivered as he stomped over to the window sill.
He saw them across the street. There they were, Nyx, and whatever was left of Hancock.
The Deathclaw was teetering. She was lumbering, and shifting back and forth like a drunk. In her clawed hands was a blackened pile of sparking, soot-belching scrap metal that he knew to be his best friend.
Sanford didn't know which name to scream out. He wanted to scream both of them out, but for some reason, his mouth was refusing to work.
The scavenger almost drooled on himself inside the helm. He gasped, breathed heavily, and was about to move when his suit's scanners started blaring.
MULTIPLE SIGNALS DETECTED; ROBOTICS. ROBOTICS.
Sanford's jaw dropped.
The robotic signatures he'd been picking up were back, and they had brought friends.
They now numbered in the tens. They were coming from multiple directions.
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