Hello, hello again. Don Orbit here. I have returned with another story and this time it isn't a crossover. Something I usually don't do.

But here we are and I had a little time to browse through the catalogue of Murder Drones fanfictions to try and identify some other tropes I'd like to write about. I got one more idea for a "pure" Murder Drones story, but that will have to wait until later. For now, here's the first part of this story and I hope you'll enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I do not own Murder Drones.

Drones of a Feather

Chapter 1 - Broken Wing

The sun hung low in the skies of the ruined world of Copper-9. The sunset painted the frozen landscape of the ruins of a once lively city in yellows and orange hues, while the weathered concrete skeletons of skyscrapers cast long shadows over the concrete jungle. Ice clung to almost every exposed surface, forming encrusting the remains of abandoned cars and forming large icicles hanging from the sides of buildings and streetlamps. Half-buried remains of worker drones stuck out of the ice like sore thumbs, their broken displays still displaying the same red text reading 'FATAL ERROR'. Dozens of them littered the lifeless streets as the sun finally set and the last warm rays of light of the day gave way to the bitter coldness of the night.

The orange and red hues on the horizon began to disappear completely into the darkness of the night sky as Copper-9 'moons', the smaller one being an actual natural satellite and the other a gas giant Copper-9 was orbiting so far away that it appeared only slightly bigger than the 'other' moon; rose up from the horizon and cast the icy landscape into a ghastly silver light. The lifeless atmosphere of the abandoned city seemed to intensify when the silence was broken by the beating of mechanical wings.

A trio of silhouettes flew through the empty streets before landing on a rooftop. They were humanoid in shape, but they were clearly mechanical as they had large mecahnical wings lined with blades akin to feathers sprout from their backs and a long cable like tail with a syringe like tip filled with a neon yellow glowing substance. They were disassembly drones, sent by their company JCJenson (In Spaaace) to hunt down the population of worker drones that had made itself at home on Copper-9 ever since the planet's core had collapsed and killed all biological life on it. The corpses littering the streets were merely a testament of their grizzly work.

"And you are sure it was supposed to be here?" V asked her squad leader J as she was retracting her normal hand for a set of four blade like claws, eager to sink them into the next unfortunate victim of her violent tendencies. J smiled a little at her subordinates eagerness, but crossed her arms.

"It has been a while since we cleaned up over here. Chances are that there are some workers around here that we haven't found yet. We really need to meet our quota for this month." She said, before turning to her other squadmate and frowned. "That means you, useless."

N, the only male member of their squad jumped a bit at his superior snapping at him, before smiling.

"Understood, boss. Leave it to me." He said with a salute. J rolled her eye lights at his positivity. He was so positive, it was sickening to her to look at him sometimes.

"I'm not leaving it to you, which is exactly why we are behind on our quota." She said with her eye lights narrowed and tail whipping the rooftop beneath her feet. N looked away in shame, while V giggled slightly to herself. "Now what are you waiting for then? Get going and find some toasters to kill!" J snapped at N, who quickly took to the air again and started looking around the area for any worker drones. V followed suit and flew off in another direction, while J took flight and searched in a third direction.

The disassembly drones were thorough when it came to exterminating worker drones like this. Scanning the ground for prey while drawing circles high above ground like vultures or scrambling into the dilapidated structures of the buildings were simply part of the job. After all, the 'barely sentient toasters' had gotten pretty good at hiding from their airborne hunters. Which unfortunately for them didn't stop the more stupid ones of them to abandon all cover and scavenge the streets out in the open in the middle of the night.

J was the one who first spotted a group of drones out in the open. Right of the bat she could tell that it were more than a dozen, a decently sized group for one night. Landing on a rooftop she observed what they were doing, while remaining hidden. Something that caught her eye was the fact that these worker drones were armed with rifles and other firearms, which they clearly scavenged from some military facility. A smirk formed on her lips at the sight of it. It had been a while since they had hunted drones who thought that they could fight back. Usually they were all defenseless and begging for mercy right before their deaths, so this was a nice change of pace after a long time.

'No time like the present.' She thought to herself before she leapt off the edge of the roof and unfurled her wings, swooping back up while exchanging her hands for missile launchers and firing. Four missiles shot out of her hands and headed straight for the confused drones. They only got to look shocked for a split second before their bodies were torn apart.

"Contact! Contact!" J heard a worker scream as the others scattered sought cover behind fallen debris. Some exceptionally foolish ones didn't and immediately opened fire on the disassembly drone with pigtails, who switched her weapons for claws and dove down. Weaving around in the air, she felt some of the projectiles harmlessly bounce off her wings, before she reached the first worker drone and drove her claws right into it, before taking back off and dropping the disembowled drone with its visor now also reading the same 'FATAL ERROR' message as all the others. The other drones looked in horror, but didn't stop firing.

"Reloa- ARGH!" Another drone screamed when V practically slammed it into the ground, killing it instantly, before turning her attention to another one, which she quickly dispatched with her claws. A third one tried to 'sneak up' on her with a combat knife while yelling some sort of incoherent battle cry only to have V's tail stab them right in the head.

"Who's next~?" V asked in a sing sang voice as she switched her claws for machine guns and started to shoot back.

"Dammit!" Another worker drone shouted as they took cover behind a piece of concrete that had broken off one of the buildings next to them. Their gun started to click as the magazine was empty, making them rip it out and fumble to grab another one.

"Oh, here you go." Someone said holding out a new magazine from behind them.

"Ah, thanks buddy." They said and turned around... only to see N standing there with his eyes replaced with a large yellow X, before he pounced on them and tore them apart.

The 'fight' went on for a while longer as the worker drones retreated into the ruins of the buildings for cover, where they were picked off one by one by the disassembly drones either shooting them or by swooping in and ripping them apart with their sharp claws. One of the worker drones had managed to climb up a broken flight of stairs with a suitcase in hand as he made his way to the windows. From there he had a good overview of the slaughter going on, but more importantly a vantage point to shoot from. Opening the case, he lifted its contents out, a rocket launcher and a missile. Inside of the projectile, he could see a green shimmering something moving, but he had no time to admire its fluorescent appearance. Instead, he quickly loaded it into the rocket launcher and moved to the window. The 'murder drones' were currently busy with the last of his companions, but he would at least take one of them with him.

Lining up the shot, he took the closest one of them into the crosshairs, before steading himself and putting his finger on the trigger.

"Chew on this, you monster." The worker drone muttered to himself as he pulled the trigger on the rocket launcher. The missile took off and threw its gunner backwards as it propelled itself towards J who had her hands replaced by swords, when she saw the incoming missile too late. Her eye lights hollowed out in shock, realizing that she could not dodge it in time.

"J, LOOK OUT!" N shouted over the noises of gunfire as he took off and slammed into J with a burst of speed, knocking his squad leader out of the way just in time before the missile hit him instead. He tried to shield himself with one of his wings and an arm, but the missile didn't explode immediately as it hit him. Rather than that it flew some distance first, dragging him along as it pushed into his midsection and then exploded in loud explosion. The resulting fireball quickly died down and left nothing but a cloud of black smoke, out of which N fell to the ground below, leaving a trail of oil until he came to a stop in the snow covered street.

"Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!" The gunner shouted like an idiot as he threw up his arms in victory at the sight of the missile seemingly having taken out one of the three disassembly drones. The gunner's joy was short lived though as the other two were now aware of his location and snapped their heads away from where N had fallen and towards him. His smile immediately fell upon seeing the two yellow Xs on their visors staring at him. "Uh oh..."

"V, I'm taking care of this one. You take the others." J said before she dove right at the gunner with her swords ready. Said worker drone quickly tried to grab his rifle and line up a shot, only to have one of the swords cleave the weapon in half alongside one of his arms below the area where the elbow would be and the second one stab him through his guts. The worker drone coughed up oil as J lifted him off his feet and impaled the sword into the concrete wall behind him.

"Any last words?" J asked sarcastically with a smirk, while switching her other hand to claws again.

"Go to hel-" The worker drone never finished his last words when the disassembly drone tore his head off with a swipe of her claws, leaving nothing but four long and deep cuts in the wall and a decapitated corpse on her sword arm, which she threw off like a piece of trash.

"Tch! Toasters." J said as she noticed some of the worker drone's oil on her suit, glaring at the body onto the ground. Not that it really mattered with it already being black, but it still was an annoyance. J made her way back to the rocket launcher's case, which she picked up. "Experimental warhead D-X." She read aloud, before noticing that there were no longer any sounds of ongoing fighting going on. Just the usual wet sounds of V feeding on the dead or dying worker drones. Making her way to the window, she leapt out and found V in the middle of 3 mutilated worker drone corpses, their oil spilled around like like a circle with not a single speck of it on V, who was chewing on an arm. "I see you're finished as well."

Then her eyes went over to N, who was still laying on the ground, making J groan in annoyance.

"Ugh! This slacker better not be asleep or Corporate help me." She muttered under her breath as V now also took note of the fact that N had not gotten up yet. Sure, he had been hit with a missile, but the disassembly drones were not your average toaster that broken when you stabbed it with a fork. Their bodies were equipped with advanced nanotechnology, that could repair some very serious damage done to them in a matter of seconds like getting their heads completely blown off or their limbs torn out. Not to mention that they were made to be very durable to deal with the things they were made to hunt down.

Therefore, being hit with a missile was but a scratch the likes of them. Frustrated, J unfurled her wings and leapt over to where N was laying in the snow followed by V. Looking down with her hands on her hips, J saw that one of his arms was gone and the wing he had tried to shield himself with appeared to be broken in the middle. The same could be said about one of his legs The syringe like tip of his tail was also broken and yellow nanite acid oozed out of it into the snow. The biggest damage appeared to be the gaping hole at his abdominal region where a human's stomach would be. Now the waist of the disassembly drones was rather thin, so the hole was almost big enough to snap him in two.

"Oof, they got him pretty good." V said as she looked at the damage done to N.

"Not good enough and not as good as I will if he doesn't get up soon and helps bringing those bodies back to the spire." J said with her eyes narrowed at the fallen drone. For a moment, she just stood there with her arms crossed, before speaking up again. "Hey, Moron Bot. Wake up." J said as she lightly kicked him in the leg. A loud snap could be heard as N's broken leg broke right at the knee joint, making both J and V jump a bit.

"Uhm... boss?" V said in a questioning tone. She knew that J hated N's guts, but literally bisecting him was a bit much when she usually did punish him in other ways like not letting him drink oil or stepping on his visor until it cracked or stabbing him with her tail.

"I didn't mean to! It's not my fault he's..." J stopped as she noticed two things. First of all, there was no reaction from N. No groan of pain. No awkward laugh. Nothing. He was completely offline with his visor displaying a yellow X and a line of text beneath it reading 'Error 606'. And secondly, she saw some sort of green shimmer around the edges of his injuries. Upon taking a closer look, warnings flashed in her HUD as lime green nanites were eating away at the edges of his wounds, preventing his own yellow ones from working properly. It was like watching an ant war with two sides made of countless tiny individuals with two different colours clashing against one another. And much to her and V's horror, it looked like the green side of the war was winning over the yellow one.

'Scrap! Is this some sort of anti-drone weaponry left over from before the planet's core collapsed?' J thought as her mind raced with possibilities, remembering the designation D-X from the suitcase.

"What the hell? What is that?" V asked in shock as she was about to get closer to N, only to be held back by J.

"Don't. It looks like some sort of nanite weapon. Probably that's the reason why he isn't rebuilding himself yet." She replied before going back to assessing the situation. 'Dammit! This idiot does nothing but get himself into trouble!' She thought before replacing one of her hands with a chainsaw.

"Hey what are you-" V was about to ask, but J cut her off.

"We need to get the infected material off. Otherwise it will just eat itself deeper into this idiot and then just digest him from the inside out." She said before her saw roared to life and cut off the broken part of the leg, where she spotted the same nanites working on eating the rest of his lower body, while the broken off limb had already notably shrunken in size. "V, hold the moron's body steady. Try not to touch that stuff or I'll have to cut it off too." J instructed as V quickly nodded and lifted N's torso off the ground. J, meanwhile, began to work on his stomach trying her best to make sure that the infected material didn't spill into the new cavity or that he'd spill his guts onto the frozen floor. The arm and tail were easily taken off as well, but his wing was an entirely different animal. Far more durably and almost entirely composed of feather-like blades, cutting it in half was not an option. So instead, J opted to just it off from the base of his back entirely.

About half an hour after starting to cut away at N, J's job was done and the infected material was getting disassembled on a pile of progressively smaller scrap metal. J wiped her digital brow where her visor showed sweat drops, before grabbing one of the killed worker drones and refreshing herself on some fresh oil. V had set N's body down against a wall as his nanites finally began to slowly fix the damage done to him. In a matter of minutes, his body would be fully repaired. Finishing the last drops of oil out of the worker drone's body, J let out a frustrated growl before throwing the corpse against a wall, audibly breaking something inside as V looked at her leader with concern, while she rounded up the bodies for transportation.

"Ah! This whole thing is a massive setback to reach our quota for the month!" She said before she stood up and glared at N's now fully repaired form. "You better work hard to make up for this, you useless piece of scrap metal." J berated the unresponsive form of N, whose visor still displayed the same error message. This only seemed to piss J off more as she backhanded him, making him fall to the ground in a heap as if that would wake him up. To be fair, it usually did work...

But not this time. J blinked a few times as her usual tactic failed and saw that N was still out cold.

"What the?" She grabbed him by the collar of his coat and propped him back up to lean against the wall, seeing the visor that she had just cracked repair itself. She snapped her fingers in front of his face a few times, then shot a flat look at V. "Looks like this liability outdid himself this time." She said with a sigh.

"So... what now?" V asked, not quite sure what to do. J closed her eyes for a second and thought.

"We get the corpses to the spire, including him. Then we'll see if we can get this heap of metal operational again." J said before she flew over to the pile of dead worker drones, grabbed two of them and flew off. V followed her with her eyes, then turned her head back to N with a slight frown, before picking him and a dead worker drone up and following J. There was still a lot to do this night.

-1 Day Later-

When dusk came the following night, J woke up hanging upside down from a corner of the spire's interior like a bat with her tail lodged deeply inside the mass of dead worker drones. The spire was a monumental construct made of the dead bodies of the countless worker drones they had killed. This structure served three purposes.
First of all, it instilled fear in the worker drone population on the planet. After all, it was larger than the skyscrapers at this point and growing with each body the disassembly drones added to it.
Secondly, it served as an oil reservoir for them to feed on. Needing to drink oil to prevent overheating, storing the dead bodies like this had the benefit of not having to fear starvation in the case of nights where their hunts would be fruitless.
And thirdly, with the sunlight being deadly to the disassembly drones, it acted as a shelter from it.

Overall, whoever designed the disassembly drones had in J's opinion consumed a bit too much of vampire related media.

Dislodging her tail and opening her wings, V swooped down to the bottom of the spire, where the pod stood with which they had been sent to this planet with. Opening the door to it, she peered inside to find a certain drone still in his unresponsive state, slumped over on the ground. Last night, V had taken N's body into the pod and made him lean against its wall as if simply sitting there, before J and V continued carrying the dead bodies of the worker drones to the spire. This took way longer than it it should have as by the time they were done, they could already see the first orange hues of the next morning's dawn on the horizon.

To be honest, J had half-expected to find N sleeping on the floor or awake and greeting her and V with his overbearingly positive attitude. But he wasn't. He wasn't awake nor asleep. He still laid there with the same Error 606 message on his visor. Speaking of which, the JCJenson handbook did not mention this error at all, making J curse whoever wrote such a faulty manual, before trying her usual tactics of waking N up without any success. As such, she had left him there and assumed he'd wake up either during the day or now. Apparently she was wrong on both accounts.

"Hey J." V greeted her from behind as she dropped to the ground. J turned around and closed the door to the pod. Immediately, V's smile faltered a bit. "Oh, he's still knocked out?" She asked. J simply waved her off.

"Apparently. Or he's just faking this to get out of working. Because if he does I'll make it look like a work-related accident." She huffed with her arms crossed, before she shot V a smirk. "But at the very least, we don't have him weighing us down for tonight." V's face lit up again at that.

"Oh yeah! Girls trip!" She said, throwing an arm around J's shoulder, who firmly pushed it away. Not that she was opposed to affection, but they still had a job to do and now she had to only keep one other disassembly drone in check, which certainly made her job easier.

"We are not taking a vacation. Well, only one from N and his stupid antics." J said with an eye roll, before the two disassembly drones took off and flew out into the night.

"Lowest kill count eats a missile!" V laughed as she flew after J.

The night at the spire was as quiet as a cemetery, which it technically was though more of an unceremonious mass grave turned into macabre art. Aside from the many dead worker's visors showing the same red FATAL ERROR, nothing moved or made a sound in that place the whole night. As the night came to a close, J and V returned to the spire with about 20 broken worker drone corpses, who had tried to hide from them in some abandoned basement only for V to cut through the door with chainsaw hands and throw herself at the defenseless automatons.
J had simply waited outside and killed any other worker who either managed to slip past her very enthusiastic coworker or just happened to be startled out of their hiding hole by the screams of the unfortunate victims or V's maniacal laughter as she had the time of her life... it made carrying the corpses back a pain though.

"Hahaha! Tonight was fun!" V said with her eye lights hollowed out as she dropped down to the ground of the spire while J rolled her eyes.

"Next time, try and keep them from running away." J said with a frown and crossed arms. "And stop cutting them down to bite size."

"Duly noted." V said in a sing sang voice before making her way over to the landing pod. "Oh N, we're back~. You missed all the fun tonight." Opening the door with a smile, she peered inside, to which J facepalmed and readied herself for either the confused yet happy scream of surprise from N or him saying something stupid like that he missed them or that he was sorry or something. Basically, typical N shenanigans. Though J would lie if she said that she didn't look forward to his panicked reaction upon her punishing him by every guideline of their company policy for sleeping on the job for a whole day. The scolding she had ready in her mind was perhaps the best piece of literature she had ever written in her mind aside from 3.

The more she was confused when she heard nothing after a moment of silence.

"V? What's going on in there?" She asked while making her way over to the landing pod, where she found V looking at a still unconscious N. This was a bit weird to J. Normally V acted as if N didn't even exist, pretending as if she didn't recall there being a third member or purposefully calling him M as if she didn't know his designation. Why she did that was beyond J but seeing her more or less worked up over him being like this was more than atypical from V's usual antics.

J gently grabbed V's shoulder, who flinched upon the contact before turning around.

"Relax, it's just me." J said, giving N a glance, before turning to V again. " Come on, V. We still need to add the bodies to the spire."

"Oh... right. Right away." V replied, though her smile was smaller than before. With that she went back out and flew up to add the corpses to the spire. J shot N's comatose form an annoyed look.

'More trouble than worth.' Was all she could think about when she shut the door to the pod and helped V out. She had better things to do than to worry about some faulty and defect piece of hardware like that. Surely, that could wait until the next night when he'd wake up and she could finally give him a proper scolding as the squad leader.

J didn't know that N wouldn't wake up the next night either...