Ezra boosted forwards, thrusters igniting and launching the mech at an acceleration that would render most unaugmented Humans unconscious.
Ezra's targets were a group of MTs a bit over a kilometre away. A decent portion of that distance was vertical, however.
Ezra cleared it in slightly over nine seconds, maintaining a roughly stable altitude until he was directly above them, and then letting gravity pull him the rest of the way. His boosters fired again when he was only a moment away from the ground, cancelling the worst of the impact.
He landed right in the midst of the back third of the group, his laser blade already raised and charging.
"What-" was as far as anybody got. None of them even had the chance to react before Ezra's boosters ignited, sending the mech spinning forwards as the laser blade swept outwards.
The arc of light cleaved six MTs in half in an instant, wiping out everything within fifty metres of him as he coasted along on his inertia. He didn't stop there, continuing the spin as his thrusters and the laser blade activated a second time and swept through another group of five MTs.
Barely three seconds after contact, and he'd already wiped out nearly half of their numbers. Armoured Cores were truly dangerous machines.
"AC!" One of them screamed, fear and panic echoing in his voice, as Ezra boosted along the ground, raising his rifle as he did.
The Ransetsu rifle thundered as it fired, only two shots required to reduce an MT to scrap metal. Bang bang, bang bang, bang bang.
Three more had been destroyed, and their numbers truly halved, by the time they could even attempt to fight back. In such close quarters, however, trying to hit an AC with something as slow as an MT was sheer futility; Ezra just about dancing between them all, boosters pulsing every half-second as the mech changed positions and directions again and again and again. Bullets went flying in every direction, some of them from Ezra, most from the MTs. It didn't help in such a complicated melee; they hit their own allies more than they hit Ezra. Another mech went down, then two, then three, then four, before someone decided to fire a stream of missiles out of sheer panic. Ezra barely even needed to dodge them, but he quick-boosted perpendicular to their path, avoiding them all while returning fire with a headshot that left the attacker nearly blind. The only reason he didn't follow it up with a kill was because he ran out of bullets in the magazine.
The squad, what was left of it, scattered, fleeing in every direction. Ezra jumped, boosting through the air, and landed next to a line of MTs with the laser blade already brandished.
Another two flashes of light and the laser blade claimed four more lives. Ezra boosted immediately afterwards, gliding over the ground and skirting behind a piece of cover.
A storm of bullets followed him, but his cover held. His rifle finished reloading as he launched a scanning pulse, getting data on his targets. The vertical missile launcher locked and fired, four missiles streaming upwards as he boosted out of cover, moving so fast that the MTs couldn't even keep track.
The missiles arced into one MT, wiping it out. Three more followed with six shots from Ezra. The second-to-last MT was caught in the middle of a reload by an uncharged laser blade, still more than powerful enough to carve a single mech apart.
The very last mech was fleeing as fast as it could. Ezra chose to Assault Boost after it, accelerating to about five hundred kilometres per hour.
The MT didn't even have time to turn around before Ezra closed in and kicked, nearly sixty tons of AC slamming into a much flimsier machine. The entire back of it cratered, and it promptly shot off into a wall with a mighty crash.
Everything was dead. All targets eliminated.
I checked the clock. Barely forty seconds from start to finish. Yes, it had been a surprise attack, and yes, the opposing MTs hadn't exactly been optimally positioned for their own survival, but still...
The power of an Armoured Core was certainly nothing to scoff at.
"That last one was just showing off." I said, checking over the AC. Nothing more than superficial damage from a few stray bullets; things that the BASHO line was more than capable of handling. It amounted to little more than scratches on the paint.
"It was saving ammo." Ezra denied, but I could detect an undercurrent of satisfaction running through him at getting that kick off. "The laser blade was still cooling, and that would have been more bullets to replace if I'd used the Ransetsu."
"All two of them." I couldn't help but note. "Still, you're not wrong." And there was a flash of pride, to go with the satisfaction. "You did well, Ezra." And a glow of happiness to join with the rest of it.
"Can I keep using the AC then?" He immediately asked.
Would that I had eyes to roll. "Sure. You use it quite well. Just don't get arrogant. No place for that on the battlefield."
That sobered him a little. "Right." He agreed.
I smiled. "Head back to base, kiddo. We'll get those scratches fixed up as best we can."
His AC turned, thrusters igniting as they did. "And the wrecks?"
"Haul them back, salvage what we can, use them as resources." Between the differing destruction patterns of the laser blade and the Ransetsu, there were probably enough intact components to get a few useful MTs out of them. We'd just need new control interfaces for them all- or leave them rather dangerously on autopilot AI. Still... "Though I suppose that's going to have to wait a bit." I said.
Problem. Mechs are heavy. Ezra's little spree had created a lot of wrecks- and most of them were in multiple pieces, too. Two and a half hours was a decent chunk of time, but most of our current stuff was involved in industrial processes, and so couldn't be immediately diverted to cleanup. "Starting as soon as we could would still leave us in the middle of it when they arrive."
"Hmm... Is that such a bad thing? Having all these wrecks laying around would be a bit intimidating to most Dosers."
That... was a good point. "It'll certainly keep them on their toes." Mmm.
Yeah, why not?
Alright, two and a half hours before the next set... Nothing to do but get back to it, I suppose.
Fixing the AC was... honestly unnecessary. He'd taken... maybe five shots in that whole melee. None of them critical, and none of them to the same areas. We were down twenty one bullets, further reducing our already low supply, but there was nothing we could do about that at the moment. MT rifles and ammunition were not, unfortunately, compatible with AC standard parts.
I made a mental note to fabricate some AC laser weapons as soon as possible. They required coolant, but that entire chemical formula was significantly easier to produce than bullets with our currently limited setup. The IB-C03G wasn't the most optimised generator for them, but it had more than enough output to handle the demand and it was still better than most non-fusion generators in terms of actually supplying that power.
After that, though? It was right back to waiting. Time passed, they started coming into range, we started to breach their comms- it had happened twice before already.
Except as they continued to come closer, I noticed one thing; a distinctly small amount of Coral.
There was a decent supply of new visitors, I could easily tell that much, but comparing the previous visitors to the new ones? The total supply of Coral in the bodies of the latter was at less than a hundredth of the former.
If they were Dosers, they hadn't taken their drugs in a long time. But, even then...
The distribution was wrong. Large amounts of Coral injected directly into the body didn't spread and linger like that. Flushing it from the system took time, but on the scale of a single Human body, the Convergence effect wasn't that strong, so it would usually leave it completely within a week or two, though it could linger for up to a month depending on the details of how the Coral was introduced to the body.
This type of spread and amount... It had more in common with fairly constant and consistent introduction of Coral in small amounts, spread out over a long time. Dosers chasing a high wouldn't do that. But then, why-
Ah. Of course. "These aren't Dosers."
"How can you tell?"
"The Coral distribution is wrong for Dosers." I explained. "But it fits perfectly for people who have been consuming Mealworms as a primary food source."
Mealworms... An engineered organism, created before Humanity had even left the solar system. A rapidly proliferating and extremely efficient organism, they served as one of the best biomatter sources Humanity had available to them. They could be used as meat, processed into bioslurries, and were even capable of surviving out in the wild, often used as part of early terraforming stages. As far as I was aware, they were even pretty tasty, not too different from cow meat.
Following the discovery of Coral, however, a new Mealworm subspecies had been created as a part of what was technically the first biological Coral utilisation project, given the ability to feed on and incorporate Coral and utilise the energy that was produced in order to grow to extreme sizes at very high speeds.
That very same subspecies of Mealworms was the main, and indeed, only food source for most of Rubicon at the moment. The PCA was the only real exception, and they grew their food in an orbital facility that was shipped to Rubicon.
For everyone else?
The Dosers got their food from stolen supplies from civilians, or recovered caches of supplies. Some particularly big gangs might grow Mealworms of their own, but Dosers didn't have consistent access to Coral.
The civilians and the RLF, on the other hand? Mealworms, usually grown by the latter and provided to the former. The RLF had the Wells, which provided low, though consistent, harvests of Coral. The PCA had consistently poked those Wells whenever they found them, preventing them from stockpiling Coral in the long-term, though.
"They're RLF. This is a retribution squad, aimed at the Dosers for the recent theft."
"That's... good?" He asked. "We want to talk to them, right?"
"It is, and yes. I just hadn't been expecting a group right now." The RLF had no reason to go after us, anyway. And if they'd been hunting the Dosers that we'd just wiped out, then that was an 'in', right there.
"So how do we talk to them?" Ezra asked.
My train of thought slammed directly into a wall.
Ah. Shit.
We didn't have the ability to synthesise voices at the moment, which made actually talking significantly more difficult than it needed to be.
Which meant that the only actual option I had for communication was sending a text message and hoping that they had the coding to receive and display it.
I turned my attention to Institute City, and promptly tore through the databases, searching through BAWS archives for MT standard designs. For the most part, changes in that particular field had been qualitative rather than paradigm, which, if I was lucky, meant that their programs hadn't changed so much that the message couldn't be received.
I found the most modern version I could, which I was acutely aware was still twenty-ish years out of date, and promptly scanned through it.
Oh god there's so many ease-of-use features fuck fuck fuck
I disabled them as fast as I could, paring the entire program down to the absolutely necessary bones -and nothing more- before testing it out. It still expected specific signals, so I quickly had to map the equivalent of keyboard input out and give them new assignments on a virtual peripheral -fuck this code- then tested that out. That got me 'typing', but I then had to get started on the actual program interface so that instead of just 'typing' in messages, I could actually send them-
They were barely ten minutes out by the time I got the thing working... Hopefully.
"I sure hope this works, otherwise we're going to play a very weird and dangerous game of charades."
Program open, 'type', send...
"Greetings, visitors to Grid 097. If you are receiving this, please identify yourselves."