-xXx-
It had taken her legions sooner than she expected to answer her new orders, and while she'd always loathed the lesser demons for their lack of backbones, this time she was glad for their swift obedience.
The possessed had opened up gateways around the gore nests, using them as focal points to transport her demons to the staging point. There had been delays getting the demons in the destroyed nest's quadrant into action, but that was to be expected, and the few remaining forces that Andreas hadn't suffered were hardly worth the effort anyway.
She had watched from the rooftops as her legions amassed, filling the concrete streets with their red bodies. The occasional brawl cropped up here and there from the fodder, but that was to be expected from such a brittle, yet numerous force.
By the time the portals had dispensed the last of her ranks, she was gazing upon an army, their battle-hungry faces surveying her just as she surveyed them. It was a far cry from the cosmic battleforces she'd been granted during her first conquest of the continent, before the Dark Lord had decided to whisk portion after portion of her resources for more 'important' campaigns, but that did not detract from its substantiality.
Just shy of ten thousand demons had free run of Spain, and with little else to do but to fight amongst themselves, they had leapt at the chance for action. Imps made up the vanguard, while a mix of mancubus', cacodemons, knights and revenants made up the backbone.
The former would soak up as much gunfire as possible while the latter spearheaded the siege. Hell had used such a stratagem across many worlds, and had proven equal parts effective and reliable, Sharrya had a backup plan all the same.
She was not alone up on those rooftops. Flanking her were two of the biggest demonic castes ever spawned from Hell, towering over even Sharrya. Their humanoid bodyplans were pungent to look at. One leg was entirely synthetic, while the other was a glistening tan colour, the wrinkled flesh sleaving over three ivory toes. The mechanics from the leg spread up into the crotch area, where circuit boards and thick wiring veined into the torso, hooked up to sockets and pumps that had replaced most of the organs. Their ribcages were five layers deep, visible through rips in it's sinewy flesh.
Like its legs, one of its pink arms was whole, tipped with four clawed fingers, while the other had been replaced with a missile launcher with four rotating barrels. Any fraction of movement from them, even just a flex of its claws, was followed by a whir of motors. If Sharrya were to tear a gash through its fleshy parts, she doubted she'd see very much that hadn't been replaced with metallic counterparts.
Not that she would entertain such thoughts lightly. Cyberdemons were cruel, sadistic, and blessed by the Hell-gods themselves. It was only through the Dark Lord's orders that they served Sharrya as her bodyguard. Without such prestigious orders, they would have strung her corpse on the cathedral's walls and usurped her operation long ago.
"Neither of you are to engage until the imps have done their duty," Sharrya said to them, the cyberdemon's long, upswept horns slicing the air as they turned their flat faces down on her. The shape of their features reminded her of bats. "Once the gate opens, or the field collapses, whichever is first, only then you may commence the slaughter."
The one on the left nodded his horned head, while the other grunted. The two monsters followed her silently as she stepped between them, moving for the far side of the rooftop. A winged imp was perched like a gargoyle nearby, his arrowhead tail swishing back and forth at her approach.
"Give the order to your kin," Sharrya said. "On this day, we march for glorious battle."
The creature nodded, its leathery wings flapping hard as he took off like a missile, streaking over the heads of the army and toward the rearguard. Sharrya took up the demon's place, pausing to admire the view for a little longer before stepping into the open air.
Her cybernetic armour was layered with shock absorbers, but she would have survived the four-storey-tall drop without it. Electric whines cut through the air as her heavy frame crashed to the street, spiderweb cracks blooming from her hooves.
Panicked squawks rose from the surrounding crowd of imps and revenants that had gathered at the foot of her procession, scrambling to get clear as the cyberdemons fell down to either side of her, their prosthetic legs falling to kneeling positions as they absorbed the fall's impact. The crashes they made as they hit the ground were like two miniature earthquakes.
Sharrya moved through the crowd without delay, the demons parting around her. Before her lay the streets of the city, some of the blocks obliterated under artillery and weapons fire, a vague sense of recognition passing her mind as she examined the walled streets. She must have walked this place at some earlier point in her conquest, though the details escaped her in favour off the present.
Her chest surged with passion as her demons joined her march, the sounds of their cries for bloodshed muffled through her helmet. This was what she was born to do. Her at the spearhead, her elite guard behind her, and her legions behind them, their desire for conquest enunciated by every step. Leading a standing force was a euphoria like no other, it was the one thing that gave her purpose, and it had been denied to her for so long that she had become lazy, content, weak.
No longer.
Now she had structure, she had a goal, and with those she would not be stopped. She would break down the Rallypoint's walls, secure her human, and prove to the Dark Lord she didn't need all those resources he had taken from her. It was all so very simple.
Though she imagined Andreas would find some way to complicate things. That was all well and good – the challenge would erase all her congealing faults – and she welcomed, no, insisted that he try and stop her. It was more fun that way.
For the next half hour, the stomp of hooves and feet cut through the pervasive silence of the decaying city, her legion trailing along in her wake. She kept her eyes forward the whole way, though in her mind she could see the way they flowed through the ruins after her. They crept through every road and sidewalk, climbing the broken windows and moving over every crater with a disciplined ease. Her army was like a giant cloud of gas, flowing through the destruction unhindered as it zeroed in on her target.
The tips of the Rallypoint's walls rose into view before long, the sun setting on the horizon directly behind it, the domed rooftops inside the complex glinting in the light. The great guns on the corners were set in their resting positions, meaning no forewarning had reached the defenders about her oncoming force.
A stew of intermingling feelings settled in her stomach as the lower ends of the walls became visible, and she beheld the fortress in its entirety. It felt like an age had passed since she'd last laid eyes on the Rallypoint, and its image brought forward all those sequestered memories she'd rather kept locked away.
She remembered a section of the eastern wall had sunken away, splitting the whole section in twain as the giant slice of metal had fallen into a recess. Thick lines of humans dressed in everyday clothes were rushing through the gap in the wall, columns of tanks with their treads lined with sandbags forming two protective lines to either side. They filled the air with fire and tungsten as her legions gave pursuit, tides of demons slamming into the first layers of the point-defence. Her minions were endless, but their bullets were not, and the lack of ammo and her personal oversight of the offence ensured steady progress towards the gate.
She remembered one of the humans screaming strings of numbers into his radio, and it was only a little later on she realised those had been coordinates. The fools had called down artillery right on their positions, but she supposed that wasn't really a foolish decision. They were overrun, and were dead the moment the gate had begun to close.
The terrible racket as the sixty-meter-tall gate closed had been terrible, rising up at just a slow enough pace that if she pushed her forces enough, they might be able to climb over before it closed too much. The tanks and the soldiers had delayed them too much, however, and by the time her legion had cut down the last vehicle, the gate had risen over thirty meters. She remembered about eight imps had made the climb anyway, but only four of them had managed to reach the top lip, their clawed toes the last thing she saw of them before scrabbling over the gate. They had likely been shot a few moments later on the way back down the other side, but she had to respect the dedication.
That had been the only time she'd seen the interior, and when she tried to remember what lay inside, all that came to was an explosion of green.
She had given the order to fall back, both because trying to scale those walls was suicide, and because the oncoming bombardment was battering the masses. There had been a rise in the Earth about half a mile off from the fortress, and she had used the vantage to analyse the grounds for the follow-up attacks she was already planning that day.
She stood on that vantage now, one hoof slightly raised above the other as she perched on the slope, eyes scanning the section of wall she knew to be a gate. It was camouflaged into the wall very well, but to her trained eyes she could just about spot the grooves running down the barrier from top to bottom. She had made the mistake of splitting up her forces to hit the three sides of the Rallypoint accessible by land, but now the true place to strike was more obvious than ever.
"Legions of Hell!" she roared, her voice booming across the immediate area, her voice carrying in the still air. "For too long have these humans cowered right under our noses, mocking us with their very existence. That ends today! They are marked for Sin, and you shall be the ones to do the branding. Go! Cauterize this scab once and for all! Go!"
The legions had taken off before her speech had even ended, the frenzied imps and groaning possessed sprinting and leaping into the no-mans-land dividing the ruins from the Rallypoint. The heavier castes hurried to keep up with them, tiding across the barren ground in a mad dash.
Craters tens of meters in diameter pockmarked the terrain, but her legions flowed between the obstructs without delay, fuelled on by their hatred for the hiding mortals. Sharrya wished to join them, to rip through those walls with her own two hands, but she tempered her excitement. She could not afford to be impulsive.
The imps crossed the first hundred meters unmolested, thousands of them breaking cover from the ruins and pouring into the open. She thought she could see figures up on the walls, perhaps those were lookouts trying to raise the alarm.
On the second hundred meters, even more movement lined the fortress, followed by a distinct clanking of metal that carried over the distance. Sharrya watched as the heavy gun emplacement on the left corner began to shift, its motors cranking as it rotated on its housing. The quad-cannons turned from the skies to the ground, adjusting its sights across the charging imps. The gun on the right corner mirrored its movements.
There was no delay, the great guns opened up on the encroaching horde, each barrel erupting in fire and filling the air with thunder. The canons fired in slow succession, first the two on the left, then the two on the right, the muzzles rocking back to adjust for the heavy recoil.
At this range, there was no travel time. Each payload threw up great clumps of dirt and ash, obliterating tens of demons with each shot and sending dozens more scattering. Body parts mingled with the tossed Earth, showering down on the imps who attempted to make their charge more erratic in the hopes of becoming less easy targets.
The fort guns walked their sights across the charge, explosions of detritus travelling down the imps as though unseen landmines were cooking off. Not even the full scope of possessed had stepped foot into the killing field, but Sharrya didn't need the height to realise the spearhead was taking heavy casualties.
Heavy, but not unexpected, though that correction did little to quell the troubled pang in her heart.
The guns turned back the other way, shaving off the demonic ranks ten layers at a time. No imp or possessed change course, as going back or seeking cover would only prolong their time in the no-mans-land. The guns had a wide firing arc, but their size meant they couldn't get a line of sight directly at the wall's base, but it was almost two full minutes of evisceration before an imp made it through.
He was only a red speck at this distance, but he stood out against the fort, and he began to hurry up the vertical face, claws and toes digging into the metal for purchase. When he was halfway up the wall, gunfire erupted from between the buttresses, a stream of bullets sending the imp careening into freefall.
More imps were breaking through to the wall, their numbers reduced to the dozens, but they followed in the imp's example regardless, scurrying up the metal like questing ants. The corner guns disembowelled the charge all the while, the tips of their barrels glowing with heat.
The cyberdemon on her left growled, a sound that made even her uneasy, and she had travelled far more nightmarish places than Hell. He made to step forward, but Sharrya held up a hand.
"Not even you could withstand those heavy guns," she warned. "Victory relies on your discretion, so get a hold of yourself. Your time will come soon."
The cyberdemon bristled, staring into her soul with those beady eyes, but it seemed to decide a fight wasn't worth it. She had to be firm with these monsters, it was the only way to keep them in check. She could relate to its growing impatience, however. It was not easy watching her legion get torn to shreds while she stood safely at the far rear.
Her troubles were quickly put aside, however, when the flap of dozens of wings reached her ears. She turned to look behind her, her spirits soaring as winged imps swarmed the skies, their calloused bodies weaving between the skyscrapers. They banked over her army like locusts, rising into the air on their spread, veiny wings. Their number was countless, the fliers resembling a blob if one unfocused their eyes.
The swarm careened across the battlefield, their flight path curving high above the Rallypoint. Such a tightly packed aerial body would have been chewed up by flak rounds, but the Rallypoint's guns were focused on the ground forces.
The gun on the right attempted to correct this critical mistake, but the winged demons were already halfway across the battlefield, angling their bodies head-first as they swooped into a collective dive. They rained down atop the walls, slicing human figures apart through sheer momentum.
The winged legion fell upon and between the buttresses, taking the posted humans by surprise. Sharrya could see humans being tossed from the battlements, others being gripped by the shoulders and hoisted into the sky by pairs of imps, bringing them to soaring heights and then dropping them to grisly fates. The attention of the scampering imps was relieved as the fliers sowed chaos, but the true clause of the attack was more than a simple distraction.
She was too far away to make out details, but the corner gun that had turned to face the fliers fired off three more salvos, and then abruptly stopped. She could see flapping wings all around the weapon, her demons flocking to the emplacement like moths. She could imagine them ripping into its mechanical guts, slicing the components with their claws, sending fireballs into its exposed logic circuits, perhaps tearing apart the compartment of its gunner crew. Whether it was any of these things or none, it mattered not, the massive gun had ceased firing. Its counterpart continued to walk its devastating barrages across the ground, but the loss of the gun was a significant stepping stone.
The winged legion had roosted upon the battlements in full, choking the fortress' immediate air with their lithe bodies. The mortals on the walls turned their weapons to the skies, filling the air with bullets, clipping tens of demons in each volley, but such casualties were acceptable with such sheer numbers.
"You should have given yourself up, Andreas," she muttered. "Now look at what your pride has wrought upon your friends. If it were only so… what's that noise?" she demanded, darting her gaze from side to side.
There had been a tremendous thunk a moment ago, as though a thunderhead had set off nearby, yet the only storms overhead were those of the demonic quality. The sound carried on into a series of small clicks echoing across the battlefield, as though great cogs were grinding together.
When her gaze fell upon the Rallypoint, her question was answered. A portion of the wall was lower than the rest, sliding away into a gap in the ground, the imps caught on the moving piece flinging themselves clear. It was the gate, blooming open with a dramatic slowness, the realisation making her tilt her head thoughtfully.
That was ahead of schedule, and not at all part of the plan. The winged imps were to target the guns, then the field generator. Opening the gate was unnecessary and dangerous, but not unwelcome. Perhaps she should give the imps more credit.
The demons that had made it through the anti-air gun's blanket fire gathered eagerly around the foot of the gate, forgoing their climbing attempts now that they could simply walk through in a few moments. A second echoing bang chased the first as the gate lowered a quarter of the way, the weight of the construct palpable in its gentle descent.
Sharrya's confidence tapered into uncertainty, when she looked over the gate's threshold and saw something standing behind it. First appeared a metal head as big as a house, attached to a robotic chest piece, its surface bristled with guns and missile hardpoints. It had a giant gun for one arm, and a fist that could clobber a cyberdemon for the other. Its towering bulk was considerable at this distance, but to the demons by the gate, it must have looked gigantic.
The giant robot didn't wait for the gate to fully open, lunging one of its giant metal legs over the withdrawing obstruction when there was room. A cluster of gathered possessed stood in stupid wonder as the foot came down and crushed a dozen of them beneath its heel, Sharrya feeling the impact even from her vantage.
Seeing their brethren squashed spurred the rest of the legion into action, mancubus' opening up with their arm cannons, hell knights galloping forward to close distance. The battlesuit bent at the waist, gears clicking as it presented its chest to the horde, the automatic guns on its stomach opening up on everything that moved. Missiles scribbled through the air as the pods on its neck and chest activated, the payloads screaming through the air. Dozens of explosions shook the Earth as the ranks were carpeted with ordinance. The mancubus' high-powered energy guns didn't so much as scratch its pain, and the hell knights were kicked away like pests before the machine.
"What are you two waiting for?!" Sharrya exclaimed at her bodyguards, who watched the destruction with fascination. "An invitation? Get your metal asses down there and destroy that thing, you useless imbeciles!"
The cyberdemons grunted, sliding down the slope on their steel legs, taking off into the fray at a run. Sharrya turned her attention back to the battlesuit, wondering how such a giant thing could have slipped her notice. Had it been delivered to them, or built on-site? This must be mankind's answer to the titan's of Hell, and by the way it chewed through her legion, it had the firepower to back it up. If only she had access to her own titan, none of this would be necessary, couldn't the Dark Lord see that?
She put such thoughts aside, complaining now of all times would do less than nothing. The battlesuit was pushing her legion away from the wall, back into range of the anti-aircraft gun, which was still operational, even as her winged imps continued to swarm the emplacement.
She had to resist the urge to wring her hands as the towering cyberdemons closed in on the robot – if it even was a robot, and not manned by a small crew of some sort. The cyberdemons pushed aside the throngs of imps and knights, stepping through a firing line that a squad of mancubus' had set up. The battlesuit turned to face this new threat, ignoring every other demon even as its hull was battered and clawed by a hundred smaller targets.
The cyberdemon's brought their robotic arm launchers to bear, the battlesuit presenting its giant arm cannon in kind. Aside from the glowing, electric rings running down the exposed parts of the barrel, there was no telegraphed attack, and little to no windup. The battlesuit levelled its cannon at one of the cyberdemons, and there was a flash of light so bright that Sharrya had to shield her eyes from the oncoming blindness.
A terrible, electric crack carried through the sky, so loud she would have heard it if she had been sitting in her cathedral at the time. When the flash cleared, Sharrya peered between her fingers, blinking her eyes back into vision as she observed the fortress grounds.
One of her cyberdemons was ravaged from the chest up, arms and head reduced to a pile of mush far behind it. Its counterpart watched in a rare expression of trepidation as the bodiless legs fell like two decapitated trees.
Her heart sank. One of her most cherished warriors, obliterated before it could even fire off a single rocket.
The battlesuit moved its arm cannon aside, wisps of smoke rising from the barrel. It was obvious that it couldn't fire the devastating weapon in quick succession, but she dreaded the time it took to fire again. It could be five minutes, or one minute for all she knew.
At least the other cyberdemon wasn't privy to being troubled by the display of power, the demon using its robotic leg to leap into a sprint. It charged towards the suit's leg, the machine swiping down at the demon with its regular arm, but the intended swat missed, the cyberdemon shoving its synthetic arm into the suit's leg.
It pulled a chunk of mechanics from the hull, sparks flying from the mechanical wound. The suit tried to stomp on it like a bug, but the demon easily moved aside in time, the movement telegraphed. The cyberdemon prepared its launcher, firing off a cluster of rockets that crashed into the battlesuit's left thigh, explosions rippling along the limb.
Despite the battlesuit's attention now focused on the robotic demon, the weapons on its chest and shoulders continued to fire independently, its guns and missile pods cutting down swathes of the demons trying to support their heavier counterpart. None of them survived long enough to help. What was worse, the opened gate had revealed a barricaded entryway lined with sandbags and machine-gun nests, dozens of barrels poking through little murder holes lining the fortifications.
Plasma and bullets alike fired off from this new avenue of attack, felling any demon trying to circumvent the battling titan's and get inside the fortress. No portals were opening up either, which meant her winged legion was also facing setbacks.
"Maykyr's curse it all," Sharrya muttered, adjusting her shoulder pad as she jumped from her vantage point. "Must I do everything myself?"
The ground level rose up to meet her, Sharrya outstretching her armoured legs as she slid down the incline. She was moving into range of the anti-air gun, but her cybernetic armour should prove invaluable should it decide to make her its next target.
She ran around the craters, stretches of cadavers lining the paths, some of them two or three bodies deep. Yet more were joining the charge, both behind and in front of her, the sight of their leader reinvigorating the troops, not that morale was ever a matter of doubt. Such charges like these were common for her kind.
She stepped nimbly through the legions, the battlesuit drawing closer. The autocannons on its front were harrying the cyberdemon with endless streams of rounds, yet they did little to the demon's reinforced exoskeleton. She was almost there, just a few moments more…
In the next instant, she was flying off to the left, arcing clear over a crater ten meters across. Ash and dirt splashed against her visor as she landed in a heap, the pain in her side swimming up into her skull. She shook her head, and looked up to see she had been flung straight towards the Rallypoint wall, coming short by a few meters.
On her hands and knees, she turned towards where she had been running at full tilt, blinking when a second battlesuit was striding down the crater after her. It was far smaller than the one fighting the cyberdemon, taller than Sharrya but not by very much. Its chest was riddled with guns like its bigger cousin, and the right arm transformed into a weapon at the elbow.
Gears and engines rumbled as the suit stomped over the crater lip, holding its arms at the ready as Sharrya pulled herself to her feet.
It planted its clawed feet in the ash not ten meters away, her eyes drawn to the glass canopy situated on its upper torso. A crackled of static produced from some unseen radio transmitter, and although the voice that followed was synthetic, garbled with a tinny quality, Sharrya recognised the accent anywhere.
"Baroness Sharrya," Andreas greeted.
-xXx-
He had expected the gates to be flooded with the demonic once it was opened, but the gen one was giving Hell a run for its money. One of its weapons was always in use, be that the missile pods, or the chainguns, or the shoulder turrets, it was always dealing with a threat at any given time, and that disappointment he'd felt when Valeria told him he wouldn't be using it swelled up inside him again.
The feeling was quickly nulled when Eva gave the order he was clear to advance. He cleared the sandbags stacked against the gate's inner side, bullets streaking all around him as the soldiers behind him put down cover fire.
"Remember what I told you," Eva warned into his helmet. She still had her drone, though it was safely floating somewhere back inside the base. "Mind your foot spacing, and don't forget your right hand is not a hand."
"I got it," Andreas replied, and then promptly forgot as he backhanded an oncoming revenant with the particle cannon. Being inside the mech was like stepping into an exoskeleton. He still had to move his hands and feet to manoeuvre the suit, but the motors supporting the hand and foot grips made such efforts use up barely any strength. The contrast between such easy movements and the heaviness of the mech made it almost feel like he was floating.
He was on support duty for the gen one, their crew's channel linked up to his mech's speakers. He could hear about six voices calling out targets and adjusting parameters, their voices cool despite the onslaught their battlesuit was taking part of. They didn't look like they needed support to Andreas, although the cyberdemon was becoming a pain in their prosthetic rear as it continued to eat up all the bullets they sent their way.
Andreas prepared his particle cannon, but as he took aim, a far greater target presented itself. There was a flash of reflective blue on the far side of the skirmish, and Andreas spotted an armoured Baron sprinting into the fray. Sharrya was wearing some sort of combat suit he'd never seen before, its blue plating glinting in the afternoon sun. It covered her from ankles to neck, even her horns were protected by a conforming helmet with a glowing eyepiece serving as the visor. She must have taken his challenge more literally than he thought if she was busting out her best toys.
He retracted his cannon, stepping round the larger mech and making a beeline for her, timing his interception like a quarterback making for the ball. He thought she might notice him, but her gaze was fixed squarely on the duelling mech, and he crashed into her like a freight train.
The internal lining of the cockpit was made from resilient stuff, but the mech still rang like a gong around him, the noise drilling into his eardrums. Sharrya launched off the ground and sailed across a nearby crater, crashing into the dirt on the other side.
The gruelling sounds of gunfire, both demonic and mortal, morphed into the backdrop as Andreas moved his mech around the obstruct, pausing with a dozen odd meters spacing him from the Baroness. There was a control panel next to the grip on his right arm, and he flicked the one that activated the mech's communicator.
"Baroness Sharrya," he announced, Sharrya glancing up from where she lay. He expected her gaze to be full of malice, but of course there was a shit-eating grin below her visor, her eyes no doubt reflect her humour.
"Seargent Andreas," Sharrya replied, but her tone wasn't aloof. In fact, it was the exact opposite. "You said you would 'shit on my parade' as you so eloquently put it, and you have not disappointed me. Nice suit, by the way."
"Was about to say the same thing to you," Andreas said, gesturing with the cannon arm.
"You like it? I wore it just for you," she cooed, propping herself on her plated arms and presenting her breast to him. She looked like a yoga teacher holding a pose. The armour was slim and conformed to her curvaceous form, and he knew from the way she'd been running that its weight wasn't a hindrance on her, whatever alloy it was constructed of must be very light. "I only wear it when confronting my most challenging of opponents, and I consider you to be among their number."
"You look good in blue. It'd bring out your eyes if you ditched the helmet."
"Oh, Seargent, always with the flattery. Perhaps challenging was the wrong word just now…"
She raised herself up, nursing the shoulder she had landed on. Her eyes flicked over his mechanical shoulder, and Andreas was about to dog her about using such lowly methods of distraction, when his proximity sensors warned of three demons moving up behind him, breaking off from the main battle.
"Leave him!" Sharrya roared, Andreas twisting his mech to see three startled imps giving her strange looks. She tossed a fireball at them when they didn't move. "Away with you, he's mine."
The demons scampered, Andreas chuckling under his breath. "Sure you don't want their help, Baroness? I'm not one for boasting, but Pilot Andreas hits a lot harder than Regular Andreas."
"They are needed elsewhere," Sharrya replied, her meaning obvious. He could hear the gen one mech stomping around the Rallypoint gates, endless streams of ordinance firing from its torso.
"I'll say. I bet you and your whole legion soiled yourselves when that big fucker came walking out of the gate."
"Your robot toys won't save you, even with the aid of surprise," she replied. Her tone was offhand, but there had been the briefest hint of hesitation in her voice. "But none of that matters now. The last we spoke, you said you were not going to run any longer. I hope you aren't planning on forfeiting now, of all times?"
"Why do you think I came charging over like a bull?" Andreas spread his mechanical legs wide, just like Eva and the foundry engineers had trained him. "You wanted a showdown, now you've got one."
"Yes…" Sharrya growled, adjusting her footing as she dropped into her own combat stance. "Just your augmented strength, versus my augmented strength. No more running, no more distractions."
They both stood defiant against each other, a moment passing where nothing else seemed to exist but themselves. Sharrya reached behind her and produced a spiked mace, the handle longer than his entire torso. She beckoned to him with it, and in that moment, her shiny armour caught in the last embers of the sun and bathed in fury, Sharrya looked as beautiful as she was deadly.
"Come then, Seargent, this rivalry has gone on long enough. Let us put an end to things."
Andreas seized the moment, bringing his particle cannon to bear. The barrel became wreathed in blue light as the energies were brought to life, his finger pressuring the trigger. He was warned there would be a slight delay in the cannon, but not slight enough for the Baroness.
Her arm flung out, the one holding the mace. Andreas blinked when the spiked ball dislocated from the handle, arcing across the space between them like the deadliest basketball. It crashed into the joint at his mechanical elbow, close to the base of the cannon, the mech twisted away by the forceful blow. The arm went wide, Andreas' blood freezing as the barrel swerved onto the Rallypoint wall on his immediate right. He let the trigger go, the barrel losing its strange glow. That had been too damned close.
A blur of movement occupied one half of his canopy, Sharrya closing in on him rapidly on her long legs. Rattling chains chased her every stride, and he noted that the mace was still connected to the handle by a link. Sharrya's form bloomed until she was right on top of him, throwing all her weight into her shoulder as the two collided.
The mech left trails meters long as it skidded through the ash, the hydraulics wheezing in complaint against Sharrya's weight. He could feel his world spin as his centre mass was thrown off kilter, Andreas teetering like a bowling pin. With his left arm, he gripped Sharrya's bulky shoulder with his metallic fingers, using her for both balance and leverage to drive his leg into her stomach.
Her grinning face filling his vision turned into an expression of pain, steel meeting steel in an echoing crash. He made to backhand her with the cannon, but she planted a hoof into his chest and dodged away.
She thumbed a mechanism on the handle, and the mace-turned-flail began to retract, the chain links slithering along the ground, the mace leaving a long furrow. With a snarl, Sharrya twirled on the spot, handle held out in front of her like she was a hammer throw athlete. The flail whistled through the air, too fast to keep track of until its bulk slammed into Andreas' shoulder.
Even though he was protected by inches of steel, the metal crumpled inward in a visible dint, a critical warning system blaring an alarm through the cockpit.
He let out a trying grunt as he seized the chain links in his fist, pulling it in the hopes of throwing her off-balance, but Sharrya was charging towards him. He dodged out of her path, letting the chain fall from his grip, pushing out a leg into her knee. His leg collided with a satisfying crunch, Sharrya stumbling into the wall hard enough to leave a dent.
Before she could recover, Andreas darted in behind her, grabbing her by one of her branching horns. The motors in his arms groaning, he drove her helmeted head into the wall of steel, the impact of the blow travelling up his arm.
Her head lolled as he pulled his limb back, then rammed it into the wall a second time, a crack spitting down the middle of her helmet.
On the third swing, Sharrya came to, her elbow swinging into the cockpit glass. A grainy crunch was quickly followed by a pair of tendrils blooming from a point on his lower right vision, not thick enough to blind him, but enough to obscure parts of it.
"Not bad," Sharrya growled, leading with her flail as she whirled on him. He blocked the attack with his forearm, the impact knocking him back. "Your technology is formidable, even if it is not true strength…"
She grabbed up the chain, swinging the flail in lazy loops as she sized him up, searching for an opening. Andreas activated his weapon systems, the sound of priming guns reaching his ears as the guns on his torso powered on. Muzzle flashes left yellow afterimages as he opened up on Sharrya, the Baroness covering her face on reflex. Like bullets ricocheting in a spaghetti Western, the rounds pinged off her cybernetic armour noisily, even the fifty calibre bullets rendered useless against her protective layer, but he knew firsthand that she couldn't be brought down by conventional means.
The burst of gunfire gave him enough time to dart forward, clocking Sharrya across the chin before she could block. He followed up with a brutal jab to her gut, the raw power of the mech the only thing allowing him to knock the wind from her lungs, the Baroness expelling her breath in a wheeze.
Andreas delivered another swipe to her helmet, but Sharrya recovered, grabbing him by his metal wrist. She dropped her flail, reaching down with her other hand to grab his shoulder. It looked like she was about to break his arm, but even she wasn't strong enough to do that, was she?
He tried to break her grip, batting her with the oversized particle cannon, but she shrugged off the swipe, Andreas's eyes going wide as a sense of weightlessness settled over him. His suit had to weigh upwards of sixty tons, but he could have sworn he felt his feet leave the ground as Sharrya hoisted him to the side, tossing him away like a sack of bricks.
His bulk worked against him, and Andreas was staring at the sky once his mech settled, the first few night stars fading into the blue canvas. His chin touched his neck as he glanced own the length of the cockpit, seeing Sharrya stoop to retrieve her flail.
She thumbed the mechanism again, and the chain grew in length, Sharrya holding it in both hands over her head. She brought the flail down on where he was lying, leaving Andreas only a moment to roll onto his shoulder and let his side take the brunt of the attack.
As his mech shook, another warning appeared on the canopy, this one telling him there were malfunctions in the joint circuits in the arm. If he took any more hits like that, or she'd disable him.
She threw the flail into the air, the chains curling like a whip into the sky. It hung motionless at its peak, and then Sharrya gave the chain a tug and it fell right down again. This time it smashed into one of the machine-guns on his chest, the barrel exploding in a shroud of plastic.
Andreas snagged the flail that had come to rest on the canopy glass – another glass crack forming beneath its bulk – and yanked it hard. Sharrya snarled as she came stumbling into range of his leg, his metal joint connecting with her face in a loud smack. She threw her hands to her mouth, and when her fingers came back, the tusk growing from the left corner of her lips like an ivory stalagmite was broken.
Andreas twisted the mech's legs one way, his torso remaining as level as a gyroscope. He used his knees to raise the mech from the ash, keeping the arms out straight, just as he'd been taught to do should he lose his balance.
Andreas primed his remaining chaingun, but he didn't fire on the Baroness. He lenaed forward, squaring the sights over the flail, severing the middle of the chain with a thunder of gunfire. She gave the handle a questioning look, then discarded it.
"Give it up, Sharrya," Andreas breathed, his chest rising and falling as though he'd just run a marathon.
"Now why would I do that?" she snarled, spitting a wad of blood between her feet. "Your bastion is overwhelmed, and my legions are unstoppable."
"You sure about that?" he asked, kicking the flail away. "Turn around."
She narrowed her eyes, then glanced over her shoulder, suspicion turning to shock. While the two of them had been occupied with eachother, the battle raging around them had developed. The skirmish between the gen one mech and the cyberdemon was the focal point of the battle, and one side had emerged victorious.
Sharrya's trembling hands turned into fists, the Baroness quickly returning her attention to him. She seemed to meet his eyes even through the canopy. "This changes nothing," she snapped. "The cyberdemons were a distraction, and their usefulness ended once you came to me."
"The mech's going to tear your legion's a new asshole," Andreas replied. "You're not getting into the Rallypoint."
"Damn the Rallypoint! Damn the cyberdemons, damn the Maykyrs, damn everything! All of that is beyond the scope of our bout, and I care not for any of it."
Andreas thought of ancient Roman gladiators, basing their whole lives off glory and honour, and thought Sharrya fit that bill pretty well.
Sharrya voiced a war cry as she rushed him down, the sound chilling his blood. He raised his arm to block, but she feinted, harrying his canopy with a series of swift, savage punches. The glass creaked in protest, more cracks worming up the canopy as Sharrya pushed all her strength into the attacks. It was becoming harder and harder to see.
Andreas raised his knee into her gut, then backhanded her across the jaw, the demoness stumbling away in a daze. He grabbed her two horns like they were bike handles, then brought his forehead to hers, pulling her against the metal bars looping over the top of the canopy. The headbutt sent her swaying, that yellow eye-slot in her helmet shattering to pieces, its glow pulsing on and off like a fried lightbulb.
He thought her vision might be impaired, but she came right back at him without pause, delivering a swift kick to his knee joint. He buckled under the blow, failing to dodge away as her fist came pounding into the glass. He could hear it threatening to give, and when she struck him a second time, it did.
Shards rained over his face and chest, clinking off his combat armour as a small, two-inch wide hole appeared in the opaque window. Sharrya punched that spot again, and the gap grew another inch, Andreas feeling fresh air woosh into the cockpit.
Panic began to spread its roots through him, Andreas groping with his hand to shove her away, but she caught his limb in her armorued fingers, so strong that even the mech's power wasn't enough to break free. He batted at her with his particle cannon, unable to shoot her from this range, but it bounced off her spiked pauldron harmlessly. She held him like that, like he was an action figure she could pose at a whim, and her voice took on a much more surreal quality as she leered closer to the breach in the canopy, their eyes almost level.
"You're mine," she growled. "I'm going to pluck you from that toy suit and whisk you away. I wonder how the mortals would react, seeing their saviour abducted right before their very eyes."
"And I wonder," Andreas replied. "how sensitive are your eyes?"
She cocked her head as Andreas activated the floodlights topping his mech, millions of lumens worth of power shining directly into her face. The pressure on his mech released as she raised a hand to her head, failing to see Andreas readying his fist.
He pulled back his arm, bringing all the mech's power to bear in a vicious uppercut, the attack as solid as it was deadly. Andreas felt a white-hot sore travel from his hand to his bicep as his limb connected, Sharrya's head snapping at an awkward angle as she was lifted off her feet, flying for a few meters before touching back down, flipping once before she settled in the ash.
She lay there in hesitation for a handful of moments, and when she looked up she was staring down the steel barrel of his particle cannon, that blue energy coalescing over its length. She made to rise to her feet, but too late, the cannon was fully charged, a green indicator flashing on Andreas HUD.
He pulled the trigger.
A blue line connected the muzzle to the ash between her hooves, like a laser pointer, and then a white ball about three meters in diameter was drawn around the point, Sharrya' bulk disappearing behind the sphere. It grew to a brightness that slowly became unbearable, and as Andreas shut his eyes, a thunderous report like a nuclear bomb erupted all around him.
His mech was tugged backwards by the shockwave, and for a horrific moment he thought he was too close to the blast radius. The light cleared in the next second, and Andreas put such worries aside. He was still in the mech, still outside the Rallypoint, but there was one thing that had been removed.
The place he'd aimed the cannon, Sharrya included, was gone. In its stead was a neat hole in the ground, the exact same dimensions as that glowing sphere. There were wisps of smoke rising from the ash, which had taken on a look of black glass.
He'd put an end to things, as Sharrya would have said.
He turned to the side, the giant outline of the gen one drawing his gaze. With the cyberdemon's gone, it was cleaving the ranks of the lesser demons with its many guns, the Earth trembling whenever it put its railgun to use. Towards the rear ranks of the legions, some of the imps had seen their Baroness obliterated, and their morale crumbled, Andreas spotting clusters of the demonic taking to the ruins.
Not all of them were fleeing, but it was a clear tell that things were over. Their attack had failed, the mech was cleaning up the main force, and their leader was dead.
A strange feeling settled when that last one reinforced itself in his head, Andreas staring back at the new crater in mild disbelief. All these days of fighting, all his interactions with the Baroness, and now it was all over, in a single blink. It seemed rather anticlimactic, and a little disappointing, but perhaps not for the right reasons.
For a long while he just stood there, the motors in the mech hissing as the adrenaline from the fight bled away to leave him tired. He expected to be relieved that his mission was finally over, that the Baron was gone, yet relief was the last thing on his mind, he realised.
"Seargent?" a voice called, and for a second he thought it was Sharrya, and his heart skipped for some estranged reason. "Seargent, are you well?"
A drone came floating into his view from on high, Andreas recognising it as the one Eva had borrowed. "Yeah," he replied. "Yeah, I'm fine."
"You did it," Eva said, patched into his helmet's communicator. "I watched the whole thing. You did it, Andreas! I've already sent word to the Commander, she should be more than happy of the news. With the high command gone, the attack is doomed to fail."
"Yeah," he said again. He was still looking at the smoking crater.
"Seargent? Are you sure you are well?" Eva asked, hovering closer. "Your voice patterns are analogous to distress, but you're not critically injured. What's wrong?"
"No, nothing's wrong," he said. Eva tilted her drone, like a parent who's just caught their kid out on a lie.
"Andreas, come on, it's me. I read your emotions almost any day, I can tell when the cat's caught your tongue."
"It's just… she's gone," Andreas relented. "You know?"
"Yes…" she replied, dragging the word into another syllable. "I do in fact, know that to be the case. Why are acting so weird?"
"Well, I thought… I thought things would go differently."
"Andreas, you shot her with a particle cannon. Everything caught in the blast is reduced on the atomic level. There was only one way that could have gone."
"I thought she'd, I don't know, get out of the way or something."
Eva hovered closer, scrutinising him with that single lens. Like Sharrya, she seemed to know exactly where his face was. Maybe the canopy wasn't all that opaque after all.
"Seargent," she snapped. "You can't be seriously…. Are you upset that she's gone?"
"What? No," he said, but the denial didn't come out all that well.
"Yes you are! Andreas, Hell is mankind's greatest evil, and Sharrya was one of their top generals! How can her death make you feel anything but joy?"
"She wasn't evil," he replied, Eva scowling at him. "Alright, maybe there was a little evil in her, but she's far off from being a monster. Monsters don't show mercy, and she did that to me several times before."
"Be that as it may, she tried to destroy the Rallypoint, its people included. This isn't to mention all the things she's done to Spain before our arrival, plus whatever other crimes she's committed on these other worlds she's mentioned. She had to answer for all that."
"I… I suppose so," he relented, but that feeling still weighed in his chest, one that wasn't quite disappointment, but very close to it.
"I'm sorry, Andreas," Eva said. "I know she meant something to you – even though I cannot comprehend why this is – but what's done is done. You saved a lot of people by bringing her down."
That cheered him up somewhat, and he brought up his argumented hand, Eva responding by extending her claw and slapping it.
"We should report our success to the Commander firsthand," Eva said. "I'm sure she-"
"Ooohhhh that'll leave a mark..."
"Did you say something, Seargent?"
Andreas turned to the source of the voice, which had come from the particle cannon's crater. He realised he that was wrong, it had come from beyond it, where a deep trench furrowed into the ground beyond in a long gash, following the curve of the Rallypoint's corner section.
The trench was around ten meters at its lowest point, and as he stood upon the lip, he saw something blue odwn there, and it didn't take a genius to know what it was.
"Oh come on!" Eva complained. "She lived through that, too! How?"
Andreas supposed his aim with the cannon had fallen just short enough she could get out of its range, though it seemed she hadn't gone unscathed. The front of her chestplate was completely gone, a giant burn mark bloomed beneath her breasts. Her hands were charred black, a couple of her claws and fingers missing, and just like the ash, smoke was trailing from her cybernetic armour.
His approach brought the Baroness out of her fugue, one of her ruined hands reaching up to her head. Her helmet was cracked all over, and she ripped it off with a kind of lazy patience, exposing her snarling features. She let the helmet roll away, where it settled by her ankle, Sharrya looking up at him tiredly.
"I think… I should have taken you up on your offer, Seargent," Sharrya chuckled, but the laughter only seemed to hurt her more. "What on Hell did you hit me with?"
"Particle cannon," he said. "Supposed to destroy your atoms or some shit."
"It destroyed more than that," Sharrya said, holding up her hand and staring at the stumps she had for fingers. "Something tells me I'm not regenerating this one anytime soon."
She reclined on the slope, staring up at the heavens. "I have finally found my match," she mused. "Thirty-nine worlds it took, and you have fought for this one harder than any other. Fought very well."
"I blast you to Hell, and you still compliment me?" Andreas asked. "You are one crazy bitch, Sharrya."
"I can neither confirm nor deny that," Sharrya replied. Her eyes flicked to Eva, then to him, her arms bobbing in a shrug. "Well? What are you waiting for? End it."
"Easier said than done," Andreas replied. "You took a particle cannon like it was nothing. If that couldn't do it…"
"Oh, I'm sure a second attempt will do the trick," Sharrya said. She tapped a claw to her temple. "I may be immortal, but even I can't survive without a skull, and regenerating brain tissue is beyond my ability. So hurry up and get on with it."
Andreas stood over her, raising one robotic leg over her head. Even with the weight of a tank looming above her, there wasn't a hint of fear in her eyes. He believed her when she said that this time, she wouldn't survive such a blow, beaten and battered as she was.
"May you reclaim this Earth," Sharrya said in the following silence.
With a grunt, Andreas brought his leg down, and even when its heavy landing rumbled the ground, Sharrya didn't so much as blink. One side of her brow did quirk, however, when she turned to see the limb had pummelled the ash right beside her head.
"You've been fair with me," Andreas muttered, his mech clunking as he moved back a few steps. "Now I'll be fair with you, just this once."
"Well that was overdramatic," Sharrya said, gazing up at him in wonder. "You could have just said that instead of pretending to stomp my brains out…"
Andreas found a suitable place to stablise the mech, the joints locking
together as he activated the resting mode. Eva was doing one-eighties as she gazed from him to Sharrya, spinning like a floating top.
"If you won't kill her, Seargent, now what?" Eva asked.
"Indeed," Sharrya agreed. "What happens now? Am I free to go, wallow in my failure to best you?"
"Not quite," Andreas said. The cockpit bloomed open like two petals, splitting into two halves that opened to the left and right. The cracked canopy glass grinded and produced a few more stray splits, but it held, the mech crouching of its own accord so Andreas could hop out onto the ash.
Sharrya's eyes lingered on him for a second, her tongue snaking out to wet her lips. "Don't tell me you plan on going hand-to-hand with me? While I'd enjoy the prospect of getting my claws on you, I don't think you'd say the same."
Even reduced to her ruined state, she still summoned up the will to chuckle at him, as if him holding her life in his hands just a second ago was now a lost memory. When he disappeared behind the mech's bulk, then reappeared a moment later, he was holding something in his hands, and when her eyes darted toward it, that confident smile dropped off her mouth.
"What's that?" she asked warily, shifting in the ditch as if she'd grown uncomfortable.