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reactor online
Glen comes back into his head with a screaming headache. Thousands of echoes of his own voice are bouncing around inside his skull. His awareness resolves – he’s in Dyrnwyn’s cockpit, rising up out of a sandy wasteland. The damage control board is showing severe damage, with everything but his basic config wrecked. The surrounding battlefield is littered with burnt-out wrecks of combat equipment, all bearing the green-and-white shield of the 501st Exploratory Guards.
sensors online
Dyrnwyn tags three frames as sensor contacts. One is Echo’s Mobius; the other two are hostiles. The nearer one is of similar size to the Everests. It’s sprinting toward Dyrnwyn and Mobius, clutching a mech-scale sledgehammer. The other is farther out, an enormous Size 3 quadruped mounting a fuckoff-huge rifle. Its vents are open; it’s glowing white-hot on thermal, and Dyrnwyn is painting it with radiation warnings. Both hostile contacts also read as heavily damaged – though the EW environment is so saturated it’s impossible to be sure of anything.
weapons online
Glen moves forward, interposing Dyrnwyn between Mobius and the onrushing melee frame. Despite the heavy jamming, he’s able to lock onto the artillery mech. Dyrnwyn’s grenade racks cough out a smoke screen.
core systems nominal
The artillerist’s stance shifts as it reciprocally assesses Dyrnwyn. Sensors warn of an onboard printer spooling up, building a smart round tailored to Dyrnwyn’s defenses.
It’s too slow. Echo takes the targeting handoff and salvos his hunter-killer drones on the artillery unit. It staggers under the impacts of the heavy nexus’ swarm. An assault rifle burst finishes it off.
The hammer-wielder closes to melee, swinging wildly. This close, sensors are able to get more of a read on it. It’s biomechanical, not pure hardware. Its power source is not a conventional reactor – it’s some sort of barely-contained pulsating orb of energy. Its armor and weapon both have weird polymorphic properties. Both are adapting, respectively, to our weapons and defenses.
Echo orders Janus to capture a full combat log. The NHP illuminates a caution flag: the hostile is broadcasting corrupted 501st IFF transponder codes.
Dyrnwyn and the hostile trade blows. Dyrnwyn reels, damage indicators flashing.
Janus breaks into the comms with an initial tactical analysis. The hammer isn’t fighting smart – its targeting is algorithmic. There may not be a sentient pilot on board. It’s focusing on the closest frame, tiebreaking equal ranges with the last attacker. It’s useful data, but not enough to keep the thing from landing another catastrophic hammerblow on Dyrnwyn. Systems begin dropping offline.
Echo launches a series of combined CQB and EW attacks that leave the hammer mech’s systems compromised, degrading toward catastrophic failure. He launches Mobius away from the impending explosion. Glen orients for a fast scan of the mystery power source before firing up his own flight systems to clear the blast radius.
The hammer mech implodes. Local spacetime errors out, leaving a spherical zone of perfect nothingness. Dyrnwyn’s systems finish processing the sensor data: the power core was a paracausal dimensional annihilation engine, actively consuming space rather than matter.
Headaches start retu
discontinuity
e side of the motor pool, holding his throbbing head. He’s wearing sweat-sodden workout gear. He has just enough time to query his dataplating, which says he’s halfway through his usual morning run, before the comm systems light up with a tasking order from the chief of mission.
Mechanically, this session was a white-room combat for all three of us to get used to the system. Narratively… I think it’s the first puzzle piece.
Dyrnwyn is not all that tanky, and getting structured twice was an object lesson in not hanging out in melee.