[MFR] Chapter 64 - Aegis Monstrum

Note :

Heya. Didn't have a chapter for a bit, I honestly felt absolutely fucking awful and took a bit of a break.

Also I feel like I'm starting to burn out a bit on Manaforged Robotics, so I might switch tack to The Fallen World soon.

Chapter 64

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Workshop

Sapphiria came out of the workshop, data already pouring in from the turrets and the bots.

Six hostiles, moving fast.

She was still grabbing her plasma gun when the turrets finally pinned down one of the fast moving shapes, reducing it to shreds.

Five.

She fired. The medium power burst sent two of the abominations stumbling. One wouldn't be getting back up again, though it was still breathing, somehow. The other never got the chance as her shoulder-mounted machineguns unloaded several dozen rounds into its upper body.

Three.

Her riotbots made contact. After their tusle in the woods, she'd reprogrammed them. This wasn't low tech infantry versus infantry warfare or riot control with shield walls and battle lines. They couldn't hold their position, the enemies were faster and far more agile.

What they did have was mass and strength.

One of the monsters got slammed by the shield and straight into the ground. Sapphiria heard ribs cracking and giving way, but the thing was still clawing at the bot, right up until a second one slammed its heavily armored feet with its entire weight into its head.

The skull didn't just explode like a watermelon, like it would have for any normal animal, but physics was a stone cold bitch and the monster's neck snapped.

Two.

The militia formed into...not a spear wall, but a vague collection of pointy sticks hanging in each other's general vicinity. Miraculously enough, one of the monsters hesitated.

That split second was all the time the turrets needed to retarget.

One.

The last monster gathered to leap onto one of the turrets, and Sapphiria swore as the militia moved in, stopping her shoulder-mounted machineguns from firing.

"DAMN IT GET BA-"

The monster fell to the ground, stunned as one of her riotbots threw its mace with enough power to crush stone.

The militia fell upon it, screamin at the top of their lungs, though in terror or hatred she had no idea. Probably both.

One spear wasn't much. Two was a bit more of a problem.

Six spears repeatedly stabbing in your eye sockets was too much even with those things.

The monster shuddered, and all fell still.

Sapphiria immediately moved into the carnage, putting herself between the squishies and whatever was out there, cursing herself.

She'd shut down her active scanning, but that hadn't helped. If anything, it had been a curse, the turrets and bots' inferior systems unable to penetrate the enemy's stealth, or even realize they were coming.

The AI activated her sensors.

"Holy shit, what hap-" Said Ramina, stumbling out of the workshop, only to shut up as Sapphiria raised her fist.

The junkbots reloaded as the riotbots took up combat position.

One solid contact, moving in.

And that one wasn't stealthed.

The AI hesitated, and prepared her gauss rifle, swapping it with the plasma gun.

She dialed it to penetrator mode. It wasn't a proper railgun by any means, but it was meant to attack power armor.

Trees and vegetation weren't exactly an obstacle.

She sighted the contact, and pulled the trigger.

There was a hiss, a crack...

And a burst of light as well as exotic radiation as the spike of tungsten hit something and just ricocheted into the firmament.

Her eyes widened. How-

She'd seen that before. Acting differently, but still. The Hand. Energy shield.

"OPEN FIRE!"

She mostly yelled out for the squishies' benefit, who were still milling around looking confused. Thankfully despite their lack of expertise they weren't idiots, and they immediately gave her gun totting automata a wide berth as they opened up.

Sapphiria kept her shoulder machineguns silent. She couldn't reload them. Not during this fight anyway. But she set the turrets to just shredding the forest. She had ammo to burn, a lot of ammo to burn, and squishies to keep out of harm's way.

She calmly slung her gauss rifle again, and pulled out the plasma gun.

Most of the bullets were just hitting the vegetation or the ground, but she could see the flashes when they collided with the force field protecting...what seemed to be some madman's idea of what a grizzly bear would look like if crossed with a honey badger.

That is to say it was violence incarnate.

The flashes were getting less intense, in fact she could have sworn she saw the whole bubble just waver at one point, and she pulled the trigger.

A couple of low power bolts weren't enough to do much more than draw some particularly intense flashes, but it got the abomination's attention. Which was interesting because it should have been laser focused on her, no? Because of her scanning.

Perhaps there was more to these things.

The monster powered through what was left of the trees, and Sapphiria dodged out of the way of its charge.

She was back in a battle stance in an instant, but the monster stopped its momentum and turned around with unnatural swiftness. By the time she was ready to shoot again he was already almost on her.

She fired. Not at full power, but a medium blast. She couldn't let herself panic and take her best weapon out of the fight for the next ten seconds, not when it was this frantic.

The barrier around the abomination flashed...and exploded.

For a split second her sensors went insane. The monster musn't have faired better however, as it stumbled aside, missing her by mere centimers, roaring to the top of its lungs. Though it probably wasn't just from the flash, as the turrets and bots continued pouring fire into it.

However, just like last time, it recovered quickly, and rounded on her.

Sapphiria jumped back, hissing as long claws raked the front of her armor, and opened up with her machineguns, cranking their fire rate to maximum, their barrels starting to glow and hiss as she pounded rounds through them as fast as the gun could chamber them.

Individually, each bullet did little damage. But this was at point blank range and both machineguns fired so fast they dumped their entire box magazine in a single second.

The stream of gunfire literally drilled its way through the abomination's skull, and it dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

Sapphiria continued retreating, and swapped for her gauss rifle. She did actually have scan data on that thing, but given how much damage it had taken, she wasn't going to take the risk.

Six shots through the cranium convinced her it was dead for good, and she lowered her gun.

Sweet stars, what the fuck was with these things?

*****

It took the squishies a solid minute to stop gesticulating. Sapphiria could have barked out orders and probably gotten them back into line, but she didn't want to advertise the fact that she was a trained military officer. Plus it was good to let them get it out of their system.

Ramina was the only one not losing it. Instead she immediately went for the monsters, slicing them apart and inspecting them.

"Field autopsy?" Said the AI.

The artificer grunted as she pulled her knife out. She was basically having to saw the bear...thing's skin apart to get at the flesh underneath.

"Something like that. This thing, it had a ward. A barrier."

"Yeah. Saw the Hand with one." A considerably less powerful one. If her medium power shot had collapsed it, then the maximum power might have killed the whole abomination outright. Maybe. All the gunfire had probably helped a ton as well, but the Hand had been under similar bombardment back in the tunnel and barely cared. "Tough cookie."

"No shit. Monsters like this are always a pain in the ass. And usually stay in Convergences, or very near them."

"Why?"

Ramina looked at her strangely.

"Because they need mana? They can recharge if they consume mana crystals, I think, but that's not exactly a sound survival strategy."

"They don't look like they care about survival."

"Most of them don't. Those that do however...they're the real dangerous ones."

So they had some sort of survival instinct? They certainly had cunning, so perhaps that counted past a certain level.

"I see." Sapphiria knelt by the corpse. "That's reassuring at least. If they attack on they can't live and learn from their mistakes." Unless they won, of course. "That one didn't rush me."

"Neither did the others?"

"My se-divination wasn't on then. I found it through that and yet it didn't seem to care about me all that much until I shot it."

The artificer shrugged.

"Not all monsters use divination the same way. Maybe it didn't notice you. In any case- Ah!" She smiled, withdrawing her hands from the corpse, holding what looked like a chunk of...something. "I thought it would have one!"

"What the fuck is that?" Blurted out Sapphiria. Her sensors were just...returning gibberish. It looked like a shard of stone, that was constantly shifting colors and emitting an almost random collection of particles and radiation.

"Condensate!" The artificer smiled, as she removed bits of guts and...was that chitin? From the thing. "We can't harvest the mana from these things. At least I've never heard of anyone succeeding. But we can harvest ichor if you're really dedicated, and those that have been twisted enough start to form condensate." She knocked on it. "Might be able to do something with it later. Here!" She chucked it to Sapphiria, who caught it, more by reflex than anything. Stars, the thing smelt like brimstone. It wasn't big, it fit in the palm of her hand, but there was a sense of wrongness with it. Like she could feel it was never meant to be. It reminded her of staring at a black hole, in a way. Just knowing that reality as you knew it ended where it began. "You can probably put it to better use than we can."

"I, uh...sure! Thank you".

"You killed it. By guild rules, you get to keep it. Not that it means anything out there."

"Guild rules?"

"Oh, right, yeah. Adventurers guild. Guilds, actually." Sapphiria raised an eyebrow, and the artificer elaborated as she cleaned her hands and forearms, heedless of the blood and guts seeping from the carcass next to her and lapping at her boots. "The big one broke up during the Age of Silence. Idiots thought that with the Empire gone, they could bully nations. Didn't end well. Governments are above guilds, no matter how big they may be."

Sapphiria nodded. The Federation had a similar policy with megacorporations. They had interests, but if they started swinging their weight around things would go downhill quick. It was part of the reason why the government had to get a significant stake in every corp. To keep things from going downhill so far it required military intervention.

It seemed like overkill to many but...

Well, her mom had taken over the European Federation and eventually the entirety of Sol by using her own megacorp as a springboard. What was the saying again? 'Money really is the best superpower'? Greed may not be the root of all, but Deus got that right, at least. She wondered if she had the Grrlpower comics in her library core. She'd have to take a look.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

"Yeah." She grabbed one of her armor's pouches, and carefully set the condensate inside, like it was a hunk of plutonium. Which it might as well be, honestly. "They handled monsters?"

"Kind of. Truth be told most adventurers are just more respectable mercenaries. Diving into Convergences and taking what they can. Mana crystals, condensate...and since monsters can have the latter, and usually have standing bounties, yeah, they take them out. But most of the time they wander around on quests. Find some specific stuff for someone. Clear an area. Find a crystal field for harvest, or escort some miners there."

"Oh." Sapphiria hesitated. "We have mining equipment onboard the snowpiercer, but should I bring some dedicated mining bots along?"

The snowpiercer did have a couple of slots for bot deployment. Usually for maintenance and general utility. Sometimes it was a lot easier and safer to send a robot repair something on the hull than suit up a human and pray they don't get killed in the blizzards of Europa or whatever other hellscape it was trudging in.

"We should be fine. Plus I really don't know how the crystals would react to...whatever the hell your bots use to dig." There was that hunger in the artificer's eyes again.

"Well, maybe we can test it out on a future journey." There would be a pulse drill in the snowpiercer's equipment, but she wasn't risking her android or the squishies to test it. And replacing a maintenance bot could wait until she was sure how much punishment and repairs the snowpiercer would actually need to make the journey, as right now it was very much guesswork and she was going to take every opportunity to stack the deck in her favor.

"Sure." Ramina looked at the mess around her, finally noticing that she was standing in an expanding pool of blood and gore, cursing as she stepped back. "Argh! Damn it. This'll take forever to scrape off." She gazed at the workshop, and then the slowly setting sun. "I should probably get back to Astralis. Enough work for one day, I suppose."

"Yes. See you tomorrow?"

"You can count on it!"

Ramina smiled and Sapphiria answered it in kind.

An interesting, if stressful day.

She touched the pouch with the condensate.

And perhaps she could finally get some damned answers.