To face The Trio was to face an
Avalanche in progress.
Blue, Cold Flames and Red Hot Flames froze and seared flesh and armor simultaneously. Maple's telekinetic display with her firearms shredding through multiple bodies with a combination of blasters and slugthrowers.
Darth Xiphos, a proven terror on the Battlefield by this point, sliced ruthlessly into the fanatical Mawite hoardes, feeling their life force leave to fuel
Darth Solipsis
.
She didn't care. The man was going to fail. Even if they completely failed to save Tython. Even if they completely failed to destroy the Avatar, he would
never be a God. Something would get in the way, feth it up for him at the last moment. She need not be there to witness it. The Force had odd ways of correcting chit.
They had lost a few of the Model 3's, but had killed scores each for everyone lost so far. The Model 2's in the group coordinated fire as they advanced, but the sheer
weight of the forces being thrown at them from all sides, trying to flank them, cut them off, some even trying to resort to suicide attacks had begun to to stymie even them.
But the Trio was an
Avalanche.
The floors and walls were caked with blood and gibs as they ruthlessly pressed forward.
Darth Phyre frowned as
Tu'teggacha
, against all odds, managed to slip out of her grasp. A moments distraction had done it. Slippery, that one.
But not slippery enough...
As he had fled her, Phyre had managed to slip a specialized curse through his barrier. One that was, even now, slowly starting to affect his brain, turn it into a conduit for Force Slow. It would create a radial effect that would slowly spread out from his brain to affect multiple decks if it was successful, slowing the reactions of everyone around him.
In a pitched battle, the slowed reaction times of hundreds, potentially thousands of vital crew members, this would be fatal.
But even if it didn't work, Phyre still had his measure.
Being the master of a single kick, made him only a one trick pony. And no self respecting Dark Master in
history was ever the master of just
one kick. He was still alive, but she had seen his pathetic life. He was a coward. Terrible when he had the upper hand over someone weaker, but get him cornered and he had nothing else to save him. She had sneered at his turtle method, knowing the next time they met, she would have no distractions like the Annihilation of a planet.
And she would make certain his life ended as it began: a weak little
nothing cowering before his betters,
hiding from them.
We WILL meet again, Squidling. And I will reduce you once more to that little dog kicked around by his own kind.
She showed him an image from his worst, most fear filled moments of his youth as he fled. A little demonstration of her own use of Memory Walk to distract him from the curse trying to weave itself into his brain even now, turning itself into a booby trap that would try and stop his body from functioning and kill him instantly if he tried to remove it. This one was going to be fun to break...
That image of an Ebruchi being tormented by his own kind was delectable.
That's who you really are. That is who you will die as.
And then she laughed mentally, watching his spirit flee her fully even as she broke a Mawites neck in the real world.
The two Black Knights that had accompanied them, Adam and Burt, were still going strong, their blades deflecting projectiles, working in tandem with their smoke teleport tricks confounding the Mawites, creating illusionary doubles of themselves as they fought brutally through tactical response teams.
"Burt, they make Shark Repellent, right?" Adam asked, stabbing a large Mawite wielding a chain gun
repeatedly.
"I believe so, fellow Crime fighter!" Burt responded, pulling up a Motherfether's heart out.
"Well maybe we ought to get to work on developing some sort of Chemical for Tython's fair citizens. Not only would it repel Mawites, but
clowns..." Adam posited as he dodged the furious slashes of a Mawite Sith, his armor getting scorched a little before he parried the next slash and disemboweled the Sith before cutting his head off.
"Why Clowns?" Burt asked, breaking be a Mawites neck.
"Because Clowns piss me the $#@+ off..." Adam answered as he sliced a Mawite in half length wise.
"CLOWNS!??" Maple shrieked as she made a Mawite Head explode with a well placed headshot. "WHERE ARE THE CLOWNS?! SHOW ME THE CLOWNS!! SHOW ME!!!
SHOOOOWWWW MEEEEEEE!!!"
("Send In The Clowns" Plays OOC)
"Aunt Harte,
chill the feth out!" one of the Model 3's exclaimed as he gunned down a few of his own "Everyone hates clowns."
"I don't hate clowns..." Phyre mentioned after she roasted a rival Sith alive with red flames.
"Ha! Only a further sign of your
depravity!" Maple insisted as she executed another maw Warrior with a perfectly placed armor piercing round that went right through his dome.
Maple was fething
bug eyed under her living armor, which worked overtime to prevent her schizophrenia from overtaking her. It hissed that it loved her, begged her to keep wearing it until it could merge with her at the Molecular Level, which absolutely WOULD happen if she wore it for too long, and other little tidbits of WTF it would whisper into her ear.
They lost four more Model 3 units, blasted apart by concentrated fire. They lost three Model 2's for the first time but the tide of House Io pressed on in their mutual Fanaticism, bent on destroying the Avatar. The Maw
had to be dealt a fatal blow here. The Avatar
must be destroyed. The will of their Dark Gods
must be denied.
Xiphos herself however, even now, questioned once more if it was really worth it to save Tython. The Jedi sure as hell wouldn't appreciate it. She was still a Traitor and Criminal in her eyes, and they in hers. The feud with them had become too personal for her. Part of her had badly wanted to step back and let the Maw end this planet, but a greater part of her wanted to thwart the Maw. Even then, she couldn't decided who she despised more.
The Maw were
destined to lose.
Destined to collapse. They didn't understand. It didn't matter if you wiped out the birthplace of the Jedi. It didn't matter how much they hurt the Force. Whatever they did back to it, it would return upon them a hundred fold, a thousand fold if necessary.
There would be no rebirth. It was a pipe dream. And even if it was not, they simply hadn't thought it through.
These people were addicted to hurting others at this point. Their very existence was defined by it. By Cruelty, even to each other. They
lived to hurt people, to destroy. If they got their new Universe, how would they even
function if there was no one to torment? Did they really believe there would just be instant change in themselves? Was someone like
The Mongrel
, after all the chit
he'd done, really just gonna
stop wanting to hurt and torment and destroy? Who did these people think they were, they they could wash their hands so easily.
Xiphos knew, for her part, that she'd be utterly
bored in a brand new, clean universe. The people who had done these terrible things to
this one, even if they got
exactly what they wanted, wouldn't be able to let go of the cruelty in themselves. They would not be innocent, even if renewed. The desire to hurt people simply for the sake of it would still be there, and that was something even
Gods couldn't purge in a soul. If there was no one innocent left to torment, they'd just turn on each other to slake their appetite for cruelty and death. Their new universe would quickly become an even
worse hell than the one they had fought so hard to destroy.
There was no point in escaping this universe, even
with all it's problems. And besides, if the cycle was endless, would they complain if some group should rise on the other side and decide
that universe needed to end? Would they at last understand how utterly they had been
conned? Would they fight to preserve their "reward"? Or would they be good little worshippers of the three Avatars and
allow the next universe to be destroyed, when
they became the stagnant A-holes that needed wiping out?
It was all these questions that drove Xiphos to despise of the Maw. Who cares if the universe is stagnant? Who cares if the Three Avatars promise was genuine? It's just trading one hell for another, and
someone would come along to ruin it eventually. If not a Force User, than something
worse.
They would never be masters unanswerable to anyone, no matter the Reality. Something would spoil it. Something
always spoiled something like that. They'd have to destroy the next one eventually. And the next. And the next one after that. Their will would break at some point. Might as well break it
now and drive it into their thick skulls that they were utterly insane to want what they wanted. That they didn't
deserve to be masters of their own fate.
They deserved to die enslaved to this universe. Their Avatars were
nothing to The Force. It had the final say in
everything. That is why she knew it could not be overwhelmed. Overthrown.
That is why she knew, no matter
what happened today, The Maw would eventually fall, their Gods swept aside and forgotten, as had every other pretender that had ever challenged the Throne
directly.
She scanned a Mawite's mind, trying to understand what gave them faith in these Dark Gods that compelled these freaks to build a Super Laser, even as she pulled his stomach out and shoved it into his throat.
Even as she stared, gazed upon the fractured mind screaming of War, Death, and Rebirth in its head, Phyre and the others massacring their opponents, she
still didn't understand the appeal, and wouldn't have understood it even without The Force.
She had been so bereft of faith in anything but her knife growing up she scorned most forms of Religion. Even though she
somewhat favored The Light, she didn't trust it, mainly because she found most of its representatives to be insufferable little chits who had done nothing with their power except constantly fight the Sith Empire. It had been people like
Auteme
,
Cedric Grayson
,
Ryv
, and
Coren Starchaser
that had made her harbor the idea that maybe the Light Side didn't deserve the veneration and respect it got. Maybe it really
did deserve to be made to suffer, along with the people who had so selfishly squandered their power to crush an enemy.
Thing is...
...
she wanted to be the source of that misery. That punishment.
In her heart of hearts, she was utterly obsessed with punishing the Jedi Order. The Maw were in the way of that. However much she wanted to stop the Maw from destroying The Galaxy, she ultimately still wanted to punish the Jedi for being so callous, so lazy, so inept, that they had allowed the Bryn'adul, then the Maw, to get this strong, and forced everyone around them to try and glue the pieces back together to a burning house.
It was this desire that kept her in a frenzy of killing as she charged forward, swatting aside bolts and projectiles, covered in blood and intestines, stepping over the dead, crushing their corpses to kill more. And still the Maw came.
A whip crack of purple lightning hit explosives on a Mawite belt, causing a massive detonation that took out a large cluster of Maw, sending body parts flying everywhere, and severely damaging the deck plating and surrounding tissue.
The defenders momentarily repulsed, Xiphos looked. Phyre had vanished back into the flesh and Mind of The Amalgam, who was positively giddy at fighting alongside her greatest students, and wished it would 'never' end.
The Amalgam cast a spell, causing strange arcs of lightning to flow over the damaged parts, preventing the area from getting depressurized.
"Ohhh, it's so
lovely to be killing alongside you both. I wish I'd packed a picnic basket. It would would have been filled with crushed puppy eyes!"
"Why would we eat that?" Maple asked, reloading her battle rifle.
"Oh, it's not for eating, dear Uri...it's for conferring the blessings of the Unholy Spirit. But I have something just as nice. See, I've been giving it some thought...Ol' Solipsism is using everyone we slaughter to channel his power right? Well, if it can work all the way from here, that means they are linked and--"
"Mother..." The Fixer Nuetralizer called out, monitoring sensors and security networks. "I have detected an elite unit deployed by the Final Dawn. An ambush is being set up to flank the team heading to Nutrient Storage. Elite Units tied to
Marlon Sularen
.
Xiphos paused.
Sularen. Kicked out of the Ashlan Crusade. Then the GA. Nowhere to go but downhill from there. It was telling the only people left who would have him were the biggest scumbags in the universe after the Bryn'adul.
It was like Amy told her: Everybody gravitates towards their true peer group eventually.
Supposedly, he believed he was destined to conquer the core worlds. What would the
point be if Solipsis actually succeeded in rewriting the universe
here? Just getting the last laugh? He fought for an empty reward if that was the case. A man with an ego that huge would be miserable in the next universe if there was one. Who'd be left to conquer and destroy with a big scary fleet? Who'd be left to be afraid of
him? Who would bother
obeying him?
He was just a Kath Hound chasing Landspeeders: He wouldn't even know what to do with one if he caught it. (Madness is like Gravity: 700 XP)
Still, that didn't mean he wasn't dangerous. He was, after all, one of the most vile war criminals in Galactic History. Arguably up there with Tarkin. They'd sing ballads of whoever finally dropped him. But his end would come another time. Now it was time to deal with his minions.
My children, take heed. Powerful Warriors are laying an ambush up ahead she called out with her technopathy.
"Elite Soldiers are attempting flanking maneuvers..." The Fixer said, having wirelessly sliced the local network, before shutting the blast doors on the routes they were taking towards the team from the sides and behind, redirecting power flow momentarily to overload and destroy the circuitry that would allow them to open again. If the Hand of Judgement wanted to get them in a pincer move, they would have to blast the doors open to reach them, and the Fixer had made sure to shut the blast doors to the next two sections ahead of those troops in every direction, while leaving the route that
Joseph Torson
was using undisturbed.
Xiphos sensed more hostiles approaching. WAY more.
"Amy, do something about these corpses..." Xiphos ordered.
"Zombie time? Slow or fast?" Amy asked playfully, dead purple eyes fixed with a mania in them on Xiphos's silvery armor.
"Wait, what were you going to do before?" Maple asked.
The Amalgam glanced at her with an equally playful gaze and Maple unconsciously took a step backwards. She
hated it when Amy smiled like that.
"Not enough dead yet...but for now, I can whip up something quick."
The Amalgam whispered unholy things that made Maple, Xiphos, Adam and Burt cover their ears.
The mangled corpses of the dead began to rise up...and then squish and converge together, torn muscles and skin and armor knitting together to make three giant zombie golems that plodded forward, looking utterly horrible and letting out unnatural screams as they plodded forward into a hail of fire from fast approaching Mawites.
"Holy B-Movie Horror, Adam!" Burt exclaimed.
"I think I've found something I hate more than those fething clowns, trusted partner in crime fighting..." Adam said, who seemingly could speak only in Ham and Cheese.
"What's that?" Burt asked, watching one of the Zombie golems rip a terrified Sith Lord apart.
"Not having put any skill points into necromancy."
"Oh come now, you invested in Illusion, One Handed and Heavy Armor, you're doing
fantastic..." The Amalgam encouraged as the Golems took massive amounts of fire, but giving them a bit of a breather.
"Someone
really needs to talk to the Narrator about the fething Skyrim jokes..." Maple muttered as she rushed forward.
(Dovahkiin Theme Plays)
Maple looked up at nothing in particular.
"Feth You." she said to the Narrator.
"I used to mock the Narrator like you did. Then I took a Darth Phyre to my subconscious."
"What in the absolute mother
feth are you talking about?" A Model 2 asked, not comprehending.
"Barry, sweetie, don't worry about it. They do this all the damn time." Xiphos grunted before charging ahead with the others.
Meanwhile...
The team heading to the Nutrient storage had gotten the warning, but a tad late to try and change course. The Model 3 units, immediately deducing that they were the most expendable, had volunteered to go up front, knowing it was a fire zone. A few Chaplains and Kevin the Black Knight were immediately behind them. The Model 1 units that had accompanied them slowly, carefully, wirelessly sliced the circuits controlling power flow in this area.
They immediately came under fire, and Kevin conjured illusory doppelgangers as they Advanced, trying to confuse their aim, but some Model 3's took the hit, three getting their head blasted off and a Chaplain got half her head blasted off and fell backward. But in those precious moments the rockets and grenades were hurled at them the other Nuetralizers knew Torson had made a suicidal move using such powerful explosives.
The chaplains used their built in Tractor/Presser Organs to catch and divert the rockets and some of the grenades to the immediate side of the ones who had launched them even as more of the Model 3 units sustained heavy damage to their chassis, others expertly dodging heavy fire and returning it with their deadly
Laser Cannons , The Model 1 units that had come with them providing support via their lethal
Assault Radiation Blasters, others concentrating their fire on where the rockets and grenades would impact on the wall.
The blast was incredibly powerful being so close to the ones that had launched it. Rockets? Seriously? In this enclosed space?
It blew a massive hole into open space, decompression happening immediately.
The Nuetralizers didn't need an atmosphere to survive, and each had their own cute way of avoiding getting sucked into space, The Chaplains hurled themselves against their brothers, driving them backward via their repulsor organs, while also using the tractor organs to catch more and pull them away from the blast hole. Torson and his men were still flesh and blood. Even if their suits were sealed against vacuum, the Nuetralizers had diverted the rockets and grenades to impact very close to the ambushers. The blast happening so close to the super soldiers had hopefully killed many of them already, and if not, well, that was what the guns were for.
The Model 2's, built much more solidly and resisting getting sucked out the best, calmly laid heavy sweeping fire with all onboard weapons, such as their shoulder mounted charrics cannons. A blistering, apocalyptic level of volley fire in the direction of the initial ambush as well as the hole, trying to make it bigger so it could hopefully have a greater chance of sucking the enemy out...
Meanwhile.
The Rhand Class Battle Cruisers were still directly above the Fatalis, directing point blank fire from all their weapons at its hull, even while under heavy attack from enemy Starfighters. More than a few lost their main electromagnetic cannons, and one had already had all it's solar Ionization Cannons. But the Energy Torpedo Launchers were still going strong, relentlessly sailing towards the hull.
But the Leviathan of Danuta had been buying a moment, firing on that engine.
The Leviathan had been built to bring the fight to SSD class vessels, and the weapon it had ready as it repositioned itself, the other vessels with it pulling back, was a terrible one indeed.
It was a Battle Cruiser Grade
Scythe Weapon
One that had been built for such terrible power even SSD ships were under severe threat.
"Fire." Hadrian ordered.
Six destructive waves of energy lashed out from the ship.
They would converge on the very middle of it's engines creating a hopefully massive series of detonations powerful enough to finally, seriously outright damage the Maw Vessel and hopefully cause its Faith to waver...
OOC: Mongrel, will cover the effects of Tu'Teggacha's air strikes on the Rhand Class under a different account.