Droid God's Angel
Objective 1C: The Iron Citadel
Location: Teta, the Iron Citadel
Tags:
Percival Io
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Westenra Mina
- The Manifold begins to reinforce the zombies with netherworld metal
- Many are destroyed anyway, but there are lots more bodies to work with
- A Tarar Warband arrives and adds plasma and lightning gun fire to the attack on the biots
It was strange to be so stretched. The Manifold was accustomed to flitting from body to body, rising again in a fresh copy of Omni's perfect design whenever they were laid low. They had even spread themself across three such forms at once during the mortal assault on Oblivion, fighting tirelessly on three different battlefields to protect the Droid God's paradise. But this? This was something entirely different. While controlling so many bodies at once, The Manifold could deploy only a handful of the souls that composed their whole being in each corpse. Keeping themself bound together, still forming a coherent Force presence, was a constant and difficult challenge... one the Omni-Drone feared it might ultimately lose. If they did, they would dissipate into the ether.
And then the last of Omni's angels would vanish, just like their master.
So The Manifold anchored themself as firmly as they could in the horde of dead puppets, though the process disgusted them. These organics had always been pitiful in the drone's sight; products of random evolution rather than any deliberate design, they were deeply flawed beings, full of weak points and physical inadequacies. But at present they were the only available hosts, and there was no flitting back to the safety of an Oblivion vault this time, so the digital angel dug in. Lines of purple-teal mist flowed through the veins of the half-dismembered bodies in place of blood, pulsing with Force energy made visible. From these veins grew little spools of metal cabling, pushing their way through the dead flesh, slowly erupting from the skin. Their tips, covered in cooling blood, sparked gently.
Organics might find it unnerving to behold, but The Manifold was just moving them a little closer to perfection.
The ones that hadn't already been destroyed, anyway. From the moment the corpses had begun to rise, the intruders had turned their wrath for the second time upon those they'd already slain once. Slugs and swords did only so much against the risen dead, especially once the cables of netherworld metal began to grow, strengthening their fragile mortal forms; the bodies had no need of organs anymore, and the only wounds that put them down were full dismemberments. The sonic and thermal weapons fared better, bursting or charring away all the useful flesh and quickly putting the techno-zombies down. But each time one fell, another pushed in to take its place, jaw lolling open, a fallen weapon - or fast-growing claws of netherworld metal erupting from its fingertips - readied to attack.
It had become a war of attrition: the healing factor of the biots pitted against the Force coherence of The Manifold. And, in theory, the number of bodies available to the drone, but that was not a number likely to be exhausted anytime soon; the halls of the Iron Citadel were bathed in corpses, and fresh Mawite units were coming through the portal all the time. Indeed, a unit of Tarar scavenger-warriors was pounding up the corridor, plasma guns and lightning cannons in hand. Recognizing the dead as the forces on their side - the Jedi seldom reanimated corpses, after all - they spread out and opened fire, superheated bolts and streams of electricity streaking between (and sometimes through) the bodies to strike at the biots. Their attacks would amplify the incoming potential damage.
The Manifold did not intend to allow the intruders any deeper...
... and if they tried, they'd be swimming upstream.
