The Begining of the End

[Paladin89]

The human charged straight at Mallock.
'This human should no better then to charge straight in,' Mallock thought with a smirk,'that's how hero's die!'
Raising his leg Mallock charged it with red eco then slammed it down in front of him, causing the pavement to crack and buckle. As he did this he pushed yellow eco down into the ground. A yellowish light shown up from the cracks, raising towards Karras, then dulled. All this happened in the blink of an eye when suddenly the ground before Mallock erupted upwards, violently exploding outwards! The exploding pavement rushed towards Karras, filling the air with sharp rock and blocks of pavement.

[Darkjak87]

The distant rumble of artillery. The occasional gust of wind. A sneeze or a cough. These were the sounds that kept company the remnants of the once proud fighting force known as the Second Armored Regiment. They waited restlessly for their enemy, hidden behind their hasty defenses, rifles pointed down the street into the haze of war. The air held a tenseness that could have been cut with a knife.

The Deathbots were a fearsome foe, but the soldiers knew they could be defeated. Human ingenuity had seen them through centuries of fighting, and though their creations had turned against them, they lacked that one, redeeming quality. The Deathbots had taken them by surprise, but they could be bested.
It was simple, really, removing the inhibitors on the KG rifles. Eco was a lively element, and difficult to control. It was possible to design a weapon that could, with great precision, deliver the perfect amount of eco for every round fired. However, this was an expensive feat, so in order to cut costs, simple modifications were made to more basic weapons that limited the power of each shot. Rather than directly controlling the flow of eco, a KG rifle discharged a rough amount of eco with every pull of the trigger that was regulated by the inhibitor, which then ‘caught’ the excess eco and funneled it back into the cartridge, therefore increasing the number of shots per magazine at the cost of less power, which was an acceptable compromise given that Metal Heads tended to be weak, but numerous.

But this was an easily removable part, and at Zrion’s command, all the soldiers had done so. Zephan, monitoring some impromptu testing of the modified rifles, estimated that the shots were approximately twice as powerful now. Accordingly, there were half as many shots available for each charge of eco now, but it was a necessity, given how ineffective they had been previously.

Zrion wouldn’t deceive himself – the odds were stacked against them even still, but at least now they were ready for them.

It began much as before. The whistle of mortars and the burst of shells filled the area ahead with smoke. The KG soldiers, those with helmets that still functioned, simply activated their thermal vision in response, illuminating in rough clarity the bots that were already advancing through the screen.

“Remember.” Zrion said, his voice hard. “Pick a target and fire until it goes down. These things are tough, but we’ll drop ‘em like we do everything else. Pick your shots, look for weak points, and keep it together. If we hold ‘em off long enough, we’ll get lifted out of here to Maintown.”

Seconds passed, but it could have been an eternity. Then, all hell broke loose.

The foxholes at the head of the formation opened fire, their Vulcan Furies firing in quick, controlled bursts. As before, the high-velocity blue eco rounds had little trouble piercing the armor of the Bots, but there were plenty of them to spare. The Clankers closed in, and the riflemen opened fire, their streaks of red eco adding to the barrage of fire, illuminating the street with a hellish red light. Behind them, the quad-cannon the Guards had salvaged opened fire, the heavy rounds easily tearing through the Bots like they could just about anything else that walked the planet.

The Deathbots’ return fire was brutal. Automatic bursts of red eco tore through the smoke in response, burning away the metal shells of the zoomers that the Guards were using as cover. The smoke did little to hinder them, Zrion noticed, as several of the guards near him cried out in pain as the stench of burning flesh filled his nose. However, Zrion did not pause, and neither did the others as they continued with their slow, steady barrage of fire, making the Clankers pay for every inch of ground they took.

A series of deeper booms filled the air as the Bots started to close in on the forward defenses, the scatterguns going off in a rotating pattern of fire in order to maximize their effectiveness. In stark contrast to the blasters, the scatterguns were immensely effective, as the waves of red eco, at this close range, were capable of literally cutting the Bots to pieces.

It wasn’t enough, however. The Clankers continued to move forward, hindered by the KG’s efforts but not halted entirely. The soldiers in the forward defense line were hard pressed to hold their own, even despite the generous supporting fire from the men at the rear. However, Zrion had planned for this, and he signaled the men in the buildings to do their part.

Glass bottles were tossed into the streets from the windows above, nearly a dozen of them in the first few seconds alone. The Cocktails lit up immediately, fueled by the volatile mixture of alcohol and eco that was their makeup, spreading thick, oily flames across the concrete and the now rather unfortunate Deathbots that occupied it.

It worked as well as they had hoped for. The Bots immediately began to wither under the flames, the intense heat scorching their armor and frying their internal circuits, which no amount of insulation could have shielded from the flames, had there even been any in the first place. The soldiers cheered openly as dozens and dozens of the bots were vanquished by the flames, as if it were a holy fire that the heavens themselves had contributed to their fight.

The Guards continued their barrage of fire, now confident in their victory, only the occasional cry of pain from a man among their ranks demoralizing them now. They fired with great discipline, and between their new tactics and the mounted gun at the back of their makeshift fortress, the final Deathbot fell to the ground in a heap of scorched scrap metal.

All was quiet now, as the cracks of rifles and the booms of the heavier guns ceased, there no longer being any targets to shoot at. Zrion continued staring down the sights of his rifle, the smoke cloud having dissipated by now, for what it was worth, breathing heavily from the exertion. No matter how conditioned a man was for battle, nothing was more tiring for a human being than combat.

Zrion could feel Zephan at work, feeling the use of green eco at the edge of his awareness as the Ottsel worked to heal the soldiers that had been wounded. Zrion, after breaking his line of sight with the now empty kill-zone, noted that most of the wounded had simply been soldiers that had been hit directly in the flesh, where their armor had already been stripped away by previous hits.
‘If we don’t get resupplied soon, we’ll be fighting with sticks and stones’, Zrion remarked mentally. ‘But dammit, we held them off this time, and we’ll do it then too!’