If Maria Ramius had been the sort of person to curse the incompetence of those around her or the unfairness of the universe, the air inside Blitz's cockpit would have been too blue to see through. As it was, their briefing officer's fatuous comment about 'terrain working in their favor' had her almost growling in frustration as she hunted the last survivor of the enemy unit.
ORB mobile suits fought in squads of six, four 'soldier' types, a commander, and a walking cannon. They'd killed two of the grunts and the tank column they were reinforcing had accounted for two more - while taking fifty percent losses - and la Flaga was dueling the leader at this very moment, which meant that the one approaching around -that- corner would be...
Her shot missed; it had been aimed at what should have been chest-level, but the ORB soldier had sent his machine past the corner like a runner sliding in to home plate and had already started swinging his suit's main gun down to bear on her the moment it cleared the building.
She brought her aim-point down with a hiss of mingled fury and sudden fear.
The Deimos' elbow slammed into the pavement and brought the cannon's fall up brutally short.
The beam rifle came on target.
The driver rails stored within the cannon's main housing - itself two-thirds as long as the suit carrying it and the same proportion of the 'stored' weapon's length - snapped out to full extension, almost doubling the length of its accelleration ladder.
They fired in almost the same instant. The particle beam burned a small crater in the ORB suit's thigh, but lacked the energy to fully penetrate the massive armor and destabilize the synthetic atoms making up the battery underneath.
The railgun's round missed entirely, which wasn't a surprise, since her own machine was safely hidden by its mirage colloid.
What -was- a surprise was when the High Explosive, Airburst round carried on comfortably past her to detonate ten meters short of the building that marked the end of the short cross-street.
It felt like a giant the size of a skyscraper had kicked Blitz in the ass.
The impact was enough to put stars before her eyes, and on the screens she could see the blast wave shatter windows and small buildings, and send dumpsters and parked cars skittering along the street like tumbleweeds. Needless to say, the carefully maintained envelope of nanomachines shielding her from her enemy's cameras vanished just as easily as any pane of glass.
Instinct made her stompt on the pedals and keep Blitz moving, and the suit's own computers, noting that their stealth ability had been lost, switched on the phase shift armor without needing any input from her, which between them meant that the armor-piercing round that followed only glanced off of its ankle, and not hard enough to detonate.
The Deimos pilot abandoned his weapon and rolled back out of reach as she brought the beam saber down, and by the time she had landed and taken the first step forward to come back on balance had slipped his suit's backup weapon, which looked incongrously like a combat knife built to scale, out from under the curved shields that were folded, beetle-like, close over its back. He lunged, driving the blade straight towards her cockpit, and she brought the saber back up in a backhand arc that caught his machine's leading arm just above the elbow, sending it and its weapon crashing to the ground as the smaller but heavier suit continued on and knocked her own machine sprawling.
Blitz was the fastest of the three stolen prototypes, and pushing off with its arms at the same time as she threw the throttles wide open launched it hurtling into the sky only a fraction of a second above her enemy's uncanny twisting kick. Theoretically, of course, there was no reason why she couldn't have done about the same thing with her own suit, but what she could envision and Blitz's hardware execute were both very different things from instructions she could convey to its operating system through the neural pickups built into the cockpit. Whatever method ORB had used to get around those inherent limitations of human minds - Natural or Coordinator - they seemed determined to keep as close to their chest as possible.
On the other hand, she thought as she rolled over near the top of that ballistic arc and cocked her suit's right arm and its beam saber back into position for a killing blow, while that trick of theirs might have increased the precision and flexibility of ORB's suits' movements, it couldn't do anything to actually make them faster. By the time the Deimos had come back upright and begun to step out of the way it was too late; a quick burst from the thrusters cut the time needed to fall the remaining distance by a factor of four, and sent the beam saber shearing down through the center of her foe lengthwise a split second before Blitz landed with enough force to crater the paving beneath it and snatch the breath from her lungs as the cockpit's straps punished her chest.
Once she had recovered her ability to think she cut the saber and hauled Blitz to its feet; there was still one suit left.
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"