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  The Skyhook swooped north, Cassie held below in the metal harness like a roller-coaster of old. They were getting close, as evidenced by the loose patrols of Model-3s and 1s they had started to run into. The ground out here was sparse, a few dotted outcroppings of plants that had managed to grow since the last time a harvesting party from a deviant hive had stripped the ground bare.

  Quinn wiped the remains of a very brave Model-1 off her front.

  "How far are we out?"

  Elliot had apparently picked up some sensor tech. He'd explained it apparently used the force of gravity exerted by objects to figure out what was present and how big, and while it wasn't constant he could send out pulses that gave him quite detailed information. With it, they'd located the hive after about five minutes travel north of Prosperity. It was underground, but there seemed to be plenty of activity up top that Quinn could assist with.

  She really needed a way to be able to assist with tunnels and buildings, a way that didn't involve… actually fighting herself.

  "Honestly, we should probably set down and go on foot from here, assuming you don't want to risk the truck."

  Quinn glanced over to where Maia was watching something on their augs. "Nope, lets set down."

  They quickly unloaded, scanning the horizon for Antithesis. Unfortunately the terrain was just hilly enough that sight only went so far.

  Elliot laid out the plan over comms, walking to the side as he checked his firearms. "Okay, lets spread out to get a wider view, but not too far - maybe 20 meters apart?"

  "Sure." Hayden replied, before trotting off left. Elliot himself went right, and she caught a glimpse of some sort of weird pauldrons now sitting on his shoulders. The three set out.

  A couple of minutes later, Hayden was idly flying his blades in a loop around his head as they walked. "So, Elliot, what was your specialty…"

  The ground quaked. Quinn took a step back to steady herself and glanced around.

  Irys barked an order. No warmth, no personality, just pure command. "Dodge right NOW!"

  Quinn's conscious panicked, anxiety nipping at her at the aggressive tone. Her subconscious had more sense, and she activated the momentum drive.

  Her dash right was further augmented by something smashing into her left side, throwing her further than expected. Thankfully the full stop at the end of the dash seemed to account for this, as she came to a halt smoothly. Where she had been standing, a huge Antithesis was clawing its way out of the ground. It was long, with four thick legs, and covered in bony plating. A face with lamprey circular teeth and flailing tentacles was flanked by a pair of sharp tusks. It pulled itself from the ground, letting a swarm of smaller Antithesis stream up from the hole behind it. A quick check of the readout confirmed that while the servos in her plasma cannon were shot, the weapon itself and its power seemed fine.

  She opened fire into the horde next to her, quickly backing up while checking for her allies. Elliot had made some distance himself, taking precise shots into the horde. There was no sign of blade dancer, only a second of the giant diggers where he had been walking. Shit, shit, shit, was he dead?

  "Anyone hit?" Elliot's asked over comms.

  Hysterics crept into Quinn's voice as she replied. "Hayden, are you okay?"

  "Fuck, I think something ate me." Hayden's voice rang out over comms, more… annoyed than anything? "I'll be fine, focus on keeping yourselves safe."

  Something ATE him?? How was he still… Okay, he was fine, he said so himself. She took that knowledge as a spear, jabbing at the mad terror that had begun to creep in like a hungry beast. Usually, this would be a protracted battle as the spiraling thoughts circled and harried; but this time they were unusually cowardly, running for the hills after a few defensive thrusts. It was still a fight, but one far easier than she had come to expect.

  "Quinn. Status." Elliot's tone was focused. She watched him turn to expertly put down a set of Model-3s that had been moving to flank, before crushing another group into the ground with his gravity.

  "I'm fine." she managed to sputter out, forcing herself back into the present combat. "Minor damage."

  The dire lamprey boar was turning towards her now, preparing to close and put its tusks to use. Quinn crouched and shrugged up the beam cannon. She took a moment to aim before putting a shot through the digger colossus. Her aim was off, but she still caught one of its shoulders. The beam punched right through the plating and left the limb dangling uselessly.

  "Understood, can you plug the hole near you? Then we'll go back up Blade Dancer."

  She glanced over at said hole, Model-3s and 4s still streaming out to add to the growing mass.

  "I can handle it, help Hayden."

  The biggest threat was still the big boy. Despite its injury, it looked like it was preparing to charge her, and she couldn't afford to be dealing with it and the swarm at the same time. It was too big for either plasma or laser cannon to kill it quickly, and she needed to end it decisively.

  She raised her sword, pointing it blade first at the things head, and dashed. The sword buried itself up to the hilt in the things lamprey maw, and she felt it shudder and go still around it. She yanked back, finding the blade thoroughly embedded, and the delay gave a couple of Model-4s the chance to leap up and begin snaking their tentacles in, looking for weak points to tear at. She spotted a Model-6 charging her back, and let go of the sword to swing her smaller arms behind her, activating the hard-light shield just as the living battering ram hit her.

  She wasn't properly braced, and so the impact sent her tumbling backwards, squishing one of the Model-4s between her chassis and the ground, as well as a number of other small Models. She stumbled to her feet, ripping the other tentacled bear from her and smashing it into her chest before dropping its twitching form to the ground. She really, really needed something to deal with that.

  Giving a quick glance around the battlefield she found Elliot had gotten halfway to the other hole. He was firing shots in, but she noticed that aliens were being flung bodily into the sky at a insane speed seemingly out of nowhere. As she watched a Model-6 crashed down a little off the side. It exploded on impact, spraying the ground with plant flesh and sap.

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  Quinn swiveled her torso to point her plasma cannon at the horde and let fly, frying a huge number still pouring from the hole.

  "Irys, I need to close that hole. Is there anything from my esoteric explosives I could use to kill anything coming up? Maybe dump a liquid down there?"

  "Hot or caustic?"

  "Hot!"

  New Purchase: Oversized Shunted Mantle Bomb

  Cost: 10. Points reduced to... 3978

  A metal canister the size of a barrel with a big red button on the tip dropped into one of Quinn's hands, and she sprinted towards the opening, blasting the Antithesis standing in her way. She body tackled another six that had emerged from the tunnel, stumbling but managing to hit the button and throw the bomb into the hole.

  She didn't stop, but there was a sudden flash and the hole was suddenly lit from the inside like a star. No more Antithesis emerged, and she turned her attention back to the remaining swarm in her vicinity, hitting a Model-6 with a head on plasma disk that flash fried its brain.

  She was keeping an eye on the second of the digging tanks when it reared up on its back legs. It fell onto its back, rolling around like it was on fire, but after a few moments, it stilled.

  A few seconds later a large blade erupted from its stomach, slicing up and down before a thoroughly soaked Blade Dancer tumbled out of the incision. He was covered in sap and blood, and his armor had great rents carved into it, but he seemed to be holding up. More of his blades erupted from the corpse, blending the nearby swarm as he himself pounced upon an unlucky Model-3, ripping into it with his teeth. A much larger blade, almost oversized for him, shot out and began cleaving through groups at a time.

  With the big threats dealt with and one hole plugged it only took them a minute or so more to drop another mantle bomb into the second hole. With the remaining Antithesis dead or dying, Quinn yanked her sword out of its dead sheathe and then jogged over to the other two.

  "Holy fuck, that was awesome!" Hayden grinned, showing off his razor teeth, a piece of green stuck in one of them like spinach. "But gross now, would not recommend. Also, Ow." The huge blade flew over and inserted itself into a sheath that he had hanging on his back. He sat down, grabbed a nearby corpse and began to chow down.

  Quinn raised a digital eyebrow. "Aren't you eating them? Also… why do you eat them?"

  He tried to scrape some of the goo off as he replied. "Would you enjoy being soaked in tofu juice? You eat that. And apparently my body damages itself somewhat when I really push, eating Antithesis gives me the materials to heal. Also helps with the more literal wounds." He did have several nasty looking gashes, mostly around his legs, but Quinn swore she could see them slowly closing up in real time.

  Elliot shrugged and wandered towards the hole. "Human muscles technically do that too, though it takes much longer to heal." he stopped as he got closer. "Do they taste good, and fuck that's hot, whats in there?"

  Quinn walked over and peered in, finding it filled with a dull red liquid streaked with black.

  "Uh, Lava apparently." She replied.

  "Technically molten stone and metal is Magma when underground, which this is." The stern female voice, presumably Hayden's AI, interjected.

  "That's Mynerva, by the way." Hayden said, moving towards the hole and being stopped by the same barrier of heat as Elliot, though quite a bit closer. "Damn, you weren't kidding about the heat. But yeah, I can't really describe the taste but I enjoy it."

  Quinn backed off and rejoined the other two. "Can't say I'd have gone that route myself, but I guess you didn't have much choice?"

  He shrugged. "I probably could have asked Luna to reverse that bit as well, but honestly I kinda vibe being a shark dude. There was a shark themed v-tuber I used to vibe with quite a bit in my teens."

  She mentally nodded. "Fair enough. By the way Irys, what the hell were those big things, and how did those bombs work."

  "I was going to mention if you hadn't asked - those are Model-18s, specialized for digging and heavy assault. You three did well for your first time encountering a Model in the high teens! On the second question, Mantle bombs are essentially just a high durability shunt, we collect a large quantity of mantle from some of the hotter planets and bottle it up, so to speak, then it just opens the valve when activated."

  Quinn slotted that information into her mental compendium of the Antithesis, she really needed to look up the other types or get Irys to talk her through them at some point.

  "Huh, so that's stone and shit from another planet?" Hayden asked.

  "Yes, Darling."

  "Neat." he replied, before going back to trying to scrape goo off.

  Quinn took pity watching his futile attempt. "Irys, can we buy Hayden a bath in a can?"

  "Of course." Irys affirmed, giving proud mother vibes.

  New Purchase: Vanguard Bath-In-A-Can x1

  Cost: 1. Points reduced to... 4365

  The can landed next to Hayden, who picked it up, read the instructions on it and began spraying himself down. "Thanks." he smiled at her, less a toothy grin and more a genuine happy gesture.

  With the shark man(?) clean, the three dropped flesh melters in the various piles before setting off again, a little closer to each other and a little warier.

  Quinn thought back to the battle, mulling over the challenges. It was becoming exceedingly clear she had a problem she'd been putting off for too long.

  "Irys, what options do I have for dealing with being surrounded and crawled on."

  "Ah, I'm glad you asked." Irys replied, a note of genuine excitement in her voice. "I have a number of suggestions that I think will fit nicely."

  She paused momentarily, and a window opened up in Quinn's view, displaying a blueprint view of Cassie. "You're not at the stage where you can manage an active defense on your current mental processing, so something autonomous will be required. While mounting turrets like on the original Cassie." The digital mech acquired a multi-barreled turret on each shoulder. "Allows for some significant additional firepower versus smaller units, at reasonable expenditure it will come with blind spots.

  Quinn shifted slightly. "I'm not sure I'm comfortable having guns shooting at me either."

  "I can assure you that it would not be a caliber able to penetrate Cassie's armor, but I digress. The first option I'd truly recommend is this." The guns disappeared, and a number of spikes flared up in various places around the mech.

  "By using a set of combat nanites, we can implement two layers of defense. The first is more visible - ferromagnetic nanite swarms that can stab out from anywhere on Cassie's surface. They don't have the penetration for higher Models, but will turn lower single digits into pincushions the moment they enter its range. This solution would also come with dispersed decay swarms, which would spread among the Antithesis nearby and rapidly incapacitated them."

  "Like the flesh melters." Quinn observed.

  "Yes, though more aggressive and shorter lived. The decay swarms target Antithesis nervous systems, but don't bother eating through the rest of the biomass. Quicker to kill, but still requires cleanup afterwards."

  "Okay, that seems like a reasonable option. What else."

  The display Cassie lost the spikes, only to be suddenly surrounded by a number of floating star like things, each probably the size of a large dog.

  "The second option relies on Vanguard Hayden's catalogs, but I highly doubt he would be opposed. These are autonomous drones that orbit Cassie and can fire blasts of electricity, killing most sub 11 Models. "

  "I'm also not sure about…"

  Irys interrupted Quinn mid sentence. "Cassie is entirely insulated, and the drones could simply hold fire if there was any real possibility of danger to you." Quinn let out her breath, allowing Irys to continue. "These drones could also easily fire upon nearby Antithesis as well, not insignificantly adding to your crowd control capabilities.

  Quinn nodded. "Okay, could they zoop off to help elsewhere?"

  "Unfortunately not. In order to maintain stable flight and for power purposes they are held within an electromagnetic field from within Cassie. They can vary the radius of their orbit slightly, but flying off to other parts of the battlefield is infeasible without points expenditure I do not recommend."

  Quinn frowned. "Why not just make them normal flying drones then so they can move freely?"

  She caught blade dancer walking with his large sword drawn and flying beside him, flat and very low to the ground. She watched him with some confusion for a moment before returning her attention to Irys.

  "Utilizing this method the drones require neither propulsion nor energy generation on board, allowing for a significantly heavier weapon and armor payload than a self contained drone of the same size and points. More bang for your buck, so to speak, though costing some flexibility. There are also paths later on to upgrade them with quantum locking, further increasing their durability and allowing them to be used to block attack."

  Huh, that was… weird but pretty neat. "Okay, that's actually pretty awesome. Any others?"

  "Yes, one more." The simulation shifted again, and suddenly there was a loose formation of soldiers with rifles arrayed around Cassie. "Using more traditional drones, you could become the cavalry for your own ground force."