Ravens of Eternity

283 Reclamation Overdue, Pt While the others wiped out the SSS guards that came from the south, Freya and Raijin charged towards the three coming in from the north. Freya raised her towershield and protected Raijin behind her, as the two of them were sprayed down by bursts of enemy fire.

A pity that their weapons were too weak, and barely scratched her shield. Most bounced helplessly off its thick reinforced plating and clattered down to the titacrete highway.

Raijin peeked out from behind Freya for just a few moments, and focused her experimental shoulder-mounted weapon on them. It looked relatively short and simple compared to most other weapons that went there.

But it was far from benign.

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Raijin Concepts Photonic Wideband Disruptor v1 [X]

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The weapon whined as it charged up, then after a second, it blasted the enemy’s sensors with electrophotonic energy.

The energies flooded every single one of their sensors and blasted them with raw data. For a few brief moments, the sensors were so overwhelmed that they reported pure noise across every spectrum.

.....

The screens and MFDs inside of the enemy cores instantly lit up to their absolute brightest while the sonic emitters released every sound possible within the human hearing spectrum. It was blinding and deafening, and echoed inside the core and hammered the pilots relentlessly.

All three were utterly stunned as Raijin’s attack bombarded their senses.

While they stumbled, Freya charged straight at the closest one, and jammed her spear in its side, just under the core. It punched through the armor and the structure, and right through the power plant.

And as she pulled the spear free, the now-ruptured power plant began to swell from the pressure. Freya kicked the mecha away, just as it tore itself open from the resulting explosion.

At the same time, her Beamcannon turned towards the enemy mecha on her right. The bright red beam struck its head and began to slag its armor easily. It melted through the structure underneath, then utterly liquefied the sensor cluster inside.

Although Raijin’s sensory assault on them ended, it also left them completely blind.

Not that the pilot cared to even fight after having gone through all that. The sensation of being drowned under Raijin’s attack felt him feeling dizzy and nauseous and out of breath. Having to deal with nothing all of a sudden was an incredible relief.

So he simply sat his mecha down and shut the whole thing off.

The third was still reeling from the attack – the aftereffects of the visual and aural stun echoed over and over and continued to assault him. Though it ebbed with every second that passed.

Before he could completely recover, Freya slammed right into him with her shield, and smashed him against a building. His mecha’s armor dented and collapsed severely as the titacrete wall cracked and crumbled all around.

She then jammed her spear up into the mecha, pierced through its core, and annihilated the pilot inside. When she drew it back out, blood was on the very tip.

After they ensured the enemies were neutralized, the Ravens collected themselves and blasted northwards as fast as they could go.

“The district’s comms arrays are two blocks ahead,” Raijin told the others. “I am detecting multiple hovertanks guarding the entire block, however. I also detect more mecha wings incoming – one from the north, another from the northeast.”

“Loadouts?” asked Lucifer.

“Similar to before. However, the northeast wing has a higher weapon output than the other.”

“Potentially long range, then. Maybe to soften us on our northward approach.”

“Do we flank left or right?” asked Freya.

“Neither. We charge centerline at maximum velocity and get into melee as fast as possible. That’ll defang all their ranged attacks.”

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Kali cried out.

She then pushed her throttle to the maximum and blasted forward with speed. The others quickly followed suit. And as they approached, they spread out from each other, and began to weave evasively.

As Lucifer had surmised, the artillery wing northeast of their position began to pound the area. Multiple 240mm shells came down all around and blasted the highway and left deep craters in the titacrete.

On top of that, the hovertanks had all formed into a staggered regiment, and hovered alongside the northern wing of mecha. They angled their barrels down the mega highway, and fired a barrage of shells downrange.

Their shells helped blanket the area with explosive power, and devastated everything they struck. The titacrete ground and buildings were pummeled mercilessly.

Worse, it didn’t matter to them that there were civilians in hoppers who had stopped at the side of the highway. Last thing any of them wanted was to get flattened by the mecha around them. But they weren’t able to escape the devastation.

They were pummeled by their own people’s artillery fire and blasted to pieces. Hoppers with simple people were torn apart by the SSS’ overexuberance for “safety”.

And despite all that, the Ravens were hardly hit. Their evasive maneuvers and powerful armor all but negated any damage. Though the titacrete around them were blown to pieces, they bounced off without hardly making a dent.

Freya was first to attack. Her Beamcannon swept across a quarter of the hovertank formation, which caused their systems to overheat as their armor began to slag. Mecha had always held a significant advantage over armored vehicles such as tanks.

The frames that held the sensor clusters began to sag from the heat, and visible electronic systems started to short out. And when she swept the beam across them a second time, cut through the softened armor and punched into the structure underneath.

Three of the hovertanks were completely compromised, and Freya’s beam was able to cut through to its inner workings. Drivers and gunners who were hit directly by the beam were gruesomely cooked alive as a result.

A few of the tanks exploded as her beam punched through their power plants.

Although she shot first, it was Kali who got in the enemy’s faces first. She crashed right into the mecha’s lines and began the melee with a powerful swing of her axe. It came down on an enemy who used his rifle to block her blow.

But it was so powerful that it cut right through with absolute ease. It then crashed down onto the mecha’s chest and chewed right through its armor.

Kali then pulled her axe away violently, and wrenched the mecha’s armor open, even as it stumbled forward. She then swung her axe laterally and dug into the mecha’s chest armor a second time. And then a third, and a fourth.

The pilot did his best to protect himself, and tried to block every swing she performed. But she simply cut right through whatever he raised, gun or hand or arm.

The mecha stumbled left and right as Kali struck it over and over with her axe, and sheared off huge chunks of armor and structure along the way. Finally, she kicked the exposed core violently, and crushed the pilot inside.

The mecha fell over on its back, defeated and destroyed.

The others around him fared just as poorly. Xylo charged in from the right flank and wove between them as she blasted each one with bursts from her rifle. Though they didn’t outright tear through, they left massive dents on their armor.

It allowed the others to use them for their own advantage.

Lucifer certainly did. Ze too came in from the right flank, aimed for the weakened spots of armor, and fired hir own charged bursts at them. Hir slugs tore through the enemy armor with incredible ease, and slagged the structure underneath.

A couple punched through to the cores and completely disintegrated the pilots inside. The others were so heavily damaged that they could barely move.

“Raijin!” ze cried out. “We’ll keep their attention! You do what you need to do!”

“Hai!”

Raijin broke away from the fighting and buzzed past the enemies as fast as she could, and ducked westward down a side street. Despite the enemies having visually seen her, she was nowhere to be found on their targeting lists, and couldn’t even follow her if they wanted. They simply couldn’t track her.

But she was the last of their worries – the others were decimating them with incredible ease.

Raijin turned north halfway down the street, then jumped up onto a building with lithe grace. She flipped up and over, jumped onto a taller building, then stabilized herself into a landing with her bottom thrusters.

While the others fought half a block away, she scanned the energy readings from the buildings around her. For a few seconds, Raijin watched the flow of electricity and power shift between everything, and looked for whichever one of them used up the most.

A task far too easy.

She hopped over a few rooftops and landed on the building that drew the most energy. Although all the rooftops here had fancy communication arrays installed on top of them, this one had an entire cluster of arrays in the center.

This was clearly the comms hub for the entire district.

She quickly connected to the in/out stream, hijacked a few secure packages going in, and injected her code the moment she slipped through. Both her Truesight and Oversight Engines took little time in beginning their takeover.

Their code spread and infected the intelligences that ran communications, which caused the datacoders inside to erupt in panic.

Dozens of them scrambled to protect their machines – most immediately sent out countercode to defend their circuits, but found that Raijin’s intelligences were simply far more robust than their own. They watched helplessly as her code ate through their own as though they barely existed.

They ended up facing the two engines manually, and did everything they could to retain control of their own systems. But their efforts were useless. Oversight had taken control of root systems, and removed their access from the bottom up.

From there, they were isolated and shut out, unable to do a damned thing.

At the same time, Truesight converted the code and made it Raijin’s to play with.

But she was far from done. Simply taking over one communications node wasn’t enough. If they were going to be successful, they needed to take over every comms node on the planet.

So Raijin entered her Machine Trance and directly invaded the corporate network.

She immediately connected to nearby communications nodes in blocks and districts adjacent to hers, and continued Truesight and Oversight’s expansion through precise code injection. They began their takeover of the planet’s communications systems and spread out from node to node, district to district.

All the while, she suppressed any outgoing or incoming communications, and kept everyone in those districts dark.

She then looked upwards and connected directly to the orbital communications satellite that hovered above her group of districts. And injected both of her Engines there as well.

While they spread like wildfire through the entire system on the ground, her code replicated across their entire communications network above. She went across their whole system at lightning speed and infected the surrounding nodes one by one by one, all in the span of seconds.

SSS datacoders all over the planet were left completely bewildered as their own access was completely cut off. Those who understood what was going on, that they were being hacked into, attempted to reach out to call for help.

But paled when they realized that they had zero way to contact anyone. The planet’s corporate network had been completely taken over, one node at a time.

Raijin paused briefly and watched as her engines swept over the planet’s communications network. Her code converted everything with incredible speed, and gave her more and more control over the whole thing.

They were halfway done before she was satisfied with their progress, then sunk her consciousness back down to her physical body.

“In one minute,” Raijin told the others, “the planet’s communications system will be ours.”

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