880 880 Nico Needs Knowledge
The giant red creature seemed to get even more excited once Max had two weapons, but Max couldn’t tell if it was because he preferred fighting against this style or if it was because of the new weapon he was facing.
Max went on the offensive, knocking the Demon back a few steps with his blade before hooking the giant creature’s sword with the hook of the new weapon. The red Demon smirked in joy as it flapped its wings and rotated, using the hook as a guide to drive his sword down into Max’s shoulder.
With a grating that sounded like metal on metal, though the Mecha was made of the monomolecular alloy that all of their most recent designs were, the two-handed blade of the giant carved a gouge in the Mecha but failed to penetrate.
Before the Demon could withdraw, Max dropped the blade in his left hand and grabbed the creature’s arm, pulling them together with a resounding crash and allowing him to drive the forearm-mounted blade of his right arm into the creature’s chest and inject the freezing liquid.
The freezing spread rapidly through the creature’s body, and the Demon slowed to a halt. Only pure rage at having been tricked into having its chest impaled crossed the creature’s mind as Max kicked it off his blade, and then nothingness as he followed through to crush the Demon’s skull.
After a quick look around for his next target, Max found the battlefield nearly empty, with only Nico still in combat, fighting one of the six armed violet-skinned creatures.
These creatures were big on duels and honour, or at least the bigger red ones were, so Max let them fight it out for the moment and checked on the situation on the rest of this strange battlefield.
The Cutter appeared undamaged, and all of the Innu were still standing at the door of the cargo bay. The Demons had gotten close, but Nico had intercepted them and distracted them long enough for the Innu to clear out the small ones.
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Max could see the path that the Demons had left as they ran from one battle to another, and there was no movement at the site of the battle with the Galen force. There were mountains of bodies, both the brightly coloured monsters and some sort of augmentic armour, which must be Galen’s infantry uniform.
If Max was right, this place would have restricted the use of their interceptor jets, possibly by making it impossible for them to fly the same way that the Cutter couldn’t escape the battlefield, and certain thrusters didn’t work.
Max started to search the bodies for anything that could be useful to them since none of this was in their databases and collected a few different swords, plus a few smaller corpses to bring back to the Cargo Bay for examination.
Nico was doing the same thing, picking up a small sample of random items to test for later, but she also stopped to grab a few Mecha-sized weapons to add to the pile.
That wasn’t a bad idea. If they couldn’t replicate them, they could at least use these strange blades, which could cut into reinforced Mecha Armour without any sort of external power supply.
It took a few trips, but they soon had a few of each type of demon body and a collection of weapons that should last them and the Innu through months of research or at least a few battles.
The chains which attached the weapons to the creatures’ wrists were part of the weapons themselves and not simply looped over them, Max found. It made the process of recovering them rather difficult unless he hacked the arms off the corpses, but generally, if he grabbed the weapon and pulled, the chain would come free on its own.
Some of them were actually embedded into the arm of the wielder using small spikes, and the flesh of the Demons had grown back around them, keeping the weapon secure but also as a permanent fixture in the creature’s life.
Max wondered what their lives must have been like to need weapons attached to them at all times. Even just to eat or sleep, it would make sense to remove the chains, but it didn’t look like some of these had been removed in years. Some of the larger members of the group even had flesh grown through the tightly wrapped chains, as if it had been attached all their life and their bodies grew around it.
“Alright, I think that we have enough to start our research. What should we work on first?” Nico asked when Max brought the last few bodies he had collected into the bay.
“I say we start with trying to find out the physiology of these things so that we can kill them more easily. We don’t know where their vital spots are or what they can regenerate at such a fast pace.
I didn’t see any of them regrow entire limbs, but when I hit them with the dispersed Disintegrators, any surface damage that didn’t kill them grew back in under a minute.” Max suggested.
“But don’t take off your armour.” Nico reminded the Innu.
It was a safety precaution in case the creatures weren’t really dead and could recover from even these wounds. Or worse, if they were carrying an infectious disease that the scanners didn’t detect.
Nico climbed down from her Mecha while Max remained in his, in case he needed to throw reanimated corpses back out of the cargo bay in a hurry. The chances seemed pretty slim, but they had chosen the most intact bodies that they could find for the experiments, and that meant a small risk that these fast-healing beings could be only nearly dead.
Nico was just cutting into the first one when an alert from the Duty Captain caught everyone’s attention.
[Commanders, check the external sensors. Something strange is going on out there.] The Giant nearly screamed into the microphone, and Max felt the ship power up in preparation to move.