964 964 Kill, Kill
The next opponents were a bit smarter than the last batch, and the one on Max’s left side wasn’t coming close enough to take a shield to the helmet.
Their armour was impressive, but it seemed that they hadn’t considered the fact that a three-tonne chunk of metal with an energy barrier surrounding it might come rushing at them at hundreds of kilometres an hour in the hands of a giant robot.
It was a fair assumption for most species, but when the humans were around, there weren’t really any attacks that you could rule out. They would try anything and everything that might kill or disable their opponents, and a shield bash was only a mild improvisation.
The enemy wasn’t speaking at all, only growling and screaming incoherent battle cries that didn’t seem to have any sort of organized language behind them.
There was something off about them, though. Most of them collapsed and bled as expected when they were chopped apart, but some of them began to regenerate, some bled colours other than red, and some vanished entirely when they were killed.
[Nico, I think that these enemies are corrupted by those demonic-looking things we fought in the other layer.
Their behaviour is the same, and they don’t die right.] Max called out as he fought.
“They seem to die pretty good to me. No, scratch that. I just saw one of them put his head back on when it was hanging by a flap. There is something seriously wrong with this group.”
Max matched attacks with a large fighter wielding a pair of red, energy shielded claws on his hands and took a measure of the fighting styles that these strange warriors had to offer.
Most of them were not all that nuanced, more brutal and straightforward, but they weren’t crude in any way. These opponents seemed to have gone through centuries of warfare to hone their brutal ways, and they were surprisingly hard to take down in close combat.
Unfortunately for them, they were greatly overmatched in this situation, and the Mecha were tearing them apart at a rapid pace.
It wasn’t a large force that had come their way, and the Hunters were in full competitive mode, trying to slaughter the enemy faster than each other and, most importantly, faster than Nico.
They were proud Huntresses, after all. Nico might be mighty, but she was tiny, and they would never accept that such a diminutive warrior was actually a better killer than they were.
Even if the enemy hadn’t been dripping with blood to begin with, the battlefield would have been drenched in it by now with the number of them that had fallen. They were too predictable in their blind rage, and even the Androids weren’t having any issues cutting them down like harvesting crops.
It was fairly sad, really. They were huge, muscular, and had years of practice, but against a force that had acquired so many different battle techniques, they might as well have been children entering a professional fighting ring.
“Do you think that their minds have degenerated? They’re obviously not at their very best, or the main force wouldn’t be doing so well against the other aliens, much less the Myceloids, who are much more cunning than this.” Khan suggested as she hacked one of the enemy’s heads off.
“That could be. I think that we might have attracted the attention of a group of berserkers whose minds have been damaged. The way that they’re fighting, I would barely call them sentient, but the rest of their force doesn’t seem to have that problem.” Max agreed.
“So, we got the trash tier fighters? This is bullshit.” Nico complained, then realized that the area around her was clear with nothing left to fight and launched into a tirade that Max muted from the radio.
As the last of the enemies were cleared from the battlefield, Max took the opportunity to pull a few of the helmets off so that he could see what he was actually dealing with.
ραndαsΝοvεl ƈοm The first one looked much like the demonic beings from the other layer but with shocking green eyes that still showed the rampant madness of its mind even after death. The next looked very nearly human and even bled red blood, as it should have. The only parts that made it clear that humanity had nothing to do with this monstrosity were the large horns on its head.
Nico stripped a few armour suits off so that she could analyze their biology but ran into the same issue. They were all different.
“I think that they really are corrupted versions of other species. A lot of them look like they started out human, or perhaps Darkling, as the features are similar, but they’ve mutated to the point that there is no way that they should have still been functional,” she noted.
“Bring some of them back to the shuttle with us. There is a lot more here to study than a simple battle between two alien species. If the barrier between layers is so weak that the beings of the other layer are ending up here or corrupting the species that live here, we need to find out if it is a threat to the region around the anomaly.” Huntress Khan ordered.
She made a very good point. These might be from the other layer and somehow were transported here, or they might have been corrupted there and came here to fight. In that case, they might be corrupting everything that they came into contact with.
They hadn’t been spotted near the Anomaly yet, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get there. An enemy that corrupted everything around it would be even more of a pain to fight than the Myceloids, who just colonized everywhere that they went with their spores.
“Understood Huntress. We’ve got a wide variety of body styles so that we can make a proper comparison.” The lead unit of the Android force replied.
Each of them had picked up a body to bring back, which was way too much, but they could analyze them in the woods near the shuttle if they wanted. It didn’t look like anything else was coming to find them.