NOVEL NEXT B2 Chapter 34
Angar's heart pounded as dread grew in his chest. Squashing his nerves, he activated Tempest just as four plasma whips, one half-severed, lashed out from the Enforcers.
He spun into a graviton-empowered whirlwind, his hammer becoming a blur of destruction while cords of plasma wrapped around him, coiling like vipers.
His first blow smashed an Enforcer's hip, unleashing a bolt from Lightning Strike that cracked through the air with a vengeance.
The beast roared as its biomechanical armor dented inward, but it didn't fall or stop. The whips tightened, twisting along with him, burning deep into his suit.
Unlike against the Harmongulan, his spin tore through unchecked, snapping the plasma cords into gray ash. But the burns had already sunk too deeply.
He hadn't paid close attention to the warnings his HUD flashed, as he hoped his suit was still sealed and safe from the vacuum of space. If it had been before, it wasn't any longer, as one whip had coiled around his neck. Even with Tempest's damage mitigation, part of it breached the armor, searing into the flesh of his neck.
Roaring, he channeled another Energy point into his maul, its spin whirring like a wrathful hymn amid the fray.
A Guardrone's volley slammed into his back, the plasma scorching into his armor, causing new warnings to flash. His maul struck again, hammering the same Enforcer's hip, denting it inward more, then whipping around to crack the second. He infused more Energy into the weapon.
Another Guardrone exploded in sparks just as Thunderstorm's lightning crackled from his maul, right when four sizzling clubs hammered his torso in unison, sending him flying.
He'd trusted the damage mitigation to shield him from the worst. But the impact sent his head reeling, and his vision blackening.
When he opened his eyes, he was slumped against the wall, dazed, pain lancing through his head and body, and a Guardrone's barrage searing into his armor.
The Enforcers' fusion cannons roared as four massive beams of blue-violet energy tore through the air.
Angar rolled away, clearing the beams, but the ensuing blast from the floor and wall erupting sent him flying through the air as more and worse warnings blared in his HUD.
He slammed down hard, tumbling across the deck until he lay sprawled, dazed, his body blazing in pain.
And that pain provided clarity as the ground trembled under the Enforcers' approaching stomps.
Scrambling to his feet, for the first time this battle, Angar glimpsed his companions, locked in a desperate fight with the Warforms, barely holding their own.
The Ierne officer dangled, his unarmored body nearly torn apart and dripping blood, impaled on an Ebon Drain, as was the veteran that had accompanied Simo.
The Hierarch, Simo, and the swordsman fought up close, amid their enemies, nullifying their missiles and railguns. Three Warforms lay dead, and another joined them as the swordsman cleaved through a mechsuit head.
A boom ripped through the chamber, causing the floor to tremble. It took him a moment to realize it was the mass of breaching charges. They failed to make a hole, ending any hope of reinforcement.
They couldn't afford this drawn-out battle. There wasn't time for any of this. The Neural Dominion still held, orchestrating every Old Guard move with unholy precision.
The imperial forces were drowning in slaughter. Nothing else would turn the tide more. He had to engage the Neuronaut as soon as possible, or this was all a waste, and the Synapse-Engine should've been targeted instead.
Looking over, the second door had resealed, shattering Angar's plan to lure the Enforcers through it to confront the Neuronaut, disrupting its Neural Dominion.
With no real plan, he braced for the Enforcers. He desperately tried triggering Lightning Strike, only to find it still on cooldown. His heart sank.
He noticed the psychic pressure that had clawed at his mind was gone. He also couldn't see the last Guardrone, assuming Simo got that one too.
The Enforcers, one limping but unrelenting, closed in, their plasma whips shorter but still deadly. He needed a way to stand against those massive clubs he hadn't yet been able to avoid.
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As he desperately tried thinking of something, a gut instinct flared, giving him an idea.
The Enforcers charged in with whips sizzling through the air, almost upon him. Angar dove aside and sprinted away to the other side of the chamber, buying seconds to open his System screens.
With few exceptions, ranged combat and its applicable meta-builds dominated the Holy Empire
The combat instructors at Cloisteranage scoffed at his melee focus, believing it a childish phase he'd outgrow.
What need of dodging, they sneered, when you could vaporize enemies from a thousand meters out?
It was sound reasoning, but his companions, now fighting up close in melee, proved its flaws. And his Class was granted to him by one of the Holy Trinity, the blessed Mother herself.
He believed it held some spark of her Divine power in life, before sacrificing herself, when she stood alone against unholy terrors that none since could stand against.
The Capstone alone granted him Attributes and Stats far beyond imagination.
He was Mecian, superior to all others. He was born and bred as a melee fighter. He'd never abandon this path.
Acrobatics, Armor, Close Combat, and Close Weapons Skills training gave him a solid base of avoiding attacks by blocking, dodging, gymnastics, parrying, and rolling.
Not getting hit was useful, but as range doctrine was king, most melee-related Skills were looked down upon and ignored.
As he ran, without navigating through the menus, he mentally selected the Blocking Tactics Skill, automatically bringing the Skills menu up.
Without time passing, new knowledge flooded his brain and muscle memory. He couldn't recall learning it, but he had just received a hundred hours of specialized System training in intercepting and mitigating strikes and objects through precise positioning and force redirection.
Unlike the common blocking and parrying techniques covered by his Close Combat and Close Weapon Skills, Blocking Tactics emphasized advanced techniques to absorb, deflect, and redirect the momentum of attacks using his body, a shield, or a weapon's weight and leverage, enabling him to turn an opponent's strength against them while minimizing strain on his body.
He mentally selected Blocking Tactics 2 training.
The System menu shifted to reveal a newly appeared Skill, Disarming Tactics, which hadn't been on his list before. He knew what disarms were, of course, and was familiar with many techniques to achieve them, but he had never seen or heard of this specific Skill.
Shrugging mentally, he selected it. A split second later, he understood what the specialized training entailed. As the name suggested, Disarming Tactics focused on neutralizing an opponent's weapon by targeting their grip or the weapon itself with precise strikes, forcing them to drop or lose control of it.
Unlike parrying, which involved deflecting a blow with minimal contact, or blocking, which focused on absorbing and redirecting force, disarming was an aggressive and proactive defense, preventing strikes altogether.
He mentally selected Disarming Tactics 2 training.
The menu shifted again, displaying another Skill he had never seen or heard of before, named Melee Mastery.
There was no way he was passing that up. As soon as the training concluded, he understood its purpose.
Melee Mastery was a culmination Skill, representing the fusion of all his melee-related training in a hundred-hour course where offense, defense, and mobility were seamlessly integrated.
It provided lessons on counterattacking instinctively with a master's strikes, targeting vital points with greater precision and impact, and controlling the flow of combat against a diverse set of threats.
Without a second thought or moment's hesitation, he selected Melee Mastery 2, spending six Skill Points total in the blink of an eye.
His menu didn't shift to reveal any new Skills, so he closed the screens.
His maul felt lighter and more comfortable in his gauntlets, his body felt more his own, more controllable.
He looked back at the two Enforcers with new insights.
Four fusion cannons fired blinding blue-violet beams, arcing with white tendrils, shattering the floor he'd just vacated in explosions that blasted shards outward, pelting his armor, adding to the acrid stench of molten alloys choking the air.
His sprint and recent dive away from the fusion beams had brought him closer to the Warforms. Two at the rear of their formation pivoted toward him.
He activated Lightning Strike while infusing his hammer with a point of Energy.
Angar knew he had no chance of dodging any firearm's discharge.
Railguns were among the rarer weapons firing actual physical rounds. Different types used different ammo, but all rounds were encased in highly conductive, heat-resistant metal, propelled at extreme speeds by a magnetic field generated through a completed circuit, with the rounds forming part of the circuit.
He had no chance of dodging a railgun round, but he could read their trajectories before they left the barrel. He predicted both Warforms would aim for his center mass.
Angar raised his hammer, holding it outstretched, its large head serving as a shield, gravity warping around it.
The projectiles hurtled in, some redirected away by warped gravity, the rest clanging harmlessly off his hammer's galvornium head in a spray of sparks.
The Warforms' missile pods erupted, sending a dozen streaking toward him.
Angar launched into a side flip, twisting into a butterfly kick, then a dead out into a somersault, ending in a sideways tuck jump.
The missiles screamed past, detonating against the deck in fiery blooms, as the Warforms failed to track him quickly enough with their railguns.
He sidestepped the final missile, extending his cybernetic leg to angle its blazing path along it. Spinning swiftly, he guided the projectile as it slid off, redirecting it to land between the Warforms.
The explosion roared, hurling both mechsuits skyward and unbalancing those behind them.
As the Enforcers reached him with shortened plasma-whips lashing at his back, he threw himself into a piked backward somersault, the cords sizzling around him as he twisted through the air.
When his feet hit the ground, the graviton-charged maul arced forward, slamming into the biomechanical armor of the injured Enforcer's spine.
It roared, spinning leftward, its kin turning rightward in opposite synchronization, and four searing clubs blazed like lightning toward Angar, slicing through the air to crush the defiant gnat.