What's Junk? (The Mech Touch)

Pup was an expert candidate. As a candidate, he got training every day, one-on-one mentorship with Lilly, and favored treatment in many areas. This favor did not get him out of normal every day duties though. In point of fact he sometimes got some extra chores just to keep him humble. Lilly had frequently and constantly told him to work on his mindset just as much as his skills while doing those chores. Something about willpower, focus, and so on. If he were to be honest, Pup really didn't get a lot of it.

What he did get was that he wasn't exempt from patrolling. He actually did a lot of guard duty for some reason. Sometimes they even had people try to mess with him too! Pup tried not to hold it against them, but he was getting really tired of being tested all the time! (Honing willpower required a lot of work, and the Rats lacked a lot of usual tools.)

That meant he wasn't that shocked when he picked up the scent of a mech. Or rather his mech picked up the scent. According to Lilly he had a surprisingly good talent with sensory systems. That was actually pretty rare and something they'd been trying to hone. To his mind this was just another test along that vein.

It was hard to track this one. Harder than usual. The ever-present mist they kept up as mild cover always sort of muted scents, but this was worse than normal. He had to press his mech's nose to the ground in some parts to follow it, and it seemed to split at several points. Annoying!

Then, when he finally got closer, he couldn't find the target visually! That meant they were going to ambush him somehow. Pup haaaated ambushes. They always shot at him and he still couldn't line up his shots as well as he wanted. He was getting better at it, but ick! Plodding into the area was a no-go too. He'd been scolded far too many times for that. 'Treat every training exercise like real life!' 'Don't walk into fights.' 'Pay attention Pup.'

Which meant that his next action was firing an napalm missile forward. The muddy ground would keep it from spreading, and he needed to illuminate the target. Napalm missiles were cheap, and he had lots of them, so they were great to just lob at areas when you needed to shoot something. The missile went into the mist, landed, and ignited some of the ground.

To his annoyance the fires didn't reveal anything.

That was when the first prickle of unease hit him. Pup fell back on pure instinct without questioning why every sense was blaring danger and threat at the same time. He jittered in place and switched to Hellfire, before firing two shots at different areas. Both missiles flew through the air. Whether chance or innate skill, one splashed against something.

"Alert!" Pup howled into his mic, to no response.

Which made no sense at all. He knew jamming. You always got static with jamming. This meant something! He just didn't know what.

He was also pretty sure that stealthy things were supposed to be caught when you got them with something. He could just barely see the foot. There was some blurring, but he could only see it because he could see the foot! Then the stealthy thing fired at him and the feedback from the hit made him scream.

Cerberus had decent armor. It was meant to take a hit rather than dodge. Even a pointblank shot shouldn't have done the damage it did. Pup could feel his mech staggering and then another shot hit it. That one ruptured his reactor and tore through half a dozen vital components.

Something was horribly, horribly wrong.

Unknown to Pup, he was fighting a second rate Hexxer mech. It was one of the less useful direct combat ones but still Second Rate. As a stealth mech meant to operate in areas of less supply it was weak compared to other Second Rate mechs. Its claim to fame was the near perfect stealth and long operational time. It was equipped with a singular dagger and a small suppressed handgun for offense. Both were relatively anemic weapons, for the tech level it came from. Against a Third Rate mech this meant it would merely break most of the armor with a few shots instead of causing catastrophic damage with one or two good hits.

As his mech slumped to the ground Pup saw his opponent approach on his fading sensors. Oddly, the only thing he felt was dread. Not for himself. He'd come to terms with death on his first sortie. The dread came from the fact that he knew his family was in trouble. He was supposed to warn them.

'Get up.'

Pup growled as he wrenched at the controls. The reactor was blown. There was no more power. There was just the dregs in the power cells. No amount of physical effort from him could move the mass of metal. He still tried.

'GET UP!'

"Damnit. At least work!" He jabbed at the comms in his cockpit. That had emergency internal cells. It could broadcast. Or at least it could if not for the jamming.

The enemy was going to kill him. They were taking their time doing it, but they were going to kill him. Trying to keep sound down? The shots had been muffled hadn't they? That shouldn't matter. His shots had been pretty loud, but there was a chance they hadn't been heard. He was a decent distance out, and the lack of radio meant bad things.

'Get up or everyone dies.'

"No." The young man growled out and grabbed at something. Maybe the eject system? If he got out, could he run to someone to warn them? His hand tapped at the Heart Crystal as he realized that he'd have to outrun the enemy mech, which was impossible. "Damnit!"

Something burned in his breast, and he felt something spike in his head. Pup grabbed at the controls again with nothing but instinct and his mech lurched. Resonance roared as his willpower demanded a response. The mech surged with electricity as its systems powered up for one last time.

Both the right and left heads of Cerberus exploded as the launchers were forced to function far beyond their capacity. Missiles were unloaded without regards to space or sense. A dozen Hellfire missiles roared into the air and ignited everything around the downed mech. The approaching stealth specialist was caught dead center of the entire mess.

Hellfire ate everything. Against a Second Rate being covered wasn't a death sentence. It was more than enough to cause serious damage still. The pilot did as trained and dashed out of the sudden inferno as fast as possible. It was enough to stop it from dying. Nothing else. The stealth system was absolutely fried and half it's systems were done from that one strike and it had to retreat out of the general area. A hit from literally anything else would likely spell its doom.

"WE'RE UNDER ATTACK!" Pup screamed out as the fires roared around him.

One miracle. That was what the universe owed Pup, and what he collected. His voice was heard. Through the jamming, through the lack of power, through the impossibilities that prevented him from being heard, the warning made it through.

The pilot of the stealth mech wasn't quite aware of that. Despite the shout, she was in a sealed mech and attuned to a specific tactical channel. She couldn't hear Pup's warning. Only the jammer could hear that the transmissions had been pierced.

Relaying that information turned out to be relatively pointless though. Pup's warning caused the mountain to go on red alert. The ones observing things could see the doors crashing down as the place was sealed. Shields were raised up, and mechs were scrambled.

It was too late to abort. The stealth mechs carrying the kill teams had already deployed them. Plan B was therefore moved up to the primary plan. The Kill Teams moved into the mountain and the mechs moved to intercept Wrench Rat forces. The swordsman moved forward and the battle began in earnest.

Pup's mech was left to burn with the semi-reasonable assumption that the Hellfire around him would eventually kill him as it spread. It was a semi-reasonable assumption. It might have been true had the pilot not been drilled repeatedly for scenarios like this. Pup's only regret was that it would take an hour to get back.