The crew, to its credit, responded as they should've to the deteriorating situation. The piloting crews forced the Jackal's legs back under its body, coaxing the Titan into a semi-mobile stance. Two Aud clinging to its frame were bad enough; more would be catastrophic.
The gunnery crews diverted fire inward, hammering the Jackal's own exterior. It scored and deformed patches of scutumsteel plating, but not as severely as the ravaging work of the two greens chewing into it.
In the meantime, engineering teams, already stationed inside the legs' compartments for exactly this contingency, went active. Hatches released, seals peeled open, and men and women disappeared behind the walls of the internal compartments, entering a labyrinth where the Jackal's mechanical and electrical engineering lay bare.
She knew better than to expect a clean repair. Diagnostics had already identified the fault: one of the larger servos was offline. Its motor was sound, but it was starved for hydraulic pressure. Fluid wasn't reaching its target chambers.
That meant the blockage or leak lay upstream, hidden somewhere along the hydraulic transmission lines. Engineers would have to hunt it down, tracing the system node by node until they located the breach. They would be as helpless as medical staff tracing an artery, frantically searching for the rupture or clot.
If it extended further, their options grew worse: dispatching more engineers deeper into the Jackal's active and shifting machinery—reckless and dangerous in all the right ways—or waiting for the autonomous intelligences in charge of the diagnostics net to map the leak themselves.
They didn't need to decide in haste, at least. One of the Titan's rear-facing sensors, permanently slaved to the image of the Last Light, had just flagged high-velocity motion—a human silhouette, sprinting faster than the baseline physics and the fundamentals of kinesiology should adhere to.
More followed behind, some almost as fast, others slower, leaving the industrial district's edge and moving toward the base of the walls. The first carriers of the Old Man's Blessing had arrived. Some already waiting on the support platforms of the inner walls were activated as well, and they joined the ascent.
The lead figure among those coming from the industrial district halted at the base only briefly before bending low, then sprang upward in a single impossible arc. A serviceman in a heavy WAV hit the walltop with the weight of an ordnance strike, leaving a crater meters across.
She was already gone by the time the visual sensors had a lock on her, her afterimage streaking up the Jackal's exterior. The first Aud digging into the plating took the full brunt of her arrival, body driven deeper into the cavity it had been excavating. She grasped its hindquarters, swung it in a vicious arc, her scutumsteel boots cutting into the Titan's plating as anchors, and used the Jackal's renewed motion to fuel the momentum. The Aud smashed into its companion, and sparks and shrapnel erupted around the trio.
Three more WAV pilots reached the walltop, bypassing the lifts entirely. Two sprinted for the nearest greens, while the third extended both palms in an outward thrust. The pair launched forward, lesser imitations of the heavy WAV already tearing into her opponents.
The Jackal limped backward, its crew relying on the Blessed now riding its frame to occupy its two attempted saboteurs. Titan-grade emplacements redeployed, striking at targets further back. He-6's aide kept the firing solutions clean, raising the arcs so the arriving WAVs weren't caught by friendly fire.
Within a minute, the others made it up, and the Titan's crew saw humanity at its apex. The light WAV pilot who'd hurled the first pair now did the same for most of the Blessed exiting the lifts, flinging them straight into combat. They amplified the group's coordination through sabotage, hand gestures manipulating Aud musculature as though the enemy were puppets, twisting claws aside, forcing bites to miss, bending joints the wrong way.
One of the ranged pilots, refusing to close with the enemy, raised his wrist-mounted electrics and fired. The beams flickered unnaturally when they struck fur, phasing in and out, leaving burn scars that wavered like unstable projections over and underneath the fur at the same time.
Those thrown into melee proved why they were willing to enter into a range most considered suicidal. A green fur latched onto the shoulder pauldron of a default WAV. Instead of yielding, the armor warped away from its teeth, the maw closing on air. Its claw fared no better—piercing what should have been the abdomen, only for the WAV to ripple like disturbed water and seal again as if nothing had happened.
Another heavy WAV clapped, a shockwave detonating outward and stalling a charging Aud. From the way the pilot timed the claps, He-6's aide guessed the power scaled not with the strength of the blows but with the length of time of the clap itself…however that was supposed to be measured.
With twenty Blessed active—nearly two per green-fur—plus the Jackal's fire support, survival for the enemy seemed mathematically impossible. Yet the greens adapted.
Finding themselves outnumbered, they began pairing. None pursued easy kills if it meant abandoning their partner. When one was cornered, the other struck at its pursuers, buying time for recovery before they rejoined and pressed again.
The Aud intelligence had adjusted. Its lack of fine control over individuals was known; this was a compensatory strategy. It had turned them into bonded pairs, each fighting as though the other's survival was its own. A single Aud was durable but killable. In tandem, they became exponentially harder to put down.
Even the heavy WAV grappling with the first two along the Jackal's spine began losing ground, the greens alternating strikes and taking turns accepting her blows while she was forced to yield space by the meter. The emplacements could do little more than apply harassing fire; the gunnery crews were constrained by the silhouette of the WAV pilot who ensured their survival when tweaking the targeting programs.
The tactic proved brutally effective. So much so that the first casualty in this skirmish—one of thousands playing out across the scale of the first battle—was human.
A pair of Aud broke contact with the main body of fighting and angled outward. He-6's aide judged they were preparing to leap the walls into the city. A change of pace to a blitzkrieg? She warned the Blessed nearest, simultaneously redirecting some outgoing salvos to intercept.
The remaining Aud surged into a frenzy, punishing the distraction and catching their suppressors off-guard. The restoration of their typical, suicidal behavior was deliberate, she realized, but she had no choice except to address it.
The escaping pair was not unopposed. Several carriers of the Old Man's Blessing had stayed out of melee, ill-suited for it. Two acted in concert. One snapped armored fingers; space around the fleeing pair collapsed inward like sediment funneled into water. An instant later, the Aud reappeared, displaced closer to the central fighting and away from the wall's inner edge.
The second Blessed raised wrist-mounted electrics and fired. The unstable, flickering beams struck true, but the greens were already moving, one toward each of the human pair that dared stand in their way. Displacement had cost them nothing—no disorientation, no delay, no forced reorientation of up and down—and they were far faster than they were supposed to be because of that. They bypassed the line, closing on their targets along opposite arcs before melee servicemen could intercept.
The spatial manipulator snapped again in the limited time he still had, the raw reflex enveloping one enemy in the same effect and displacing it back into the din of fighting, where one of the melee WAV pilots was prepared to lock it down this time.
The second Aud succeeded; it only needed a claw to bridge the gap, and between it and the spatial distorter's third snap, one was faster. That scratch across a breastplate was enough—the ranged Blessed and the green-fur both displaced together into the kill-zone.
Unlike the beast ragdolling him, the spatial displacement had disoriented the ranged WAV pilot. Two more greens converged, clamping maws and claws onto limbs and torso and pulling with all their might. The armor shrieked--or was that the inhabitant within it? A limb tore loose. The torso split along engineered seams fast enough that the blood didn't have time to spray free.
The execution took less than three seconds, leaving a chill in its wake.