If they had been convinced to do it on their own, however, it painted a very different picture. It seemed unthinkable that they liked the idea of her looking over their every action, seeing everything they did, and showing them that they could never escape her grasp, but the man seemed proud of it. If that was an idea they considered desirable, she wondered if there was anything that could be done to pull them away from what Athena wanted them to do.
She wondered how they had become that way. They had likely been selected from those who were already terrible like pirates and quickly beaten, pounded, and forged into weapons who would follow Athena's orders without question.
"I don't think they'll go for it," Jessica13 said softly.
"Give them a warning shot," Hammerhand said through her commlink. "Target the one who’s out of his mech."
"Understood." She already had her rifle trained on the man and took a deep breath. He was still showing off his tattoos and his allegiance to Athena to the cheers of his fellow fighters when the hellebore round punched through his skull. The soft bone offered almost no resistance and the bullet drilled through and into the mech to knock it back a step before the AI inside was able to correct it.
The cheers around him ceased when they realized their apparent leader had collapsed with most of his head splattered across the outside of his mech.
"He should have known better," Tinker said. "You don't climb out of your mech in a combat situation. That's asking to get yourself killed."
"Agreed," Hammerhand said and raised his hammer.
The crack of the rockets on the back no longer caught her by surprise and his weapon quickly increased its speed as it swung into action.
By the time it impacted, she could almost hear the wind whistling around it as it pounded into fire-covered earth. The speed that propelled it generated a shudder and a powerful boom that seemed to drive the fire away from the head of the weapon.
The effect on the fire itself was negligible as it quickly regained the ground it had lost since it was still soaked in fuel. Athena's fighters took an instinctive step back, however, as Hammerhand advanced through the flames, the spectacle rather gratifying.
"Get out from behind the shield and keep on firing," he said and activated the barrier. The heat made the vents around his feet open to cool the mech as he moved through the blaze. He was through in a few strides, and from the look of the men ahead, it didn't appear as though they wanted to actually fight. The stood frozen as if their will had suddenly and painfully been dragged out of them.
Jessica13 pushed out from behind the shield but remained on their side of the fire while the other knights crossed through and advanced in formation. The enemy suddenly seemed to realize that their dead leader had elected to fight rather than surrender and hastily began to prepare.
She lined up another shot. The Cinders' pilots appeared to more anxious for action than the Lancers, unsurprisingly, and that made them the perfect place to start her attack. They had some armor but it was mostly frontal, and as they turned to face Hammerhand head-on, she had a clear shot at their fuel supplies.
It was tempting to simply act quickly but she forced herself to wait as they started the throwers. Only when she was sure they were drawing from the supplies on their back did she choose the one at the front who attempted to push his flames against her leader’s shield. She pulled the trigger.
The result was a little less immediate than she thought it would be. The pressure was suddenly lost in the fuel supply and the flame was quickly drawn back into the thrower itself to travel up the pipes and into the fuel. It took almost five seconds for the full effect to come to fruition, but by the time the flame reached the tank, she had turned away. The blast was bright enough to light up the entire area around them.
She grasped the rifle and let the mechanism load another round before she selected her next target. The Lancers needed to retreat slightly as the blaze from the destroyed Cinder was too intense for them to approach. A couple of the others had been eliminated in the same blast.
The Knights moved around the flames, but Hammerhand simply kicked the ruined mechs out of his way and marched between them with his shield up. The enemy finally opened fire.
And not only on the knights, she realized, when the earth was kicked up by a few rounds aimed in her direction.
"It’s time to move," Mini announced and she already understood what the AI had in mind before he even had to say it. She tucked the rifle away on the back of her mech and let him take them onto all fours and bound to the side as the volley directed at them grew more and more intense. She braced herself in anticipation of his next action and he pushed the Minato into a sprint toward the tall wall of flame between them and the Knights who began to engage Athena's men.
Mini bunched the mech and used their momentum while he drove forward with the more powerful back legs to launch them high above the fire and over the tongues of flame that licked at them. She could still feel the heat, even through the insulators, but in seconds, they landed heavily on the other side.
The impact was more intense than it should have been and her whole body jolted with pain.
"Shit!" she shouted and braced herself a little harder. "I really need to fix those fucking dampeners."
"Agreed," Mini said simply and raced into
