"Incoming!"
The airborne screaming started again but this time, it sounded closer and more intense. He covered his ears and ducked instinctively, even though he knew the rockets would streak overhead.
To his horror, his assumption proved incorrect. The earth shuddered powerfully, the strike too close for them to have fired at a point beyond Auburn.
"I stand corrected," he said and braced against a wave of shaking as another barrage of screamers assailed their ears. The building around them rumbled and cracks appeared in the concrete foundation when another strike made impact even closer than the previous ones.
It was followed almost immediately by a third.
The building began to crumble and something pounded into his chest to hurl the Cinder on its back as the structure collapsed onto him.
They no longer held back on the buildings. The Raptors had come in closer to the town and established their positions. Jessica13 could barely make them out in the flares that were continually fired into the darkness.
They were mostly shadows, but even those were impossible to mistake for any other kind of mech. She grasped her rifle and frowned at the enemy groups that now advanced on the town while more of the shrieking missiles careened overhead. This time, they were aimed into the buildings where the Knights and rebels took cover.
The enemy had clearly lost patience with the resistance they had encountered and intended to level the town in order to destroy them.
"Shit. Hammerhand needs to know about this," she said and tried to turn the radio on again.
Mini appeared on her HUD. "It would seem he's more than intelligent enough to know what the current situation is and is also spreading the word among the rest of the fighters."
"Fuck."
The new mechs that pushed forward initially marched in formation, but from the moment they reached the range of the jammer, they separated into smaller groups. Assault mechs formed up quickly around the support mechs. The heavier mechs—Guardians for the most part, although she could make out a couple of Argonauts—held back and fired from a distance.
"We need to change our tactics now," Jessica13 snapped. "It's only a matter of time before they hit this building and our jammer is history."
"That might be moot." Mini highlighted a handful of the squads that had begun their assault on the town. "They appear to have found low-tech forms of communication of their own."
Sure enough, when he zoomed the imaging in, lights flashed between the squad leaders. They flickered quickly and with good effect to guide each other through the fire and rubble-covered streets in a hunt for those who had survived the bombardment. From that point, it was mostly a massacre, although she could see that Hammerhand had already gathered most of the survivors and fighters and begun to coordinate a counterattack.
"We've lost the element of surprise and the advantage that came from not letting them use comms. What do you think we have to fight back with?"
"Hammerhand?"
"And they still have Athena, who hasn't been involved in the combat so far."
"That is a good point."
Jessica13 peered down her scope again and studied the troops moving forward. They held their formation as they pushed into the openings the bombing created for them. Their lights blinked at the Argonauts and Guardians, who likely communicated with the Raptors in turn, who continued to launch the airborne strikes into the structures around her. The building she was on began to shake.
"I think we need to get out of here," Mini suggested.
She tensed, unwilling to relinquish her position. The AI was right, but there wasn’t a reason to move yet. While Athena's mechs had found a way to communicate, it was rudimentary and used the old Morse codes, which delayed them.
By seconds only, she acknowledged, but it was still a delay that would buy Hammerhand much-needed time to prepare his counterattack.
"Jessica13, I must suggest that you make your way off this rooftop immediately."
"Not yet," she snapped and raised her rifle. The squads were still moving forward, but she had noticed that only one member of each flashed the lights that communicated between them. She zoomed in on one of them. The mechs themselves appeared to be the same models she had worked on her whole life, but the heavier armor around the midsection and shoulders meant she needed to place her shots more carefully than before.
She pulled the trigger and identified the telltale signs that the pilot was dead and the AI had taken the controls. An AI couldn't send messages, though.
"Jessica13, we need to get off this roof now!"
Whether it was because this was the first time Mini had ever raised his voice at her—if only by raising the volume of the internal speakers—or because the sound of the screamers was now perilously close, she quickly surrendered control of the mech to the AI.
He was quick to act, strapped the rifle to their back, and immediately launched the grappler to embed it in the building across the street.
As they were dragged over the edge of the rooftop, she looked over her shoulder. Missiles pounded into their previous position. Perhaps they had identified where the jammer was or maybe seen where her shooting had come from, but the strikes were too accurate for it to have been a random assault.
The impact of the high explosives thumped into her back as they hurtled to the other side of the street. The shockwave threw them faster than the grappler could pull them in, and she braced herself for the impact with the building.
They punched through the thin walls almost without effort, and the Minato fell through the floor as well to land heavily about three floors down from where they had intended to be.
Her chest had difficulty dragging breath in, and the dust and smoke around them made the blaring alarms in the cockpit that much more obvious.
"Shit… Mini, are you still there?"
"I am here, Jessica13." The AI's voice was back to normal volume and as soothing as
