It wasn’t until both the redhead and the invisible giant stepped in that the stalemate broke. The redhead reached into his hair, pulling out a whip of glowing-red threads, one that seed fused to his hand, moved as if it were alive, and really didn’t behave like a whip at all. It was rather alike to Krahe’s own Tar tendrils, only far more agile. Every once in a while, a pulse of strange energy would travel down its length only to burst from the end with a whip-crack and a small, nearly invisible explosion of pure force. Setting upon one of the cyborgs with this weapon, he and the robots collaborated in perfect synchronicity to separate the grey-skinned man with his bulbous glove from the rest, and with each lash, a hunk of flesh or a module would be ripped from his body. He never even got to use that glove, it was the first thing the whip lashed from his body. Before long he was armless, charging at the redhead like a wild animal. The redhead twitched in place, lines of red light surging under his skin; he leapt aside with unnatural grace, his facial expression dead, but his eyes burning. He raised his free hand, and, with a flash of light through his hair, the cyborg was thrown back by a blast of brute force, folding in half as if he’d been punched in the gut by a giant fist. A burst of iridescent light followed, similar to those of the robots’ guns, only darker. With its passing, the cyborg’s head burst open. The cyborg didn’t seem to mind, as he kept moving, his torso wrenching open from the inside to reveal a multi-barreled gun. Just plain and simple, a rotary cannon, ammo belt and all.
The redhead, alard, leapt back, his whip vanishing in a flash, and the invisible giant finally moved, and so did the two smaller robots who could afford to disengage from their targets. Just a hand erged from under the camo-tarp, but it was enormous, the size of a grown man, a slab of matte white ceramic with four fingers as thick as Krahe’s legs. With that movent, Krahe glimpsed faint traces of red light from the young man towards the mostly-invisible giant. The giant arm stopped short of the cyborg, only for a jet of silver tal to burst from between its four fingers, piercing through the man. A sudden detonation tore him clean in half and sprayed what had to be at least a third of his body mass across the surroundings; the rotary gun was cast aside in a heap of slag and burst cartridges. The spear of silver then returned whence it had co, and the arm disappeared under the camo cloak.
In the anwhile, the surviving cyborgs had managed to gain an advantageous position in their struggle with the four smaller robots, or at least they seed to view it as such. Their target was clearly the redhead, as if they expected the robots to just shut down if they managed to kill him. Considering the sightlines and the superb firepower displayed by the firearms of both sides, Krahe thought they had a fairly decent chance of getting a few good shots in before their window of opportunity closed and the robots were upon them again.
“Barzai! Kill,” she spoke aloud.
Blood-red flashes strobed out from atop the left-hand statue’s head, and a series of explosions followed. Flesh and tal torn asunder and scattered all around, and no rcy or respite given; a grueso mass of muscle and sinew in semi-human figure swooped down, screaming in a cacophony of half a dozen voices, “Death! Death upon you and yours, the master commands!”
The sword of silver in its taloned hand dispensed lances of steel with the sound of a war-god’s hamr upon his anvil, winds of black salt poured from the maw of its fanged beak, bladed quills of blackened steel flew from its wings with each beat, and all those condemned by the word of the Murderer of Murderers died where they stood, their flesh pierced and torn and rent asunder, the tal of their bodies corroded to uselessness, never knowing what had killed them.
Both the robots and the redhead, understandably, stared aghast at the scene, and at the demon who had wrought that slaughter, and at Krahe, whom the redhead reasonably presud to be the raven’s master.
“Return,” she spoke again, and Barzai did as commanded, but not before taking the opportunity to peck at one of the corpses’ hollow eye sockets and to give the red-haired youth a sideways stare. Spinning the slab of iron that was the Nu-Vasara in his hand, he simply took off from where he stood, blasting dust and grass and the dust of corroded tal in all directions, splashing pale-grey gore against the robots’ strangely narrow feet in the sa manner. Strangely, all of them had frozen in place, only to march over to the young man. They ford a wall of bodies in front of him, with the invisible giant being at the very front, barely distorting the shapes of the robots behind it.
Krahe, cautiously, bid Rocinante to approach. Seeing as neither he nor his machine guardians reacted with hostility even after she crossed the distance between them, she felt no reservations about speaking, making a truly superhuman effort to give a good first impression.
“Hope you don’t make regret giving you a hand there. For your sake,” she said. From where she sat, she could peer overtop the heads of the robots and see the redhead clearly. He craned his neck, squinting at the sky. Eventually, after a good fifteen seconds, he spoke. The light of his hair and the distorted aura about him faded, at least enough to not be noticeable. Similarly, his robots visibly stiffened. Krahe was increasingly beginning to suspect they weren’t autonomous. Psionic man-machine interfaces had been one of the more popular avenues of research; no latency, no EMP-vulnerability, but a whole new set of issues and limitations.
“So that’s how an open sky looks,” he said. “This place is… Wrong. Air’s too heavy. Too hard to move things. My puppets are too slow. I am not welco here. Distortion Whip would barely hold together…” he muttered to himself, thinking aloud, or perhaps complaining by the tone of his words.
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