《Titan of Steel》Chapter 12: Broken Bones

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During my execution of the Titan of Bone, there were five main types of Clockwork minion which I deployed, all of which had rather unimaginative names, and a variety of capabilities.

Minions

Clockwork Soldier

-Minion Type: Clockwork

-Base Form: Humanoid

-Strength: 0.25 MN sustained force

-Speed: 0.85* peak human agility

-Weaponry: Automatic Rifle, Automatic Pistols, Hand Grenades, Grenade Launcher, Bayonet

-Armor: 1.2 centimeters Mana Enhanced Nanosteel

A basic humanoid Clockwork with upgraded armor and a vastly improved motor system, Clockwork Soldiers are mostly ranged fighters, making use of both hypervelocity ballistics and copious amounts of explosives. To prevent hostiles from simply picking up one of their machine guns and going to town with the armor-piercing bullets they fire, the weapons for a Clockwork Soldier are fired using the operating Clockwork's IFF transponder, rather than a physical trigger. If a Clockwork Soldier winds up in melee combat, they will attempt to use their impressive physical strength to grab or pin their opponent, before breaking them.

Clockwork Angel

-Minion Type: Clockwork

-Base Form: Humanoid (Winged)

-Strength: 0.1 MN sustained force

-Speed: 4* peak human agility

-Weaponry: Automatic Rifle, Automatic Pistols, Hand Grenades, Grenade Launcher, Bayonet

-Armor: 5 mm Mana Enhanced Alumina CNT Alloy

-Features: Armored Wings, Flight

Resembling a Clockwork Soldier with the addition of a pair of wings and slightly bulkier leg sections, the Clockwork Angel is built for rapid flanking and harrassment, making use of a pair of thrusters in its feet to provide the thrust needed for flight. They use the same weapons as Clockwork Soldiers, but their melee combat subroutines are quite different, emphasizing fast, brutal strikes while also using their wings to block attacks.

Armed Clockwork V2.4

-Minion Type: Clockwork

-Base Form: Humanoid

-Strength: 2 MN sustained force

-Speed: 0.65* peak human agility

-Weaponry: Dual 20mm autocannons (integrated), Plasma Dump (integrated), Rotary Claws (Integrated)

-Armor: 5 cm Mana Enhanced Nanosteel backed by 2 cm Mana Enhanced CNT

Standing tall at 2.1 meters, Armed Clockworks are absolutely brutal combatants, able to send upwards of 40 high explosive shells downrange every single second. They also have several nasty surprises in case someone gets close, including a chest-mounted Proton Pile behind a cosmetic turbine, able to easily blast the corridor in front of them with superheated reactor coolant salted with extremely radioactive Sodium-24. Further, their grasping claws are sharpened, and are able to freely rotate at 40,000 RPM, acting as an extremely deadly close combat weapon, especially when coupled with the raw physical strength exhibited by the rest of the machine's motor system.

Clockwork Knight V 3.1

-Minion Type: Clockwork

-Base Form: Humanoid

-Strength: 8 MN sustained force

-Speed: 1.97* peak human agility

-Weaponry: Heavy Radsword, Combat Shield, Proton Beam Rifle, Plasma Dump (Integrated), Retractable 20mm Autocannon (Integrated)

-Armor: 8 cm Mana Enhanced Nanosteel backed by 3 cm Mana Enhanced Silica Aerogel and 4 cm Mana Enhanced CNT.

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Standing at an imposing height of 2.6 meters, Clockwork Knights cut an imposing profile courtesy of the deadly weaponry they wield. They share the autocannons and chest-mounted Proton Pile of Armed Clockworks, but these are not intended to be primary armaments. Instead, the main weapons which a Clockwork Knight makes use of are a Proton Beam rifle and a massive superdense sword built with the ability to conjure a thin line of Protonium along the cutting edge of the blade, allowing them to slice through almost anything while also frying them with plasma and heavy ionizing radiation. Further, the motor system for a Clockwork Knight is extremely over-engineered allowing them to do such things as casually flip heavy armored vehicles into the air, so long as they are properly braced.

Proton Tank

-Minion Type: Clockwork

-Base Form: Vehicular

-Strength: 1.2 MN sustained force

-Speed: 110 MPH cruise (ground level), 240 MPH (aerial)

-Weaponry: Proton Beam Cannon (Integrated), Protonium Missile Pods (Integrated), Omnidirectional Plasma Dump (Integrated)

-Armor: 20 cm Mana Enhanced Nanosteel, 8 cm Mana Enhanced Silica Aerogel, 6 cm Mana Enhanced CNT

-Features: Flight

Far more mechanically simple than any of the humanoid Clockworks, Proton Tanks are effectively a heavily armored box with treads on the bottom and a weapons turret on the top. That said, they also have a set of Protonium-powered steam thrusters all along their hull which they can use for aerial maneuvering; these same thrusters can be seriously overclocked if need be, blasting anyone close to the tank with superheated plasma.

Entirely unsurprisingly, the first Clockworks to enter the Titan of Bone's fleshy corridors were my Clockwork Angels, for the simple reason that they were faster than the rest. These machines provided critical information from within the downed Titan's corridors, revealing that while it didn't have the power it needed to get up and move, it certainly had the power required to run a fully functioning Dungeon in its interior, with Minions and Traps galore.

That said, I found the defenses they had to muster highly underwhelming. The mana-enhanced materials I had made my mechanical minions out of were, to put it quite bluntly, excessively durable by almost any metric, meaning that all the crushing sphincters, geysers of corrosive gore, and sword-swinging skeletons that this necromantic Titan could throw at my creations were lucky if they even managed to inflict cosmetic damage on one of my machines.

My machines meanwhile, had a far easier time dealing with the opponent's skeletal minions, even if there was the occasional minor hiccup. As an example, bullets commonly wound up completely whipping straight through a skeleton and missing every single bone, or a skeleton would keep moving after taking damage that would have flat-out mission killed a Clockwork that was dismembered in a similar manner. Still, the Titan of Bone's minions were still quite vulnerable to the nuclear blow torch known as a Proton Beam, or simply being grabbed in melee and ripped to shreds.

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After a few minutes of this drudgery, I figured I might as well ask the Titan of Bone about this, sending them a message.

Sending Message: I really have to ask why your minions suck so hard; if you had a Titan-level mana budget, shouldn't you have been able to design some crazily overpowered minions to make use of it?

The response I received wasn't quite what I had been expecting, but it made sense.

Message From Titan of Bone: I wish! Minions don't work that way; you can't just design them, they have to be unlocked by having a basic minion find various evolution conditions.

Sending Message: Huh, that's not how Clockworks work; I just design mechanical components, assemble them into a completed system, and there we go, new minion.

Message of Bone: Bah! Clockworks aren't proper minions! They have more in common with traps, save that they are self-propelled and have some level of autonomous decision-making capacity.

I resisted the urge to shrug, as that would send the next wave of Clockworks from my head-mounted entrance tumbling to embarrassing collisions with the ground, and instead focused on co-ordinating my army of clockwork minions as I continued to smash my way through the Titan of Bone's interior. It only took a few minutes longer for one of my Clockwork Knights to reach the Titan of Bone's core chamber, its massive radsword easily cleaving through the sphincter which made a poor substitute for even my first model of armored door.

As the Clockwork Knight raised its radsword over the glowing ruby core of the Titan of Bone, I sent one last message to the dying Titan.

Sending Message: Farewell, Titan of Bone. I draw no pleasure from this, but your death is a necessity in order to restore this region to life.

With that, the radsword came crashing down through the Titan of Bone's core, and with a blast of suddenly released mana, a Titan was slain. From my perspective outside the Titan of Bone, I could easily see their rotting organs suddenly cease in their convulsions. At the same time the oppressive aura of the Dead Wastes faltered, and with a final distinctive lurch, collapsed.

I quickly tested this by calling up a Basic Gremlin, and when they didn't almost immediately keel over, I burned the mana necessary to bring somewhere just north of 4,000 Gremlins into being; of these, 3,000 were Basic Gremlins, with the rest being my currently extant Gremlin Specialties, weighted heavily towards Health and Safety Officers. After all, the machinery I would want them to develop had the potential to be quite dangerous.

With my crew of budding mad scientists ready to go, I only needed a project to apply them to. Nothing came to mind immediately, so I simply told my Gremlins "You have free reign to undertake whatever engineering or science projects you think will be of use to me. You have Torso Bays one through twenty-three to customize as you see fit."

Most people think Dwarves are immune to claustrophobia, due largely to the cramped tunnels they call home. Under normal circumstances, this would be an accurate assumption, but Urist's circumstances were far from normal. In the last day and a half, she had been kidnapped and enslaved by a Grand Dragon, and the dark, cramped office she was being forced to work in was not helping!

Even more stress-inducing was the disparity between Urist's career skills as a psychologist and the job she had been assigned, namely concocting a plan to bring down a Titan based on extremely sparse information. In fact, before this whole mess, Urist hadn't even believed Titans were real, simply being made up stories by those who longed for an end to the tyranny of the Grand Dragons. After all, there was a certain evocative flair to the idea of a massive construct rising out of the ground, harnessing immensely powerful forces to finally strike down the Grand Dragons.

Now, Urist was looking at what she was assured was an accurate drawing of a real, physical Titan, made of finely worked metal with jets of flame shooting from its back. And Urist had to somehow come up with a plan to kill it, or else the Grand Dragon would kill her. Urist held no illusions about what would come afterwards; she would never be released, forced to work on one project after another until she expired from one cause or another. It had been proven time and time again; Grand Dragons never let go of anything they felt they'd claimed unless they were physically forced to. And by default, a Grand Dragon viewed themselves as laying claim to all that existed.

Urist looked back at the drawing of the Titan laying on her desk. Grand Dragons may be innately programmed to be ruthless dictators, but she had no data to go off of whatsoever regarding Titans. It was a risky gamble either way, but if the Titan were to win, then Urist might possibly have a chance to go home. That done, Urist began poring over every possible detail she could glean from the drawing of the Titan, and began considering how she would do this. She needed to figure out the worst possible way to go about fighting her potential savior, but then she would need to present it to her captor in a manner that would be accepted as legitimate good advice.

For the first time since being abducted, the dwarven woman smiled. It wasn't a big smile, or a particularly hopeful one, but it was at least present. As she smiled, Urist thought to herself that she might finally have a part of this whole ordeal that her psychology skills could be useful for.

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