“Fuuuuuuuck….” Axton groaned as he maneuvered Franken around. Disrupter blasts were whizzing by his War Suit, and some came dangerously close to striking something important, but thankfully Axton had learned a trick or two in regard to energy-based projectiles. Still, kicking up lots of dirt to act as an improvised shield did have the detrimental effect of covering Franken’s new paint scheme in some muck, but that was a small price to pay for avoiding those damn nasty blasts of destructive energy.

But the reason he was so upset was not because of the volume of fire coming his way, nor was it due to the violent motions he had to put Franken through in order to avoid getting hit with anything more than a few minor glancing blows. No, the reason his stomach felt like there was a party in it was due to the fact that the ten-kilometer-tall hologram of a woman who looked like she was a mix between a plastic surgeon’s botched job and a horror movie icon was constantly screeching at him in a shrill, almost Karen-like voice.

“You! Die this instant! Damned Fallen! Submit to my will! Do you know who I am?! Do you know the power I have?!”

The voice of that bug-ugly freak was giving Axton some vivid flashbacks to some similar people in his life. None of those experiences were good, and none of them left him with any hope that humanity might overcome its baser nature. You can only see people like that get their way via threats and screaming like banshees so many times before you lose faith in everyone around you, and Axton was getting some bad feelings as memories came back to him.

“I said die, you insufferable little-!”

Axton had endured enough. It was time to make this stuck-up bitch of a hologram know that he wasn’t going to give her what she wanted so easily. Axton turned on the loudspeakers in Franken and twisted the volume up to eleven.

“Shut the ever-loving fuck up, Karen! Fuck you, fuck your horror movie face, and fuck your god damned entitled ass! Go! To! Hell!”

The sheer volume of the noise that Franken emitted stunned even Axton himself, as he heard the noise reverberate through the future-tech metals that made the bulk of the machine he was piloting. If the decibels emitted by a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun firing was a 1, and the explosion of 50 tons of TNT was a 10, then Axton ended up nearly busting the loudspeakers by outputting somewhere around an 8.5 or just under a 9 in terms of sheer loudness.

As one might imagine, this was enough to send a decent number of the mooks on the ground… well, to the ground. Ears were bleeding, people were screaming in pain, a decent number of small critters died of shock, and to top it all off, the gigantic hologram of a woman was struck utterly speechless. And, to Axton, it was that last bit that made him feel the best. Sure, his ears were ringing like nobody’s business, and he was pretty sure that he had accidentally broken a part of the Geneva Conventions regarding the use of Sound Warfare, but hey, at least the harpy had shut her stupid mouth. Or, rather, her mouth was rapidly opening and closing like a fish out of water, but once again, at least she was silent, more or less.

Using this unintentional use of what could be called an Inhumane Weapon as a springboard for further action, Axton drove Franken closer towards the roughly one thousand or so goons that were now struggling to regain their senses. Axton may have somewhat believed that most decent people deserved some kind of honor and dignity in combat, as he wanted to expect the same thing in return. However, these fuckwits didn’t deserve honor or dignity, nor did they deserve mercy. In fact, even if the post-Beta wipe wasn’t going to happen, they didn’t deserve to have a ride back home.

The transports were warming up, and Axton felt it only appropriate that they warm up in an altogether different way. The current version of Franken had an extra toy for Axton to play with, although once used it would be nothing more than dead weight. Franken swerved like a Japanese delivery man making a near-blind turn on a mountain road, moving between the stunned and discombobulated grunts to get a decent shot into the open backs of the transports.

The ignition sound of a pair of rockets came in a set of three, as Axton dumped two dumbfire missiles into each transport’s open rear hatch. The rockets detonated and each pair of ‘liberated’ illegal Aerosolized Incendiary and equally illegal Micro-Nuke rockets created quite the sight as the transports began to have their systems either shut down or go critical.

Axton pulled Franken as far away from the transports as he could before the ships went kaboom in a very spectacular fashion as their engines and fuel reserves (not to mention the still-stored ammunition and weapons) cooked off and sent flaming debris in all directions. Axton was momentarily overwhelmed as the kill counter in his Player HUD listed over 700 deaths in a short few seconds from each other, and the death toll only continued to rise as more hapless thugs and marauders died from fiery, radioactive debris and hazardous emissions.

“That. Was. Beautiful….” Axton muttered as he watched what was left of the compound and the colony turn into a massive inferno yet again. He half expected for that to be it, but there were still a bunch of red dots on his Hud that needed to be turned into dead bodies, and he was also rather unnerved that he had not seen any trace of Stebbs and his big gold machine that Axton was sure was Stebbs’ way of compensating for something.

With no other option, Axton drove Franken into the burning colony and began his hunt. Little did he know that there was already someone waiting for him to do just that.

…

A certain former mayor had been anticipating that all his plans would amount to nothing. In a brief moment of clarity, he had realized that he had a much greater chance of survival and earning back some small favor if he waited for the uncontrollable wild card that was the Player named ‘Axton’ to bring down absolute destruction on the Imperial Marauders.

In a move that some would call cowardice and others would call tactical brilliance, Stebbs had held back with just enough men that he felt that he could spring one hell of a trap on the man coming to kill him. Then it would just be a matter of beating him in one-on-one combat, and then the glory would be his, and (hopefully) all would be forgiven.

But we all know that isn’t how things are going to play out, don’t we?