Axton and Thomas were about to try and wade through the fray before them to reach the bastards responsible for that very same brawl, but an alarm rang out inside both of their War Suits that caught them off guard.

“Shit!” Axton cursed as he read the nature of the alarm. “Not satisfied with hacking all of them, but you also want me to fight my friend as well?!”

“Oh, shit!” Thomas said with a mix of anger and joy. “I know this side of you! Let’s give those fuckers a one-way trip to hell.”

“You sons of a cunt-flavored BITCH!” Axton screamed as he drove Franken into the fray.

It wasn’t often that Axton got this pissed off, and he hadn’t even shown this level of anger during either the Beta or during the battle on that desolate planet against Donovan and his goons. Hell, Axton kept this primal rage hidden away for a damn good reason, almost never letting it out. Even when playing other games, games that had difficulty spikes and curves that made the Dark Souls series look like a joke, Axton never let this particular side of himself out for others to see.

But God help you if you came after his friends in such a way as this. Even Daxter or Sally didn’t bring this much fire and fury up from the depths of his very being. Thomas, though, well he was a different story altogether. The two had been bros for a long time, and Thomas had repeatedly gone out of his way for him.

Now these dumb lines of code were trying to make him turn against his closest friend from outside the game he was in? Oh, no. That was not going to stand. Axton was seeing red at this point, and as a result, he left Thomas behind on the bluff that he, himself, had just left behind.

Brandishing his fuck-all massive slab of sharpened metal, Axton and Franken paid little heed to the fight that was going on around them and tried, nearly in vain, to push through to the pair of cheating NPCs on the other side. However, all this did was give the blinded Players down in that ongoing brawl another target, and Axton quickly found himself directing Franken away from his desired path purely to avoid taking unneeded damage.

“Fucking God damn son of a monkey’s ass!” Axton spat as Franken bisected an already heavily damaged Light War Suit before spinning around and shoving its sword between the gaps in the armor of another. “Get down here and fight me, you cheating cowards! I’ll shove your heads so far up your fucking asses that you’ll be looking out of your own god damned necks!”

Thomas watched on as his friend went from being a methodical and logical fighter to a mere berserker and wondered if he should or could do anything to deal with this. He needed to avoid getting hit in the main torso of his Suit if at all possible, and the sheer volume of ballistic fire and melee attacks in that brawl made him feel uneasy about his chances of survival.

Sure, Spider-Can’s legs were armored out the wazoo, but a good hit on the torso would make all of his War Suit’s speed, firepower and maneuverability mean nothing. He surveyed the battle a bit longer before deciding on what to do. He switched the Turrets on the sides of Spider-Can’s torso to auto-target and auto-fire and then switched Spider-Can’s movement system from the usual scuttling to pure hover.

Spider-Can lifted slightly off of the ground, the legs moving a bit to stabilize the War Suit with their own smaller hover systems as the guns on either side of Thomas’ mech began to add yet more light to the darkening battlefield. Spider-Can rapidly changed its position, drifting back and forth as it sped around the periphery of the slug-fest. At first glance, it looked merely as if he was intentionally flanking everyone he had his sights on, but he had a different goal in mind beyond that…

…

“Those two bastards….” Spat a man in one of the two War Suits with a Champion belt.

“They do not appear to be affected by the modified signal. It may be possible that they have tampered with their tags. This is unacceptable, and I will move to remove them from the game. Give me the permission needed to do so, and I will leave your side temporarily.” Replied a gruff and stoic voice from inside the other Champion War Suit.

“Nah, we’ll just wait a bit longer.” Laughed the man with a lighter, more jerk-ish voice. “By the end of this little bit of fun, they’ll either be destroyed or too damaged to put up much of a fight. Then we can show them the error of their ways. Besides, I want to make sure that they don’t do anything funny.”

“I do not see how they could bring any humor to this situation. If anything, all that they are bringing to this situation is an annoyance.” Replied the gruff man, seemingly unaware of the true meaning behind the other person’s words.

“Still pisses me the hell off. Get the people up in the station on the horn and as them to verify that their tags are working properly.”

“I do not have a horn to get them on, nor would I be able to use any horn of a reasonable size to-.”

“I MEAN CALL THEM! Fucking hell, you are denser than a neutron star!” yelled the jerkishly voiced man.

The deeper-voiced man huffed over the shared comms line before replying in his unemotive voice like all the previous times that he had spoken. “If my physical form was indeed as dense as a neutron star, neither of us would be here right now to talk.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

“I shall call our allies in the station as you wished, but I do not know if anything will come of this. Given that those two seemed to be unable to be affected by the hack, it is likely that the normal routine of things will be upset.”

The jerk-sounding man chuckled. “Then we merely need to ‘redirect’ the attention of all the ants below us, don’t we?”

“They are not ants. They are people, and we lack the ability to adequately direct such small insects to begin wi-.”

“Oh, just shut the hell up and stop taking things literally!”

“I have taken nothing aside from the lives of those who stand before us.”

“Oh, for the love of fuck…. Wait… where is the War Suit with the armored spider legs?”