Axton continued cursing up a storm as he unleashed all hell on anyone that crossed his path, however as much as he wanted to remove himself from the fight he was in to pursue his intended targets, he was unable to. Suddenly there was a shift in the flow of battle, and Axton felt it far faster than anyone else who was involved in it.

“Shit fucking bastards!” he yelled over an open channel as he realized what was going on. “I’ll kill you slowly!”

His anger meant nothing to the cheating fuckers who pulled this shitty stunt, and regardless of if they cared for his endless and bottomless rage or not Axton was still surrounded by at least 35 War Suits that had their controls taken over by an external party. If there was any singular good thing that came from this, though, it was that there was an obvious time delay between the sensors on those Suits taking in and transmitting the data they acquired back to the hackers and them being able to send a signal back to make their new puppets dance.

And, of course, despite being filled with a white-hot rage that burned more fiercely than a hundred million exploding stars, Axton was sensible enough to take advantage of this obvious flaw. He really only needed to notice it a few times before he figured out that it was there, and from that point, he made the new all-on-one brawl a bit less one-sided.

Of course, he was still one man against a group of others, and his near-berserker rage wasn’t exactly helping him all that much. Sure, it let him focus on the battle with a sort of ironically furious Zen state, but he was not at his best right now. Franken was outnumbered and outgunned, and while it and its pilot had entered the fight unharmed the War Suit now bore some nasty scars despite only being involved in the fight for the past few minutes.

Franken dodged out of the way of a large mace while lobbing a few grenades at the mace’s wielder, which managed to do enough damage to knock the already heavily damaged machine out of the fight. However, as soon as he finished that, Axton felt a jolt run through his War Suit as another War Suit, though much smaller than his, rammed him from behind.

Franken spun around and rammed its sword through the smaller War Suit’s side, instantly killing its pilot and letting internal hydraulic fluids gush out, although it was anyone’s guess if the pilot was already dead before that point or not given the fact that their War Suit already had another War Suit’s arm lodged into its torso. Axton didn’t care regardless and levered his sword with Franken’s momentum to almost resulting in the impaled Light War Suit being ripped in half.

With each movement Axton pushed both his own body and Franken’s mechanical one to its limits and over them, each time causing more strain to pile up on both pilot and War Suit alike. A shield bash to a lightly armored cockpit gutted another already damaged War Suit, but that didn’t stop the hackers from using it regardless. Like an oversized metal zombie with its chest ripped open and its guts removed, the gutted mech stumbled forward as if possessed and got a grenade to the.. well, interior that sent it to its well-earned grave.

Another War Suit tried to shoot Franken from the back with a massive cannon that replaced its right arm, but Axton’s movements with Franken were erratic and unpredictable, resulting in more rounds going downrange ending up hitting the hacked War Suit’s ‘allies’ than hitting Franken. At best they only grazed Axton’s machine, and more than a few deflected off of the rounded plates that made up most of Franken’s armor.

The hacked machines were being taken down one by one, or in some cases two or more at a time, but Axton and Franken both were flagging. Pushing themselves to their limits and even beyond them for so long had seriously taxed both the machine and its single occupant, and this was beginning to be ever more apparent.

A final shot from the War Suit with a gun for an arm managed to finally strike true, and Franken was knocked to the ground by it along with a combined tackle from the remaining three melee War Suits. Axton howled with fury as he tried to push Franken even harder, but the strain had finally caught up to him and his custom ride began to hiss and smoke as its mechanical components finally broke down.

Axton was now trapped in a metal coffin with four War Suits about to lay into his helpless, rage-fueled body, but those four were ended with a few precise blows from the two Champion War Suits and the cheating bastards that piloted them. Axton was fuming in rage and indignation at his turn of events, and he pounded against the inside of Franken’s cockpit with his fists until the game decided to stop letting him inflict damage on himself.

“And then there was one.” Came a voice fit for an asshole over one of the few systems that still was working in the nearly completely broken War Suit. “Too bad your ‘friend’ left you to die.”

Axton didn’t reply with any witty lines or any kind of reasonable and human retort, instead screaming in rage until his voice began to fail him. Apparently, even the game itself was tired of his noise.

The more ornate of the two Champion War Suits put its foot on Franken’s chest and began to apply pressure. Soon enough the sound of metal buckling and tearing could be heard even outside of the cockpit, but Axton didn’t beg for mercy or survival, instead continuing to scream like a madman overcome with pure and undiluted rage.

“Just shut up and die already!”

“You first.”

A familiar voice finally made its presence known as a mech that combined the legs of a spider-like creature, the turret of a KV-2, and a pair of auto-turrets for arms sped out of the undergrowth and laid down a withering amount of fire.

“You’re just getting in my way!” yelled the more asshole-ish vice, but while the other War Suit, the one piloted by the gruff and stoic cheater, rushed towards Spider-Can it quickly decided that it needed to pick up its partner and book it. This was because Thomas was not the only member of the cavalry to arrive. No, no, no. Thomas wasn’t just circling around for a flanking attack. He was also pulling far enough away to get a chance to send a Whisper to a few people.

“Cowardly knaves! I will honor the debt I owe! I, Xiahou Dun, call you out and demand a duel!”

“And I, the great Saladin, will demand a duel with the other coward! Show me what passed for fury among your pathetically wretched ilk!”

With those two came many, many others, as they had indeed managed to link up with the rest of their Company. Now there were more than fifty or so members of ‘Kurds and Wei’ charging the two Champion War Suits, who didn’t know if their hacks would work on those that they had only just been informed were with Axton and Thomas when they dropped.

Likewise, they didn’t know if the knowledge and skill needed to bypass their tricks had been passed on, so rather than stick around, both War Suits bugged it out of there, leaving Axton still seething with rage while stuck inside his almost-crushed War Suit. As they faded out of detection range, Axton felt his hatred begin to simmer down until he was left not angry at them but at himself.

He would need a lot of luck to be able to rebuild Franken into a decent fighting state without falling to the predations of those cheaters or anyone else, but whether or not the cavalry would even let that have the slightest chance of happening was something he honestly wasn’t sure about.