First, she would split the beast open, and for this, the Butcher was ideal. Its heated edge baked the clay as she cut it, rendering reconstitution difficult if not impossible. She carved away, repeatedly invoking Heartbreaker for guidance.

Once she had a deep enough gash in the clay to stick her entire arm in up to the shoulder, she did just that, grasping the gaunt-cannon’s trigger lever as she marshalled every bit of power she could, from that which she had stockpiled to what she could pull from her breath, even what she could store inside her own musculature with Thundercharger.

Click.

Click.

“Heartbreaker…” she invoked again, burning half a lung of Fog to make her arm sharply steer towards the center of the cluster. “...THUNDERCANNON!”

What occurred next was not unlike the result of a lightning bolt striking a rotten, hollowed-out, waterlogged tree. An immense flash of light, a thunderous boom, an inexorable downward force of kinesis and lightning that carved through the Gestalt and ripped it asunder such that it flew apart as half a dozen vertical strips of half-baked, half-liquidized clay that fell apart long before it hit the ground, forcing both Zel and Strake to scramble for dear life to land. Zero landed on all-fours, and Strake was no worse for wear save for a thin, lightly-bleeding line and a budding bruise across his chest where the pilot harness dug in. Zel just instinctively grabbed for the nearest tree, scraping a claw marked path into its trunk for a few meters before her descent finally stopped.

The beast-slayer rendezvoused with the tankman, finding him still in the same place, a scant moment of peace granted by the absence of claymen in this immediate vicinity.

“GOOD WORK. TAKE SOME HI-PEN SHELLS,” his voice thundered again, this time calm. The machine turned around the gangly reloading-arm on its back awkwardly opening an ammunition box that sat precariously below the engine. “THOSE LOW-YIELD TYPE-ONES WON’T DO AGAINST ANYTHING BIGGER THAN A CLAYMAN.”

Fully in agreement, she took eight shells out of the probably several dozen in the box, replacing four standard Type-1s on her belt and placing those that wouldn’t fit into storage. As she did so, a thrum shot up her arm and, when the Fog Vortex closed, the projection now read “Incoming Call”. Upon accepting, she heard Zef’s voice reveberating in her head in perfect concert with bumps in the intensity of the tablet’s interface thrum.

“I take it that artificial thunder in the forest was your doing?” the blonde’s voice rang out.

Zel smiled to herself. “Strake helped,” she said, having taken care that the tankman had stomped off by now. “I’ve got one more Gestalt - the really big ones - to deal with before I return. How are things going over on your end?”

“We’ve begun pushing ahead. Quite a few wounded with broken bones and clay in places it shouldn’t be, a few stuck inside Second-model tank suits. Casualties so far have been minimal. We’re severely outnumbered as expected, and we have no choice but to use aggressive push tactics elsewise they’ll just outlast us with attrition, so a few overconfident or suicidal fools getting themselves killed is a best possible outcome right now. Gano and the other islanders have been doing a great job flash-baking the claymen’s outer layers so that we have an easier time picking them off.”

“Good. Don’t let the others slack while I’m gone,” Zel responded, turning her attention fully upon the Gestalt.

Despite the fear which gripped his heart, the Young Man gripped his Boarkiller Lance in turn and charged ahead, impaling upon it clayman after clayman. Tank suit or no, rickety spear or glistening Kargarian metal, he was terrified all the same, but the fear didn’t matter.

The more afraid he was, more fuel was present to fuel his survival instinct. Mere months ago he had been a gate guard, fantasizing about the sort of excitement that the tan foreigner-woman claimed to have gone on, and now he was here. Stefan gritted his teeth and let the terror wash over him as he reloaded the Boarkiller, scanned his surroundings, and with a war cry on his lips, charged a many-limbed abomination to get it off one of his comrades.

The words of that rickety old man who had been his colleague echoed in his head as his lance pierced the clay and he raised its entire mass up over his head upon his weapon, firing the Boarkiler to destroy two of its cores before he threw the thing to the ground and took to finishing it off.

“I WILL go to hell before I sit here and watch this country and the world turned over to these savages! I’m done, I’m pissed, and I’m not puttin’ up with it anymore!”

“We will never be conquered, never by evil!”

Yet another terrible thing of many limbs fell upon him from his blind spot, only for a shout of “LOOK OUT!” to resound from behind. It was swept off him before the clay thing could knock him off-balance, and in the corner of his visor, the Young Man saw a gaunt man with petrified stumps instead of arms. Above him floated two arms of purple magick lashing out and sending chunks of the clay monster flying across the field with the force of cannonballs.

The Farmer couldn’t operate a tank suit, but he would be damned if he would let his farm be overrun by claymen. This was his Sage-damned land.

He trusted the line to hold up, and asking to be permitted to defend his own property, he was given the supplies to do so.

So it was that, outside the awareness of history itself, overshadowed by the crucible of a great battle, one veteran defended his farmstead from dozens of claymen and gestalts, reaping them upon his field just the same as he reaped grain.

Encroaching darkness all around, his laboured breath the only sound, Makhus gripped his sword and prepared to meet his end. Even as he struggled with all the considerable might his armor lent him, the clay had closed in too tightly, enveloping him such that he had no space to generate momentum.