As Franken stepped out of the darkness inside the drop pod ad into the slightly less dark night of the jungle, its pilot shook his head. Even decades after most of the major companies that once had a stranglehold on media rights had fallen by the wayside, new juggernauts had risen to take their place. As much as he applauded Thomas for his choice of music that he was sure had been crafted just for a situation like this, he worried how badly things would go if and when the oligarchs that controlled most of the old, old music found out about this.

Thomas was rich, but compared to the families that held a grip on the old classics, he was only upper-middle class in comparison. That said, the oligarchs tended to play fast and loose with each other’s stuff, and in his own memory, he had not seen a time where one of them got in trouble for using the holdings of another in a positive way.

Despite supposedly being greedy as fuck, it did make sense why they would usually let others of their kind do what they wanted, to a point. After all, the precedent had already been set, and if someone threw a hissy fit over such things it could lead to a cascading chain reaction that could see this ‘new order’ of sorts fall apart.

His concerns regarding the music aside, Franken’s cameras picked up a whole fuckton of fur-covered critters with oversized teeth and nails like miniature sickles. He quickly looked over at the data he had on Thomas and his War Suit and was not impressed and rather unnerved by what he saw.

Thomas had pushed those guns of his to their limit, leaving little to no time for the barrels to cool down, and now the damn things were literally glowing hot. Likewise, the ammo counter for each was dangerously low, and while Spider-Can could do some nasty damage if it managed to grab its opponent and let its leg-claws do their work, in a confined space like this and against hordes of critters like these melee became a liability rather than a useful option for the fragile machine.

If this was a more urban fight, then maybe a bit of CQC with giant piloted robots would be acceptable, but in a jungle, it was a damn suicide move, and Thomas was about to risk it all to buy Axton more time. If he had jumped in, it might have been Thomas’ turn to run the risk of being disqualified, and the people up in space did not have a War Suit ready for him to jump into, let alone enough parts or time left to make one.

As such it was a good thing that Axton had got Franken up and running as ‘quickly’ as he had, and now it was time to give his friend some breathing room and some time to let his guns cool off. Lowering its posture and using the force of its hands against the drop pod to launch itself forward, Franken’s feet hit the ground after a small jump and let the treads on its soles shoot it forward into the fray.

With a few small drifting swerves, Franken built up momentum as its right hand raised up over its right should and tried to grasp at something that wasn’t there.

“Shit.” Axton thought as he realized that this was not his former machine. “Guess we’ll go with those, then.”

With the usual massive slab of metal not available, Franken’s hands went to just behind its waist and unsheathed two huge combat knives, one of them being spun around to be in a reverse grip while the other was facing the normal way. Instead of massive, brutal, arcing swings, Axton would now have to use quick, short stabs and blazing fast cuts, but while the previous iteration of Franken was built for heavy brawls, this one, despite being considerably well-armored, was much, much faster than its predecessor.

The animals didn’t seem to have predicted this move, which led Axton to make a hypothesis that he would need to verify the truth of, but that was for a later time. With a spinning leftward drift, Franken brought its left combat knife into the skull of one of the oversized beasts.

The reverse grip was held tightly enough that the full force of Franken’s momentum followed effortlessly, and although the mech stopped on a dime, the creature did not. With a sideways jab into the brain of the beast at such a high speed and with such force, the damage was done and yet the mangy animal was also effectively tossed out of the way in the same motion that saw it get a violent lobotomy.

Axton wasn’t done, though, as a swift drift to the right and a swing of Franken’s right arm saw the righthand combat knife slice straight through the neck of another of the stunned swarming animals. Though the blade went through the flesh and bone effortlessly, it didn’t fully sever the head from the rest of the body.

Instead, the remaining tissue let the nearly severed head flop around a bit before the beast hit the ground, and even as that body was falling, Franken was still carving up a few more suspiciously violent and suspiciously organized animals. With a cut here, a stab there, and a bit of hack and slash that would make a character from a Musou game proud, Franken shredded through mob after mob like a well-oiled machine. Well, yes, it was actually a well-oiled machine, but you understand the wordplay, right?

By now the animals had broken out of their shocked state and were now changing their target from Spider-Can to the much more melee-focused Franken, but Axton was no longer blinded by rage and was back to his prime. It didn’t help the cause of those critters that this version of Franken was faster, more agile, and far more maneuverable in tight spaces than the other versions had been, but who cared what a bunch of meaningless lines of code thought?

However, after dealing with the majority of the remainder, Axton now had... other objectives to achieve when fighting the animal mobs in front of him. He still had a hypothesis to verify the validity of, and for that, he needed a few intact corpses.

Sheathing the oversized combat knives, Axton let Franken’s fists do the talking, and a few quick jabs and hooks sent the rest of the animal mobs to the afterlife if such a place existed for virtual entities. With the threat dealt with, Axton popped open Franken’s cockpit and quickly set to work with a few tools of his own.

Rather than work on Franken or Spider-Can, he was instead conducting an impromptu autopsy of one of the least damaged kills that he had made, and with a few well-placed surgical cuts he found proof that his theory had likely been at least somewhat correct.

“Fucking… Cheaters…” he snarled in a low voice as he looked upon the cybernetic implants that ran along the dead anima’s spine and up into the interior of its skull. Well, now he was pissed all over again!