“Huh…” Axton murmured as he pulled Franken (and the combat knife) away from the giant Gnoll. “I can believe that I thought that would work.”

The creature snarled and snapped at him, but Axton couldn’t care less about that. What he did care about were the facts that he could see machinery and wiring under the exposed meat of the giant Gnoll, and that the very same cyborg creature was seemingly uncaring of, or perhaps oblivious to, the painful damage it had sustained.

Based on the bodies lying around the place, Axton figured that the reveal that the giant Gnoll that he was trying to hunt was a cyborg wasn’t taken too well by the others of its species. This assumption was backed up by the random bits of metal, bone, and wood sticking out of the body of the oversized hyena-man cyborg at odd angles.

Pulling back, Axton tried to make some distance between himself, his War Suit and the nearly three and a half meter tall biomechanical anthropomorphic hyena, but the distance he made was closed in only a few moments by the beast. Acting quickly, Axton raised Franken’s right arm up as the animal man brought down a massive hunk of metal that had been roughly pounded into the shape of a slightly curved single-edged blade.

“God, I hope this works..!” Axton cried as Franken held its combat knife at an angle,. The bestial humanoid’s weapon made contact with the much smaller tool and with a quick bit of fancy footwork and a heavy dose of angling the massive, curved meat cleaver was sent off of its intended course. However, despite the majority of the damage having been redirected into nowhere, the shock of the blow was enough to shake Franken’s arm, as well as Axton’s confidence.

The creature snarled as it swept the blade upwards and at a left-leaning angle, but Axton had already pulled back a bit more and the blade only scraped the outer limits of Franken’s armor. Rather than letting the animal person strike again, Axton drove Franken forward and shoulder-checked the oversized Gnoll, which staggered the enemy field boss enough to allow Axton to cut and carve a bit with both combat knives before needing to pull back.

Despite the damage that was being inflicted, the giant Gnoll was apparently unaffected by it and kept up the savage and unrelenting attack as though the wounds it had suffered were mere papercuts at most. Given the level of cyborging that the monster person seemed to have undergone based on the sight underneath the outer layer of its flesh, Axton could guess that whoever or whatever made this thing decided to make pain, at least, little more than a minor irritant for this monster.

Still, though, each strike that was brought upon it was slowly whittling its power down, and despite taking a few good hits here and there, Franken and its pilot were winning this fight. But about halfway through what Axton thought was the final minute or two of the fight, the oversized hyena-person began to scream incoherently in pain and claw at its body.

Axton, being a gamer as well as having at least a modicum of common sense, realized that this was the beginning of the second phase of the battle, but he was having absolutely none of that bullshit. Deciding to nip this threat in the bud before it could actually give him too much trouble, Axton rushed Franken in and plunged the combat knives into the monster person’s skull before ripping them out and shoving them into the Gnoll’s body again. And again. And again.

The second phase, or at least what Axton assumed to be the second phase, began regardless of the gruesome damage that Franken had inflicted upon Axton’s foe, and the mechanical components underneath the monster’s flesh began to rip out and form insect-like stabbing limbs that jabbed forwards, forcing Axton to pull himself and his War Suit back. Thankfully for Axton, the transformation was still underway, which meant that since the knives wouldn’t work, it was time for heavier firepower.

With the mech-use SAW held like it had been last time, Franken unloaded a deluge of fire into the growing horror, but that wasn’t the end of Axton’s attempt to end the second phase before it could fully get off the ground. The hidden weapons in Franken’s torso made themselves known once again, and the echoing of two 12.7mm machine guns added itself to the cacophony made by the giant Squad Automatic Weapon.

Axton burned through every round of ammo that he had, pumping an absurd amount of fire into something that he could no longer see due to the dust and smoke and heat haze that had been kicked up. He wasn’t about to take time to check his HUD or his Suit’s sensors to find out if the threat was gone, as he could see its rough outline in the mess that he had created, but once all of his guns were empty Axton busted out his last ace-in-the-hole.

Fired out from where they were kept underneath the now empty 12.7mm machine guns, two rockets sped their way towards the shape in the cloud, making contact and exploding with enough force to (hopefully) do some serious and (hopefully) fatal damage to whatever they hit. Once again, though, Axton was not about to raise a flag and call the battle then and there.

Out came the pair of combat knives once again, and Franken charged into the cloud of smoke and dust and laid a savage, brutal assault into the thing that was still obscured by no small amount of battlefield ‘fog’. Slashes ad stabs flowed together into a near whirlwind of damage that Axton didn’t know the result of, resulting in his cutting and slashing and stabbing away until the smoke and dust settled and revealed that Axton’s fears regarding flags being raised were now ready to be left dead and buried.

The oversized cyborg Gnoll, or what was left of it, was still standing, but it was most certainly dead. Its body, though able to keep itself upright and on its feet due to metal spikes coming from its feet that had seemingly locked it into a stationary position on the ground, had more holes running through it than Swiss Cheese, and what few organs it had were now either blown to bits or dangling on thin threads of viscera inside the almost hollowed-out husk of the monster-man.

Axton was not about to end it there, though. As long as the creature still had its head, then it was possible that it would, somehow, get back up and come at him like a zombie. Hoping to make one final finishing blow (if the thing was still somehow alive), Franken’s hands reached out and grabbed the monster’s head, twisted it, and ripped it off of its neck.

It was now that Axton heard the sound of a quest being completed, and with that having happened, his work here was done. He could feel the gazes of the surviving Gnolls, but he wasn’t about to try and kill them. He had seen enough of this already, and they couldn’t do anything to boost his Exp given how weak they were.

It was time to move on, and whether or not this damaged community would manage to survive was not his concern. He would leave them in peace, though. They had enough issues to worry about besides his hunt for loot.