Deadly Air Raid (I)

Supersonic bullets tore through the swarm of Greenskins clustered together, gnawing on several corpses. In an instant, one of them was obliterated, while another had its limbs blown away.

The other three staggered backward and fell, great chunks of flesh blasted from their powerful bodies.

Yet they remained stubbornly upright, refusing to fall. Their dull brains were incapable of understanding just how devastating the Wanderer mechs' gunfire had been to them.

"They're all yours, Oliver."

Captain Duwa said, cutting off the chatter.

"I'm glad you still left something for me to do."

Oliver replied, his voice reaching the other comrades through a burst of electromagnetic static.

Then Oliver drove the Ashen Ember mech behind the blood-soaked Orks. An alloy blade extended from his war machine's right fist, and with a horizontal sweep, he sliced all the survivors in two.

Immediately afterward, the support mech Wiluna eliminated several other stragglers with a short, perfect burst of laser fire. What remained of their bodies exploded into clouds of blood mist and metal fragments.

Three metal constructs, each five times taller than those feral monsters, stood upon the battlefield. Yet Oliver knew that calling this place a "battlefield" was far too grand a description for the nature of the death they had dealt.

The mechs were fitted with thick plates of high-strength alloy armor, protected by layered energy fields, and equipped with various weapons capable of slaughtering large numbers of enemies at once.

Their armor plates were painted a deep, midnight blue, and each machine bore the image of an upraised iron fist on its right shoulder.

The pale yellow banners hanging from the backs of the three war machines carried the same emblem—the crest of the Civic Temple.

In truth, they were not particularly qualified as war machines. Even the Wanderer-type mechs