Number of posts : 1101 Age : 42 Location : The Infinite Abyss Registration date : 2008-05-26
Subject: Re: The Countdown Manuscripts Sat Feb 07, 2009 3:58 am
Steelclaw cruises above the Bosnian capital at around 60,000 feet, his receptors open for any transmission that may go his way: Autobot, Decepticon, or even human radar transmissions.
"The target shouldn't be far by now," he assures himself, as he opens a secondary communication protocol to attempt to reach the rest of the AoF.
"Steelclaw to AoF." "Steelclaw to AoF."
"AoF do you, copy?"
A series of garbled signals answer his call. Somehow, this turn of events started to pique his curiosity. He doesn't like it when things go 'curious' like this.
"Something's amiss here..."
Suddenly, his sensors picked up a different set of signals:
Several missile lock-ons, more or less ground-based in origin, have come to his attention.
Moments later, the war heads reared their ugly faces above the clouds.
As Steelclaw has no countermeasures similar to the Earth aircraft that he has copied, he instinctively transformed and increased the thrusters on his feet, alternately, as he propelled himself backwards in a zigzag fashion, shooting the missiles down with his rifle.
The timing of the missiles' arrival was unforgiving. It was as if they were fired almost at the same time.
The last one nearly clipped him, as he deflected it to the right with his free hand. This particular missile exploded dangerously close to him, hurtling him downward towards the ground, which was several miles beneath him.
He almost blacked out in that explosion. Tapping in his inner will, Steelclaw roused himself back to action to break his free fall.
After losing a good 20,000 feet, he instinctively kicked out and pointed his feet downwards to stabilize himself, before transforming back into his aircraft disguise. It was then that he picked up the enemy's frequency. The number, he assumes, is quite sizeable, but he has to neutralize this threat quickly before it sends out calls alerting other Cons in the area.
He immediately accelerates to the location, reaching Mach 2 in a matter of seconds. He traces the signal to a location on a hillside defense battery, composed of several anti-aircraft defenses undeniably reeking of Decepticon ID's. He locked the location on his crosshairs as he flew towards it at full throttle.
He sees one transform into its bipedal mode and raise its rifle as he quickly approaches. He did the most natural thing that he would have done, given the circumstances:
Izanami Platinum Member
Number of posts : 3201 Registration date : 2008-08-11
Subject: Re: The Countdown Manuscripts Sat Feb 07, 2009 9:04 am
Holy Cow! O_O
The Darkfather Inactive User
Number of posts : 1101 Age : 42 Location : The Infinite Abyss Registration date : 2008-05-26
Subject: Re: The Countdown Manuscripts Sat Feb 07, 2009 12:24 pm
Obiterate leaps through the infernal wall that Pyro has created, heat knife in hand.
Pyro, whose manic demeanor gave him an exceptional sense of awareness, ducked instinctively to the side, receiving only a small scratch on his right shoulder from his attacker.
Obiterate ends his lunge in a forward roll, defying the laws of physics with his uncanny agility.
Pyro gawks at the size of his enemy, who is almost twice larger than he is.
"What the... are you the new Prime?!" squawks the Decepticon, as Obiterate turns around in one fluid motion.
"No. You're not good enough for that kind of clobbering," was the cold reply.
Frantically, Pyro let rip a stream of machine gun fire in Obiterate's direction. The Autobot covered his face, as he charged shoulder first into his target. Despite the hail of bullets, the shoulder block connected, and Pyro crashed into a burning restaurant behind him.
Ignoring the flecked paint, Obiterate navigated through the rubble, stopping only to yank a concrete beam out of its already precarious placement. He starts to tap it into his free hand as one would with a baseball bat.
Pyro is down, but far from out. He manages to get his left hand on a burning sofa that has fallen through the second floor. He flings it at Obiterate's face, the latter leaning lazily to the left as a mockery to Pyro's sense of accuracy. The sofa disappears into the inferno behind the Autobot.
The Decepticon arsonist wasted no time. As soon as he tossed his makeshift weapon, he picked himself up and warily sidestepped to the left.
Obiterate followed him with his optic sensors. The Autobot changed his vision feed to Electronic wavelength, to discern Pyro further from the burning background. He had to hand it to him, this flame-red Con knows how to blend with his habitat.
"(Chuckles) What are you waiting for, big guy? Cold feet?"
Obiterate gave him a cold stare back.
Pyro stared back into the Autobot's face, as he peripherally eyed a possible exit through a broken wall to the left. If he can lose this lummox sooner, the better for him.
He tried to feign to sprint to the right.
Obiterate didn't move an inch.
He tried to fake drawing a weapon.
Still, Obiterate didn't move an inch.
A bit exasperated (more like frustrated), Pyro drew out his thermobaric cannon and fired it at the Autobot at a suicidal distance of 20 feet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Time seemed to slow down.
At least for Obiterate.
He sees Pyro raise his left arm, and notices a small cannon extend from one of the sockets near its wrist.
In a split-second, he takes one giant step and manages to grasp Pyro's cannon arm with his right hand. The weapon fires, but misses his face by several inches. It hits the wall behind them, engulfing them both in flames.
The Autobot sees no problem with that, though. Like Pyro, his outer core is made of fire-resistant alloy.
He proceeds to ram the end of the concrete beam on Pyro's midsection as soon as the fire slides down their metallic frames.
Pyro's optic sensors and balance program suddenly experienced a sharp jolt, as Obiterate sucker-hit him with a makeshift club.
Obiterate saw the power fluctuation and cudgeled Pyro's right temple with the beam repeatedly.
The Decepticon groaned at the brutal strike, each grunt growing weaker for each strike.
Pyro fires the cannon blindly, caring not what it hits. He hoped to hit the ceiling to cave them both in from the burning rubble.
The warhead flew outside instead, hitting another building across the street.
Obiterate noticed this and twisted off Pyro's left arm before yanking it clean from its wiring.
Pyro, however, laughed manically at this.
Obiterate realized that for some unfathomable reason, his own heatblade --- is now underneath his breastplate, Pyro's free hand burying it even deeper into his Spark Capacitor.
----------------------------------------------
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: The Countdown Manuscripts Sat Feb 07, 2009 3:45 pm
go pyro!
Dr. Lecter Silver Member
Number of posts : 564 Registration date : 2009-01-05
Subject: Re: The Countdown Manuscripts Mon Dec 14, 2009 12:55 pm
Obiterate staggers a step backward as Pyro pushed slowly with the heatblade.
The Decepticon's robotic face contorted, impishly betraying a faint smirk, as he gloated on the sudden turn of events.
"Not so tough now, huh? You metal ****,"
Obiterate, with his central power supply heavily damaged by the devious sneak attack, passively ran an internal subroutine - a unique failsafe developed by Autosaver for the members of AOF as part of its combat auxiliary routine research program - which activated a temporary backup power source that is embedded proximally to his main spark capacitor.
The failsafe is dangerous though, as it uses up all reserve energy in the power cells. Should the subject deplete all resources before the main capacitor is repaired, irreversible damage may occur to the memory drivers, effectively killing the subject or at least its sense of cognition or reasoning.
Obiterate's visual feed flickers as Pyro twists the heatblade clockwise and steps closer for leverage.
Unable to stop the onslaught, the Autobot's arms slowly went lax, as his body shut down from the damage. The blue light from his eyes flickered violently for a few seconds and faded into a dull gray.
Pyro released his grip from the heat blade and stared triumphantly into his latest victim's face. "At least this huge heap of garbage died standing up," he rused. "It'd make good target practice before I report to Hawk."
The Decepticon scanned the immediate area and picked up his machine gun among the burning rubble, where it fell. He stalked back to his towering foe and with his remaining hand, rested the nozzle flat and upwards at the Autobot's chin.
"So long, sucker."
A single shot rang out amidst the inferno, followed by a sharp, sick crack.
Chargemine held his position across the the ruined street, his pulse pistol pointed at his enemy, and fired.
The shot was true to aim.
The Decepticon's gun shattered as the pulse hit it right at its center, prompting its startled owner to duck for cover.
Sequentially, Obiterate's backup power surged throughout his body and all of his sensory protocols went online as abruptly as it had gone off a couple of minutes prior. He saw a rather confused Pyro cowering in front of him, gazing outside towards the street.
He unceremoniously grabbed the Decepticon with his right hand by the neck and hoisted him up.
"Surprise," Obiterate sarcastically growled, as he clenched his left fist, the metal hinges in his hand grinding ominously amidst the chaos.
"How in the --- "
Obiterate smashes his fist, knuckles first, on Pyros' right eye socket. The Decepticon's face caves in to the sheer strength of the blow, destroying him effectively.
Victorious, Obiterate dumps Pyro's lifeless heap to the side and steps out of the burning building.
"Obiterate," Chargemine calls out, as he approached his battle-damaged comrade.
"Thanks for saving my rump back there," Obiterate acknowledges, as he checked his damage.
"That was a close call. I tried to find another way here without attracting too much attention. We have too much collateral damage around us, I'm afraid our prolonged existence here may also jeopardize our welfare. Some of the humans can't tell us apart from the Cons."
"I understand. I've heard Pyro talking to someone else on his transponder though, before our encounter. If Steelclaw's intel was right, it would have to be the Mercs he was talking to."
"What did he say?"
"I'm not sure, the line was secure somehow. He was talking about coordinates before I tried to silence him permanently."
"And now he's dead. That's just great then. Way to go AoF," Chargemine sighed, as he planted his face into his free hand. The lead would have been important after all, as the possibility of the Mercs' involvement in this may provide more answers as to the alarming spike in Decepticon activity in recent weeks.
"Sarcasm is not a fruitful course of action for this situation," Obiterate reminded, sensing the agitation in Chargemine's tone.
"Yes, and I see you need some immediate attention to that wound of yours," Chargemine snapped back, as he crossed his arms. His face lights up a couple of seconds later, as if realization has dawned on him, and asked, "Is his head still intact?"
"Barely," came the snide reply.
"I say let's rip it off. We'll take it with us. We may be able to try and let Autosaver hack into it to get the coordinates from his memory banks."
"Fair enough."
With a curt nod, Obiterate grudgingly turns around and stalks back to where he tossed Pyro, as Chargemine transforms to vehicle mode and activates his holographic rider decoy.
Subject: Re: The Countdown Manuscripts 
Sat Feb 07, 2009 3:58 am
