SS [13] Breaking
They were going into this fight blind. The most they got from Laxy or Ivoi was that it was a large warframe designed as a siege engine. So yeah, they got barely any information no matter how they asked or worded the questions. Regardless this fight was inevitable the S-17 and later the S-16 were all that stood before them and finally being able to put all of this behind them.
Destroying the S-17 was the penultimate battle, the last obstacle before reaching the power plant’s core. Then it would finally be over. Tanisha was ready for no more world-ending threats, no more portals to the Infernal Plane, no more being separated from Bjorn or Joha. Just clean air and real sunlight and a real adventure away from Yuhia.
Tanisha forced herself to focus. One thing at a time. They were going to hit this thing hard with everything they had in the first strike. The objective: cripple its mobility and observe how it responded. If they could take it out from there they would. Simple plan. Brutal execution.
Aurelius began the countdown. “Five... four…”
Tanisha broke into a sprint at “three.” She was technically the slowest and needed the head start.
“…two…”
Fuyumi vanished between strides, blinking forward in flickers of displaced space.
“One,” Aurelius roared.
They struck as one.
Magic erupted in the red gold bursts of seiðr, the razor sting of ice mana and the chaotic twist of primana. Their weapons met the S-17’s armor in a coordinated explosion of force, energy splashing like lightning across its body and legs.
Pain followed. Tanisha felt the shock of her weapon hitting an unmovable object. Her Walking Armory bardiche shattered into shards of electrical mana that tore at her violently. The recoil surged through her, cracking through her limbs, her core seizing with sudden overload.
What in the Infernal Planes?
She didn’t loose control. Not entirely as she wrangled her core into compliance. She was too skilled to lose full control. The pain was staggering, and her body locked up for a second. And that was a second too long.
Then she felt it. A hollow emptiness followed by a burn in her chest. A thin stream of light no wider than her pinky shot through her armor, through all of her protections and through her heart.
Her eyes widened but she didn’t hesitate a second longer. There was no scream of pain or panic. She could move and she would.
Everything was happening so fast after that as she used Arcane Shift in quick succession to retreat. More shots followed her but all she could do was dodge. The S-17 didn’t care what stood in its way: walls, rubble, her. It kept firing.
She couldn’t hear anything for a long time. Everything was drowned out by pain and instinct. Though even frantic she wasn’t sloppy. She didn’t have the luxury to make mistakes.
Her heart was destroyed and she was loosing consciousness. If she were a normal person she would be dead. Luckily she was not a normal, she was a mage that had gone through a mana baptism. Her body wouldn’t fail just because her heart did. Mana, maya and aether was her blood and flowed with or without the organ. Though she could very much still bleed out.
The S-17 lumbered forward, quiet as death. No gears groaned. No engines howled. Just cold, efficient movement. Its undercarriage bristled with guns of various sizes—the same ones that had nearly killed her.
Tanisha finally saw it clearly as it emerged from its hibernation. A monster of metal and silence: the S-17 Siegebreaker, a Heavy-Class Warframe. Its design was something she could only describe as utilitarian and brutal. It stood on four thick legs like a siege tower in motion, bristling with battlements above and below.
Tanisha hurled herself onto one of the skybridges, Arcane Shift deposited her in a heap on the ground. She was finally out of the range of the small cannons. She used her elevation to monitor the situation. But first she had to take care of herself.
The thing was with her core and body both damaged she didn’t bleed blood. Her body was too charged with magic. Instead a burning ash white gold like aether flaked from her chest and mouth. She punched the ground as she grit her teeth through the pain.
The visor of her helmet opened and she took out a potion and downed it in one breath. A cough rattled her body as the liquid felt like it burned on the way down. Her core was still recovering so she couldn’t utilize her seiðr like she wanted. Still she had a mission to complete.
She scanned the battlefield below. Fuyumi and Aurelius had taken a more cautious approach but were still engaged. Both were injured but still moving. She was the only one who’d taken a killing blow.
Their first assault had done nothing. The S-17 hadn’t even flinched. All they had done was wake it up ready for war.
“Fuck,” She gasped, struggling to catch her breath. “Get up Tanisha. You have to ge… get in there!”
She saw Fuyumi and Aurelius retreat. Good she needed a second. Everyone was outside the machine’s immediate combat radius, and Tanisha assumed it would return to standby mode. She clutched her chest as her damaged heart began to knit itself back together, golden ash spilling from her lips with every shallow breath.
A surge of concentrated aether flared in her senses. It told her not to let her guard down. And she watched with eyes wide as the two story tall behemoth of a machine used Blink.
The air folded in where the machine once was causing a cavitation of air to collapse in a thunderous whump! The machine appeared at ground level next to a shocked Fuyumi.
The sound of combat starting back up a moment later. Tanisha quickly got to her feet using the Third Activation to boost her speed without drawing on her damaged core. She took her bardiche out of her inventory, the real weapon and not the construct, and dashed into the battle.
Lances of aetheric fire streaked from the machine, defensive turrets locking onto everything in sight. Tanisha sprinted, leaping from roadway to shattered skywalk, weaving between lines of gunfire capable of slicing through her armor like paper.
She lost track of Fuyumi but Aurelius’s primana flashed in her periphery. His strike took on the shape of a dragon which hit the rear leg. With a strike like that it should have done something. Any other foe and it would have ended the fight.
Tanisha saw a shimmer just before the blade hit. It was an aetheric ward.
“That’s why it isn’t damaged when we hit it.” She said to herself.
“Tani, Fuyumi, we are pulling back!” Aurelius yelled. “We have to get to the fallback point!”
Before his words had fully left his mouth, the machine pulsed with aether again and Blinked.
Tanisha barely had time to react. It appeared right in front of her, a massive cannon mounted atop it beginning to charge. The main weapon which it hadn’t used yet. She arcane-shifted just as the blast fired, a searing beam tearing through the cityscape.
When she reappeared twenty feet to her left she fell to a lower level. She landed heavily on her feet. Her armor glowed red-hot, heat venting through its internal systems in furious gouts of steam. Another moment and she would’ve been cooked inside it.
She didn’t have time to orient herself and she wasn’t sure where she was. The S-17 continued its fire aetheric beams cut through the road way between them as showered her like rain. She deflected smaller projectiles with her bardiche, the impacts reverberating through her arms.
She escaped into a building. Not bothering to use doors she just ran through walls. The machine didn’t pursue her, instead going after one of her teammates.
The S-17 wasn’t fast on its own but the fact it could use Blink made its normal walking pace relevant. Somehow it could also track them down. Tanisha ran through one of the districts they had already cleared of other targets.
She could hear the sound of the S-17 firing and its guns faded gradually. She stopped at a shattered storefront, its interior gutted by some past explosion. There was no way to tell what it once sold. Kneeling amid the rubble, she reached inward.
First focus. Breath in and out. Maya is breath, Aether is Restriction, and Mana is Balance. Breath In.
Her mind focused inward on her Sage Core. She breathed long and deep, drawing in ambient energies and calming the flow within herself. The maya aspects of her core went from a torrent of chaos to a smooth flow in her meridians. Aether fell into place no longer competing with the demonic energy. Lastly mana stabilized which balanced the harmony and her seiðr alloy was again under her control.
She opened her eyes and the world came back into focus. She clinched her fist as scarlet electricity surged around her. It was time to find the others and reassess their plan of attack. This was humiliating. All they could do was run away.
She pressed a hand to her cuirass, fingers finding the hole scorched clean through just over her heart. The machine’s aim had been surgical. The damage would have been mitigated, maybe completely deflected if she hadn’t lost control of her Sage Core. Her Chain’s Breaker’s Mantle not only made herself more durable but also the armor. Without it, well, she felt what happens without it.
She drank a second health potion then stood up. It didn’t sting this time now that her wound was nearly healed. It was still bitter though and she scrunched up her face while drinking it.
I need to find a way to make these things taste better.
The sound of aetheric gunfire stopped and she had to get moving. The city was eerily quiet without her team and without the battle in the distance.
“Alright… first things first—let’s figure out where I am,” Tanisha muttered.
Her visor closed and she realized she made a wrong turn. The map was blank all around her meaning she hadn’t been here before. That was bad and she needed to find her way out soon. Unexplored areas meant enemies.
She kept herself low as she walked out to an intersection. She used an Arcane Shift to go up two levels to a large atrium. Simulated plantlife swayed in nonexistent wind. It would almost be as if she were outside if not for the perpetual darkness and flashing redlights.
[Hostile Detected]
Oh great, somethings here.
Tanisha quickly tightened her grip on her bardiche as she saw a red dot appear on her map.
She turned just in time to dodge a blade from stabbing her in the back. She used Arcane Shift to gain distance, appearing twenty feet back. The gleaming edge retracted slowly. Another blade lashed out from her blindside, but her bardiche intercepted it with a shriek of steel. Lightning danced from her weapon, meeting the aetheric edge. Three dots appeared on her map now.
“I don’t have time for this.” Tanisha said.
Tanisha charged the nearest enemy. Three blades lashed out at her from different angles. She ducked beneath the first, momentum never breaking. The second scraped her shin guard, sparking but failing to breach. The third she batted away with the haft of her bardiche.
As she approached she saw the offenders, the S-10 Stingers. It is a scorpion-like model she had encountered before. Annoying alone. Deadly in groups. Three would be troublesome but doable.
The first one raised its claws. Aether began to build. She sidestepped a crackling beam from the left claw and kicked the right one offline before it could fire. Her bardiche came down a heartbeat later, but the Stinger dodged. She again deflected a blade aimed at her back, knocking it aside with her gauntlet. She then had to jump up to avoid a blade aimed at her side.
Scarlet lightning arched from her hand in a silent ribbon of power. The closest Stinger raised its claw just in time to block but the appendage fell limp.
The fight dissolved into chaos. Blades spinning, aether beams slicing, scorpion tails snapping with lethal reach. The tails could extend dozens of feet, keeping her at bay.
The thing was, she was a mage. Distance worked to her advantage too. Hydromancy answered her call. Six water orbs condensed around her, satellites of power. She had to send a silent thanks to Laxy for the upgrades to her armor. She could only condense so much of her magic because she wasn’t also powering the suit.
She pushed her magic senses to their max as she directed razor-thin jets from each orb to slice at the joints of every extending tail. Precision over power, a benefit from her training with Fuyumi. As the whips fell, she transitioned.
She put away her bardiche, getting into the second form of the Way of the Rakshasa. VritraVajra the art of deflection and redirection. Red-gold seiðr flowed from her fingertips, trailing like comet-fire as she moved. This form no longer felt foreign—it was muscle memory now, refined by countless battles. Joha would be proud.
She waited for the right moment between Arcane Shift, and dodging. Then she reached out her hand and caught one of the aetheric beams. . Her magic guided the energy, spiraling it around her arm, across her torso, through her other limb like a serpent coiling a tree. Then she released it just as fast as it had come.
This time however, it was infused with her seiðr as it struck one of the other insectoid monstrosities. Power carved through the machine and it fell dead.
She then summoned her electric bardiche from her Walking Armory and threw it at the second scorpion. It jumped to avoid it but she teleported directly above it. Electric Hand already punching forward landing on the armored head of the machine.
They both landed on the ground, the Orbs of water shooting into every joint disabling it before it could retaliate. Then her fists came down again and again until it stopped trying to move.
A beam carved through the air where her head had been. She ducked, grabbed the downed scorpion, and used it as a shield. Two more shots slammed into the corpse. She sprinted.
The final S-10 reeled back in surprise as she hurled the dead machine into it. The creature as it tried to dodge only to be caught in the side by her bardiche.
The weapon bit deep, nearly bisecting the machine. Water and electricity finished it off.She stomped on its head until the last glowing eye winked out. There was a long silence. Then a twitch in the corner of her vision. Without hesitation lightning arced from her outstretched hand. Striking one of the downed S-10 until it was slag.
Her HUD confirmed it—no more hostiles.
“Okay…” Tanisha exhaled, heart pounding. “Okay. Back to figuring out where I am.”