After nearly skidding around a corner and lowering its posture for maximum speed, Franken charged through another wide, open hallway towards the poorly defended rear of the enemy forces. Having originally ducked down a side passage, Axton had driven his War Suit on a rather roundabout course, though that was mostly to throw off any potential pursuers, not that there were any.

After clearing his tail (which, once again, was already clean), Franken had boosted up a set of stairs that led to the second floor of what Axton assumed was a fuck-all massive mall. From that second floor, he had directed Franken to take yet another roundabout method of approaching the defending enemy forces before making his final approach.

He smiled a bit as he had his piloted killer robot unsheathe its two massive combat knives. Perhaps due to the sound of their burning transport, or maybe due to some other factor, they were unaware of his approach, and would quickly realize the error that was their focus on solely looking forward.

After all, the worst kinds of attacks often came from behind, so it paid great dividends to keep an eye pointed backward as well as forwards. As Franken lunged forwards and drove one of its knives deep into the back of another War Suit, Axton grinned, but then quickly had Franken spin around.

A shot barely passed right in front of Franken’s face, and Axton realized that while he may have ambushed them from behind, they were much less willfully moronic than his other foes had been up to this point. Certainly, they had not fully expected him to strike from behind, but they had, in fact, prepared for if he did.

Another shell whizzed by, and Franken pulled the impaled War Suit in front of itself to act as an improvised shield. The other War Suits nearby didn’t seem to bat an eye at this and pumped round after round into the improvised cover until they suddenly stopped.

Axton didn’t know if they were out of ammo or merely conserving it until he and his War Suit broke from their cover, but he wasn’t about to try and find out the hard way. His cameras let him see a little something that he could use nearby, and Axton had Franken drag the broken ‘body shield’ along until he reached it.

Peeking out from behind the mostly shredded mech, Franken then lowered its posture and reached out towards the objects that its pilot had set their sight on. It managed to grab the chain of items and pull them back behind the improvised cover quickly enough, but the cost was that a shot from another foe scraped a bit of the final, exterior layer of metal off of Franken’s forearm.

However, the prize was secured, and Axton now had what he needed to (hopefully) deal with the issues he knowingly yet unknowingly walked into. Franken twisted a bit to build up a gyroscopic force, and a few shots sailed near its exposed flank before the machine twisted the other way and then all the way around as it's one free hand yanked a chain of smoke and chaff grenades in an arc between itself and the enemy.

As Franken turned around completely, a few smaller shots slammed into its frame, not causing too much damage but still embedding themselves partially in Franken’s composite armor. Thankfully for both it and its pilot, the chain of grenades snapped apart and danced in the air as Franken once again took cover behind its first victim, and aside from those few direct-ish hits, no other impacts caused any meaningful damage during the whole thing.

Axton listened closely as the grenades went off, and he flipped a switch in his cockpit to change the main sensors from regular visual ones to a mix of light electromagnetic sensors and one specifically designed to look for the thermal signature of active, running vehicle engines. However, as he peeked out from cover again, he realized that the mix of smoke and chaff did not help those sensors do their job properly, and so he switched back to purely using the purely visual one.

He would need to rely on shapes in the smoke and his Player HUD for this one….

…

“Fucking bastard…” spat one of the intruders as he had his War Suit swing its one actual humanoid arm wildly to try and move the smoke out of the way. “Huddle up. We don’t want him sneaking up on us!”

He peeked over at the readout on his side and growled. One of the lights had already gone out, and he was loathe to have yet another of his allies go down to such an underhanded bastard. However, one of the remaining lights began to blink rapidly, and he, in a moment of panic, pressed the flashing light and saw the active readout of that particular ally’s systems.

Cursing, he turned his War Suit in the quickly falling ally’s direction and begged over the comms for his comrade to forgive him. A half-second later, his War Suit pumped a series of five 120mm APFSDS rounds downrange, and the ally’s light went out on his dashboard.

He slammed his fist down on the control panel. He had lost more than a few good men today due to treachery and the bullshit that was the two people he was supposed to have wiped out completely by now, but he hoped that these two would be the last two to fall today.

Though the smoke was still heavy, there was mostly silence, which hopefully meant that the threat had gone down with that bit of friendly fire. He sighed and leaned back in his seat. It was, for now, over. Now he just needed to deal with that weird-looking War Suit that had some damn fine guns on it.

The sound of gunfire snapped him out of his delusions of security, though, as another light on his dash began to blink rapidly. He twisted his mech’s main gun around, locking on to the light of a gun flashing in the thick smoke.

“Got you this time, you damn bastard!” he yelled as he fired another three shots in an equal number of seconds. However, the gun kept firing, and eventually, his ally went dark. Another friend was killed, and he wasn’t able to take down the killer.

“Come out here and face me instead of hiding in this cloud!” he yelled, this time on open comms. However, he was met with the screams of another of his comrades as another light went out, and then a final one after that. All the while, the gun off in the cloud of smoke kept flashing and the sound of gunfire kept coming from it.

He had endured enough of this bullshit. He stomped over to the gun ad had his War Suit grab it in its hands and pull it close enough that he could see it through the smoke, only to discover that it wasn’t a gun at all. No, in his machine’s hand was a rather ingenious decoy that made the same light and sound as a gun of its size, but, upon closer inspection, revealed itself to be nothing more than an elaborate and intricate version of a giant cap gun.

It was in that moment that his memory snapped back to a few minutes prior, and he realized that he had played himself. His companions, after setting up, had joked about a piece of tech that was there that had somehow survived all of time’s attempts to destroy it.

That very piece of tech, a giant toy cap gun, had been there before he and his companions had been, and it was still there during the fight, and now it, at long last, had been activated by his foe to deceive him and, most infuriatingly of all, gotten him to waste precious ammo and attention as his comrades died around him.

He was livid, but he was impressed. He was about to try and get back to the fight when a large, sharp piece of metal rammed its way through the rear of his War Suit, through the seat he was in, his back, and out his chest and into the cockpit’s dashboard.

“Oh…” he muttered before the blade was pulled out. “Well… shit…” He looked down at the hole in his torso and slumped back into his now damaged seat. As light and life left him, he managed in his final moments to get out the last few ‘badass’ lines he would ever speak before passing into oblivion. “That’s much too big a hole to be in a man like me…”