It was an early spring day in the city of Seattle. A light drizzle fell from the bright overcast afternoon sky. The streets of down town were slick with the rain that had been falling since earlier this morning. Strangely the streets were devoid of traffic in the heart of the city and very few cars were parked on the curb, even less than you would expect even with the recent meter rate hike.
A low continuous crashing sound interspersed with an occasional bellow-like high pitched keening noise echoed through the empty streets, seeming to come from everywhere at once. A series of explosions briefly overpowered the other noise and the ground shook underfoot.
A high pitch whistle started far in the cloud filled sky overhead. It sounded almost exactly like the falling sound made by a cartoon coyote when it fell from a cliff. It got louder as a black speck in the sky became visible and rapidly grew in size as it sped toward the empty street. The black speck resolved itself into a metallic armored humanoid figure with a midnight blue cape. The figure fell limply and crashed into the street below plowing a furrow in the wet concrete and asphalt coming to rest in a crater of debris half way through the sidewalk.
The shining dark steel power armored figure covered in a tangle of heavy cape, concrete and dirt laid motionless for ten or fifteen seconds before the first signs of life began to appear.
A dark blue light traced, slowly at first then pulsing with more speed, the seams of the armor highlighting the knight like form. From the segmented tank like breastplate to the square toed highly armored feet, all the way to the large angular shoulder pauldrons, to which the thick fabric like cape was attached. The armor gave a full body twitch sending a shower of road fragment flying as it rebooted. The shiny metallic head with the grooved half mask covering the lower portion of the face pivoted from left to right as its yellow pupils dilated, the camera like iris fading up from a pale to a bright yellow glow, in the eye sockets of its human like upper face. The gauntleted knightly styled hands flexed and made fists as mobility slowly returned.
It was just under a minute before the armor rose to its feet, the rubble cascading down to the pavement. A remarkable achievement when you looked back at the ten foot long four foot deep trench it created when it came crashing back to earth into account.
A deep rumbling bass voice rumbled from it as the technological knight surveyed his surroundings. “Thank goodness for redundant systems. I might have been stuck there for quite a while. And right now the city needs me.” He looked around. “Hmm, ten blocks. It seemed like I had gone quite a bit farther while I was traveling up.”
He held his arm out at an angle and made a clasping motion with is right hand, as if grabbing an invisible handle. For a brief moment nothing seemed to happen then a five long foot black blade appeared instantly in his hand. The blade seemed to be composed of the darkness of deep space; it looked un earthly the way light seemed to ignore it causing it to stand out in sharp contrast to the rest of its surroundings. As if to highlight its unreal nature small black spheres the diameter of nickels and dimes seemed to wink in and out of existence along the edges. They also clustered in a swirling mass congregated at the end near where the blade seemed to be gripped by the dark steel gauntlet. The blade appeared for only a second or two before it began to flicker becoming opaque and then winked out completely, causing the racing blue tracers on the armor to flicker and stall for a moment.
“The blow and the fall must have shorted out some of the circuitry. I don’t have time to wait. Hopefully the auto-repair systems can have it in working order by the time I get back to the beast. And if not I can always batter it with my fists. No one will say that Forever Knight didn’t give it his utmost.”
The Forever Knight turned on his heel his sensors orienting him to the source of the keening bellows and began to lope down the street, causing even more potholes for the cities already beleaguered road maintenance crew to take care of, in long bounding strides towards the source of Seattle’s most recent peril.
Another keening bellow ripped out of the creature and rattled through the city at a deafening volume. Setting off distant car alarms and causing all the remaining birds in a five mile radius to flee in terror.
The beast stood four stories tall and seemed to be a horrible amalgamation of crab and squid. Its spined, sickly olive green carapace had cream colored edges and highlights. The carapace was slick with ooze and slime that seeped out of the mottles and warty skin of its non-armored flesh. It perched upright on four armored tentacles that acted as legs. The tentacles were covered in giant plate sized suckers that tore up the street and storefronts as it moved through town. Additional tentacles sprouted in the gap between its shells and grasped cars, tossing them up into the air and to be neatly severed into chunks with oversized grasping pincers.
The gills spaced around the gap between the back and front carapaces fluttered as the beast made its keening cry, thrashing its multiple sets of tendril arms wildly at everything near it and including the annoying bothersome people attacking it. Its bulbous stalked eyeballs swiveled trying to focus independently on different targets.
Considering Forever Knight was gone the rest of the Emerald City Defenders weren’t doing too badly.
AI-leen hovered in the air firing beams of energy at the vulnerable flesh between the creatures two half shells and trying to blind the beast with flashing lights. All the while calling out tactical advice to her teammates using bright hard light billboards she formed near them
Necessity on the other hand used device after device on the creature, everything from ice grenades thrown at its gill/mouths, to a pudding that exploded when a certain amount of pressure was placed on it, to rocket propelled net launchers fired at its supporting leg tentacles, all the while circling overhead thanks to her dual turbofan back pack.
Harmonic bravely stood, arms outstretched, in the center of the street and used his power to combine the ambient noise to augment his voice, and act as a background band. He sang almost continuously at a deafening volume trying to use the wall of sound he generated to keep the ocean born menace from advancing any further into the city proper. Harmonic did his best not to flinch at the debris that the creature threw his way all the while singing his own versions of the most vocally intense songs he had memorized; from Ronnie James Deo’s Number of the Beast, to Down with the Sickness from Disturbed and even Rainbow’s Man from the Silver Mountain.
Expresso meanwhile zipped back and forth using his super speed to protect Harmonic from everything thrown his way; even snatching pebbles and rocks out of the air with his bare hands seconds before they would hit his companion. To the remaining people hiding in the surrounding buildings it looked like a pale brown blur zigzagged tornado-like keeping a center of calm free of chaos in the raging battle.
Necessity broadcast on the frequency that AI-leen monitored for skirmishes; “This isn’t working. We are at best holding it at bay. Definitely not driving it back to the sound.” She lobbed another ice grenade at the thing, missed, and watched it fall to the ground forming a thick sheet of ice in front of the beast causing the suckers on the lower legs to only lose adhesion to for a few brief moments.
An electronically generated female voice replied almost instantly in the com built into her light brown leather aviator’s cap. “I agree. At best even with Forever Knights help we would need something unexpected to get it off guard and gain positive momentum in this battle. I am running multiple calculations and scenarios with the collective in Redmond as we speak. Also please note Harmonic may not last much longer than seven minutes at his current level.”
Necessity turned down the exterior sound dampener for a few moments to listen to Harmonic’s voice. She heard the strains of Van Halen’s Welcome to the Jungle. “Oh no. Welcome to the Jungle... That means he is two or three songs tops away from Ave Maria. He has been practicing on his strength and in a normal fight I wouldn’t be concerned. But I have never heard him hold this volume level for so long. I might be worried for him, but it is kinda inspiring.” She said with concern in her voice. “Plus the Crab-topus doesn’t even seem to be tiring.”
“Crab-topus..?” The mechanical voice seemed curious.
“I’m an inventor.” She paused lobbing another rocket net at the creature. “I made things up. Why not words?”
Forever Knight chose that moment to rejoin the fray. The power armored warrior charged out of an alleyway behind the beast the blue tracers of his armor pulsing strongly. His metal clad legs pumped like pistons and his cape flapped behind him as he chopped into a supporting leg. The black energy blade flickered slightly as it scored a line in a segmented armored tentacle. The Crab-topus gave it’s keening cry once again and flicked out a tentacle/leg at Forever Knight who dodged it and swiped at it with his sword, cutting a few of few feet off of the end of it.
This duel between the Emerald City Defenders and the Crab-topus went on for a few more minutes and one song with neither side giving ground. When the game changer that AI-leen was needing happened.
An explosion, so loud it was heard even over the wall of sound that Harmonic was generating, erupted from the docks on the south side of the city. Necessity looked over her shoulder in that direction but didn’t see any sign of flames, just a large cloud of smoke and dust.
Using the built in magnificators in her goggles she couldn’t immediately see anything amiss other than the cloud. Not that she gave it a lot of attention, being that she was still concerned with not being a meal of the raging Crab-topus in front of her. But glancing back and forth repeatedly, as she dodged, she soon spied something unexpected. The black smoke cloud seemed to be heading their direction, weaving down the streets and around buildings. As the smoke go closer she could see that a large figure moved in front of it. A figure that was nearly the same size as the creature that they were currently facing.
“AI-leen! We have trouble! I think there might be another one of them and it is doing something different! And I think it is heading this way! I think it might be a Class 5!”
A pulse of flickering light and data streamed out of AI-leen towards their new adversary. In a calm voice she relayed her findings to Necessity and Forever Knight’s internal coms.
“The figure approaching us is a non-organic biped. I can state with one hundred percent certainty that it is not another Crab-topus. Wither or not it is a Class 5 cannot be determined at this time. Due to it returning conflicting sensor readings I cannot give you a definitive answer on what it actually is. Some of the signal appears to be blocked by strong shielding while other portions pass through it as if it did not have any shielding at all. It is most perplexing.” The whole time she was giving her data to her companions AI-leen continued to weave and dodge firing the occasional hampering pulse at the legs or eyes of the Crab-topus in front of her. “Something else of note; It is emitting a strange and powerful sonic signature. I believe you will be able to hear it above Harmonics aural assault in less than ten seconds, which indicates its sonic level.”
Five blocks away the noise could be heard. It sounded like all the monster trucks in a monster truck show revving and idling their engines in synchronization.
Four blocks away the bipedal figure was close enough to make out. It was a three and a half story tall metal robot. It seemed to be built out of rusty scrap metal, organic looking alien tech and junked cars. There was no visual cohesion to the thing at all.
Bent bondo colored auto hoods and fenders covered the entirety of the left arm, which ended in an over-sized claw that looked like it came from a piece of construction equipment. While the right arm was made out of black and purple techno-organic sinew coiled around and underneath bright orange semitransparent carapace that ended in a segmented four fingered hand. The main torso was a mishmash of battleship plating, more chunks of the alien carapace and what looked like the grill of a fifties pickup truck, with the head lights still attached and on at full brightness. The legs that propelled this scrap pile nightmare weren’t much better. Some effort was made to color coordinate with the car parts on the thighs. But that color happened to be the baby blue of the reshaped fenders riveted on top of the grey battleship plating. It turned out that the cloud of black smoke that followed it was actually being generated by the stacks of mismatched exhaust pipes jutting from the back and shoulders. What really set it off was the head. Perched on a neck of black and purple sinew was a nineteen fifty eight Cadillac Fleetwood painted in a glossy candy apple red, complete with whitewall tires, also with its headlights on. A figure with dark sunglasses and a wild mop of yellow hair could be seen in the driver’s seat.
Necessity gasped. “It’s a MEGAS!”
Dodging another swiping arm Forever Knight enquired “AI-leen?”
“MEGAS: Mechanically Engineered Gigantic Android Soldier. This one appears to be crafted out of Vrall tech and more mundane materials. It might be able to take the Crab-topus, even with its poor craftsmanship, especially if…”
Before she could finish she was interrupted by a high pitch whine of a microphone becoming active. “Hey Defenders!” An enthusiastic male voice exclaimed at incredible volume from the MEGAS. “I’m Dale! And this here beast is The Mighty Metal Mechanoid! I figured you could use a hand! It’s time to Rock!” The word rock was said in a poor, but enthusiastic, imitation of the metal falsetto which many singers have used over the years.
The right arm of the giant robot flew up above its "head" and flashed the universal symbol for heavy metal with its four fingered hand. The rock devil horns. Then music kicked in at a tremendous volume, which it so happened to be the opening notes of Painkiller by Judas Priest, and the engines revved up sounding like the accelerators of a dozen monster trucks hitting the floor at the same time. Harmonic's rendition of Bodies and the new sound assault from the MEGAS proved too much for the glass in two block radius. Every pane of glass simultaneously shattered as the battle was joined by the new combatant.
Forever Knight dodged out of the way from the two titans as the sea behemoth was tackled from behind by the metal monster.
“How
did this even happen?” He sighed into his helmet.
