Hacker: CF_Dogcatcher
Region: Application City
Duel Disk[8]: Vivi_Paltest.dat(4), Squad Summon S (1)x3, Recovery 10 (1), CallChiptune (0)
Other: The hunters become the hunted, as the Data Police crackdown begins! Will they manage to drive out the mysterious Firmament, or will the nefarious Dogcatcher outsmart them? Look out below!
With the gangs crushed and brought to heel, only the actual police of the city should be left to resist the forces of the Firmament. But the city police has realized they are in over their heads even before the Firmament moved to take control of the actual upscale portion due the preceding gang war, and they've called for help. The World Data Police descends upon Firmament City.
The battle starts slow, almost peaceful like, the only sound in the city streets that of a strangely omnipresent chiptune. The city police have mustered in mass, baton armed CopAgents unfolding from the police stations like a flower blossoms to take control of the streets back. The quiet does not last, for it takes bare minutes for the CopAgents to come upon the first Firmament controlled safehouse. The CopAgents command the Firmament's CarbineMinions to stand down and surrender, the CarbineMinions refuse to surrender, the CopAgents move to arrest them all, and then the entire squad of CopAgents dies in bare seconds as a pack of Chamelee.mon killers drop off the roof behind them and strike.
City PoliceThopters are quick to respond, TransportBlimps dropping new squads of CopAgents down onto the rocket-blasted streetfront where the Chamelee.mon viral constructs stood, and there is no second call for surrender. Neither do they call for a surrender at the second safehouse found, or the third, or the fourth. They move in and begin enthusiastically arresting all programs found within. Or, well, they try to at least. The riot shields that would have allowed the CopAgents to handily resist tattooed GangMinion tommy gun fire is less then effective verses the more powerful and better programmed CarbineMinion.exe programs that the Firmament uses even when the entire squad hasn't been knocked off their feet by a hit and run Scout.exe ramming strike, and their batons make poor counters for the chainsaw claws of the Chamelee.mon ferals.
When the city's police attempt to turn things around with more PoliceThopter airstrikes, launching missiles that inform their targets they are under arrest in booming voices and dropping Flashbombs, they find that both thopters and blimps alike die under the the sharp teeth of the Wyrm.exe fliers, held back for this moment.
If the World Data Police wasn't here, this would likely be the end of things, with only a rare few siren headed CopRobos able to put up a good fight, giant robot bodies fighting back with Bullhorn-Cannon and Cat O' Nine Cuffs before they fall under the weight of enemy numbers.
But the World Data Police is here, and they move to stabilize things. The Crackdown begins. Police Hovercars take flight and begin chewing through Wyrm.exe swarms as their twin mounted 40mm Auto Cannons roar, and the next attack against Firmament Safehouse Installations are led by Rookie.exe programs with snap-firing laser pistols and a brace of grenades. Detonations shake the city as the Firmament finds out the hard way that the rookies carry their grenades armed, and death tends to leave a gravestone built from explosions behind. As the CarbineMinion.exe defenders try to find new cover after the rookies blow away the walls, either through death or threw thrown grenade, CannonHeavy.exe WDP programs rake the defenders with autocannons, mixing explosive and incendiary ammo clips to leave the former safehouse a burning ruin, and RocketHeavy.exe programs snapfire rockets at Chamelee.mon ambushers.
As the burning fires illuminate the remaining fragments of the safehouse second floors, hovering over the ruins, Bailey orders her forces into the streets to ambush and assault the WDP before they can locate any more of her Safehouses or backtrace from them to a more important installation, and soon the streets are aglow as laserfire crossed with the CarbineMinion.exe's energy bolts and charged shots. Above these fights fly the shots of the Hunter.exe Ver. 0.9-B, the Firmament's snipers engaging in deadly duels with the flying armor equipped SniperVet.exe agents of the World Data Police as the WDP try to eliminate Firmament officers and high class units such as the Wako.mon and the Hunter.exe try to eliminate them in return. It's a deadly long ranged duel where the Hunters are at a disadvantage due to the fact that the enemy can fly and they can not. Both side's snipers can easily terminate the other side's with a solid hit, so the advantage of a superior vantage is not a minor one. On the other claw, flying SniperVet.exe programs have an unfortunate (for them) tendency to get swarmed under and eaten by Wyrm.exe programs, and soon are forced to only fly with defensive deployments of CannonHeavy.exe programs and laser rifle carrying VetTrooper.exe defenders in their own flying armor.
It becomes a running battle between the two forces as Bailey uses Scout.exe programs to track enemy fireteams and deploys the newly upgraded Tunnelers to allow her to deploy her own squads behind enemy lines, maintaining enough presence there to use her Squad Summon S chips to seek and destroy the enemy BlastVets, hiding in concealed corners as they launch their highly explosive homing projectiles across the city. Even Vivi is pressed in the battle as she is forced to take on the limited number of deployed enemy HovtnkPlas.exe vehicles in a fight that leaves entire city blocks ruined and Vivi out of the fight until Bailey can spare the codepower to recharge the Recover Chip that kept her in the fight. However, her intervention was needed for the only other program that could meaningfully balk the flying tanks were the Hunter.exe Ver. 0.9-B program's third level charged shots, which were not usable at enough of a rate to hold off the tank push by themselves.
In the end Bailey is forced to give ground in front of the World Data Police attack, 'going dark' in critical installations in an attempt to conceal them from her enemies as they become connected only through secure long ranged tunnels and sacrificing garrison forces to conceal the Firmament's primary access points into the city. Despite these measures, the World Data Police razes several of the Network Backbone Taps she'd constructed in the last expansion into the city, hunting them down and sniffing them out with PsiVet.exe programs who barely use their plasma pistols in favor of detecting and tracking the bitbrains of Firmament forces, allowing them to locate any non-filtered site with Firmament troops. A fact realized only barely in time to let the Firmaments original installations construct appropriate Mind Shielding functionalities.
+1 Control in the Application City for the World Data Police (Independents). Control point returned to the City Police Agency (Independents). Application City Gangs (Independents) removed as a relevant faction.
Hacker: DJ King Cabaret
Region: BitMines
Duel Disk[8]: Recovery10 (1)x2, Atk+10 (1), Minion Call A(1)x2 Squad Summon S (1)x3, CallChiptune (0)
Other: Day in, day out, the bits are mined and the miners become bits. No more, the DJ has come to rock this joint clear with an uprising from below!
Entering through both channels in the petrified roots of the Amazon Commerce Forest and the deepest sewers of Application City, the DJ King enters the BitMines to a complete lack of reaction from the occupants. Unlike the crude tunnels of the Archival Sediment, the BitMines are well constructed, stable, with ample supports. There is little risk of a cave in here, but that risk is made up for by the abundent and continually operating machinery. Hammers hammer endless upon conveyor belts, drills bore creaseless tunnels through the stone, and an abundance of completely uncovered gears turn forever just waiting to crush an unwary limb... or entire program, depending on gear size.
However unsafe the environment is, however is not unsafe enough to properly contest Firmament forces. That falls to the JackDroid.exe programs and their seismic wave generating jackhamers, the RockingSupervisor.exe programs and their laser guitars, and the suicidal DroneMine.exe constructs that spin endlessly with pickaxes and explode once they take catastrophic damage. While normally these programs work together to mine into the stone without reason or end, they react with violence towards interference with this work, such as that caused when large amounts of programs try to move through their areas (and get in the way), when programs interfere with the local machinery to free up space for Firmament bases, or when a MinionCall chip accidentally drops a minion in front of a DroneMine.exe's pickaxes.
The mine teams do their valiant best to preserve their stakes and fight against what they see as foul claim jumpers, but against the battle-hardened and advanced Firmament forces their best is not enough. More deadly in their attempts to force intruders out are the living factories that trundle endlessly through the tunnels on treads, furnace-mouths always hungry for more fuel and more resources to smelt. Entire companies of CarbineMinion.exe troops die to bring the Wako.mon warriors time to pull them apart rivet by rivet, and bases melt under their molten iron belches when defenders fail to rally in time.
But the MobileFactory.Mons also die, in the end, for they are pulled apart by the Wako.Mon rivet by rivet, and Firmament bases are built where shrines to industrial automation once stood. The Firmament is the one who now mines the BitMines, outdated Minion.exe programs crudely pulling useful orecode from stone as processing centers are built and begin to calculate their endless contemplations of the endless network.
+1 Control in the BitMines for The Firmament.Warning! Stagehands attacking the Viral Jungle! With no Hacker assigned to the Viral Jungle, and no hacker in reserve, Auto-Resolve triggered and command is delegated to local C&C units.
See the
Battle Report in the core thread.