The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Ten

It came through the half door gate at the outside-facing end of the corridor just behind the superheated blastwave that had, after knocking them from off their booted feet, flash-fried a trio of security force defenders...

... and it was moving very, very quickly, killing with ruthless efficiency and an unusual feral savagery considering its computerized cybernetic composition.

It was roaring at a deafening volume and charging bull-like, its large and knobby triangular head thrust forward, through any and all obstacles on three sets of four-clawed paws the size of dinner plates.

Predatorial and megafaunic, it was a partly mechanical panther three and a third meters long, standing one and a quarter meters high at its muscular front shoulders. It had six-legs, a hyper-articulated sheath of matte-finish, titanium armor-skin stretched taut over a supremely muscular predatory feline frame. It looked to weigh over five hundred and fifty kilograms and it possessed four crimson, almond-shaped feline eyes under a raised bony ridge on its stout skull. It had a mouthful of silvery fangs resembling machetes at half normal scale. Over its second set of front shoulders were a pair of prehensile bony-plated tentacular protuberances that each resembled the tail of a giant scorpion. It was from these outgrowths that it fired destructive streams of superheated ion pulses.

It had obviously been designed for no other purpose than to maim and kill.

And the thing, guided by an analytical multi-thread heuristic, autonomous artificial intelligence designed for strategic combat, led a ravening pack of other Offworld alien, cyborg-monsters like it. It was a Clawbulekk assault unit. It had unleashed a fiery ion particle-beam and partially caved-in the eastern outer wall of the nethermost level of the ground pavilion of Hehlgrummyte's Whyrligaegem... interrupting the contentious standoff between the grim knights, Qrystatos and D'Spayr. 

Kazzime Joxx ducked, rolling away from the Symposium Room's centrally placed large conference table. Keeping low, he skittered across the rough-hewn floor under an explosive torrent of fragmented masonry mixed with flaming cinders. The mechanical beast lunged awkwardly into the Symposium Room, shattering the stone framework of the room's overlarge doorway, its quartet of tilted, upwardly-slanted eyes rapidly scanning the area for targets. 

Though the sound was muffled, he could feel concussive tremors racing along the stones of the floor as the ground shook. Something inside the compound's perimeter outdoors had blown up. He could hear a growing cascade of faint screams. The acrid smell of something burning nearby assaulted his nostrils and he could taste the bitterness of slagged metal in the air.

It was damn near unthinkable that anyone would dare to launch an assault against Hehlgrummyte's Whyrligaegem Command Compound. The servile, pedagogical, mostly agrarian, feudal community that had developed around Lord Hehlgrummyte's Astromancer Observatory was ill-suited as any kind of a strategic military target. This should not have been happening. And it was happening in daylight, in broad,naked daylight, which made it all the more affrontive, more horrible -- it was evidence that those who had launched the attack were secure in their arrogant belief that no manner of defense or counter-offense could be mounted that would or could threaten their power. They would do what they wanted however they wanted and to a thousand Hells with anyone who felt and believed differently. Blood was theirs to spill as indiscriminately as they desired. The Chaos-Mage felt anger and outrage permeating his mood, defying his normal disinclination towards reactive rashness, but he'd tolerated about as much of the violent madness around him as he could stand. 

Gritting his teeth while he forcibly slowed his breathing, he grasped hold of his turbulent mental state and focused his mind, psychokinetically isolating the prismic tunnel through which he drew upon the dark, preternatural Unreality of Extremities that was the Magyckal speciality commonly called "The Discipline". Time slowed... Joxx could abruptly feel and join with the invisible lines of paraphysical non-atomic force that circulated and rippled between the empty spaces surrounding him and other objects, organic and non-organic, inside the partly decimated structure where he was under attack. The Clawbulekk predator swiftly drew closer, its analytical, machine brain targeting on the rising shape of the gesticulating Chaos-Mage.