"Ten minutes, tops." Wrex's voice rumbled over the coms, distorted slightly By the steady drone of machine guns and the deep baritone of shotgun blasts. "The de-con process is taking longer than we thought; Solus is babbling something about Oblivion flows contamination in the Essence filters."<br/><br/>"Tell him to polarize the asymmetrical energy core, then reverse the nucleonic flux discriminator. When it turns purple, flange the hypotenuse." Esone snapped, catching one of Sun's explosive projectiles and hurling it back at the Abyssal's face. The explosion barely fazed him, and the Soulsteel juggernaut simply bulled into the ashen assassin.<br/><br/>"...Tell him to what?" Wrex asked, his confusion palpable. The explosions actually paused as the Krogan tried to process the technobabble he had just been subjected to.<br/><br/>"Flange the hypotenuse man, flange it!" The sharp<span style="font-style: italic">ping</span>of Metallica rebounding off of Sun's face punctuated Esone's mock-serious tone. "If that does't work, invert the Alduin paradigm and caramelize the root-converter."<br/><span style="color: #000000">Cut the poor guy a break, I don't think he realizes that you're messing with him.</span><br/><span style="font-style: italic">And that's what makes it fun. I need at least a little cheering up after losing a pet.</span><br/><br/>Skippy had been reduced to a smoldering pile of worm puree early in the fight, mashed up by Black Hole Sun at the Maiden's command. Now the great worm's legacy was leaving smears wherever Sun stepped. The pattern the smears painted spoke of a dance more complex than the Labrynth, a confluence of bladed grenade launchers and shotgun smashfists. The Abyssal and Esone had entered a kind of stalemate; Esone dodging every attack Sun could dish out, while Sun shrugged off every blow Esone managed to land. The two Night-derived Exalts were polar opposites, a hit man and a soldier. A hit man's occupation is not to fight, but to supply one fatal attack before the situation turns into a battle. This had entered into a soldier's battleground long ago, and only Esone's agility was keeping him alive. Between the ultimate evasion of the Scourge and the perfect parry of the Day, this fight was getting nowhere fast.<br/><br/>Mere feet away 042 and Bau had teamed up against another unpleasantly familiar 'face' - Weeping Ration Cast Aside. Where Esone and Sun enacted the problem of clashing defenses, these three represented the conflict of perfect attacks. The shrouded woman was giving the Saber agents a run for their credits, unleashing an unending barrage of blades from an Infinite Jade Chakram. The white-blue disk whipped back and fourth through the air, shredding the building in a near-suicidal assault that sent the Saber agents to dancing.<br/><br/>Bau for his part was manipulating probability at a prodigious rate, creating serendipitous debris collapse, renegade pianos, inexplicable flower pots, and falling anvils. His final heat clip had overloaded long ago, but seemed to be content with firing projectiles composed entirely of the concept of profanity. For a mild-mannered Salarian, the Spectre's torrent of bullets was enough to make a Blood Pack blush. One bullet described in great detail the means by which Raiton's mother had impressed upon an Elcor and a Bolus to jointly father the Abyssal. The lack of response to the Homerically-crafted essay affirmed Esone's theory that the woman was probably little more than a corpse puppet, for all that her Caste Mark bled upon her brow.<br/><br/>042 had enough armor plating to soak up the brunt of Raiton's airy torrent, but his tidal wave of metallic pellets seemed incapable of actually felling her. She was bleeding from so many places that she may as well have been a Blood Golem, and the few times the Geth had managed to close in with his axe had shown some of the more disturbing tricks in the Abyssal arsenal. One slash had split her in twain, yet somehow the half that contained her arms managed to shunt itself behind him and stab at his exposed back with an ebony dagger. Another blow had seemingly pulverized the Abyssal, yet moments later the sanguine carnage simply died and was replaced with her haunting, unmarred Soulsteel visage. If she or the Geth were afraid of the other they gave no sign, but their offensive was rapidly escalating to the point where tactical warheads would be called in. And to be honest, no one would survive that. Esoen had seen some of the weapons 042 had stashed away, and they could give even Isidoros and Mafeas pause with the sheer scale of potential destruction.<br/><br/>"0042! Castlin-" A heavy backhand caught Esone full in the face mid-shout, slamming him into the wall and opening a crack along Rare Earth's helm. Vertigo shivered, his display fracturing into fractals with a whimper. Sun's hand clamped over approximately where Esone's mouth was, Soulsteel visor becoming translucent. The hateful corpse-assassin glowered at Esone, his mangled jaw working out some garbled half-curse. As it did, a small burning figure coalesced beside a gnarled ear.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FF8000">Black Hole Sun would like to inform you, 'Not this time, punk'. He used courser terms, but I find my phrasing to be more elegant.</span><br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">He has an AI now?</span><br/><span style="color: #000000">Looks like Del Pilar really managed his jaw on Earth, I guess they installed it so he could communicate.</span><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Way to upgrade the enemy, John.</span>