The captain encountered an Alliance class titan; the smallest of them all, measuring just as tall as a petroleum oceanic platform, armed with missile tubes everywhere and in its back, a nuke silo, additional armor and movin' on treads, it was just a basic version, and it was alone, tried to connect to its overlord trillions of times and as such, after some millenia of maddening, it gained some kinda self-awareness; but sayin'  'at a smartphone is self-aware is just nonsense, amiwrong?

 

"IDENTIFY YOURSELF. AT LEAST WANNA KNOWS THE NAME OF WHAT IS POINTIN' ME ITS NUKES, EH!!!!?" I shouted in defiance to the frontface of the titan, which didn't have any resemblance of a face; i mean, no red-evil lights, not even actual headlights, nothing

 

"Arpoxias the powerful, of the sixth company, third squad, and the hundred thousand, four mill..." the thing answered with its thousands of megaphones installed all over itself

 

"I thought: blablablah enough of your cancer, furshit-face, I want to unmake you and that is what I will not do rite now" said before firing the microgun at the smol treaded thing even if I knew it is as useful as throwing candies to a battlefield and pray the possessed warriors suddenly stop its shit; just doesn't happen

 

then I accelerated my legs and moved to the side the titan might see me more: underneath itself; then tryed to climb with the mutated claws or something

 

"Arpoxias you die today, you will see it comeing, maybe your tormented netprocessors and brains are thinking: this fuckmad's gonna climb me so I can and will prepare meself and throw to it the best laser shit I have to spit at, huh?" THOOOOOught while actually climbing thru some of its treads while receiveing its las-storm as I expected,

 

"JUST EXCREMENT FROM GODS. DON'T YOU KNOW SOME'N BETTER??? HAH, SUCH A HOE YOU ARE" I was spitting my own thing-words while still climbing the titan which started to move and turn its alarms on, which sounded like moans of torture, to try to take advantage of the titan being self-aware; you know, if they think like us, then they're vulnerable like us, blinkblink. Advice for the future, tee-hee

 

I managed to climb to the insides of the titan then noted that some tribesmen armed with actual powerspears and other people inhabiting the titan, all of them wearing ruined robes and fragments of its old armour sets, appeared doing its daily life, or more politely, I appeared in its environment;  this thing is actually less rare than one expects: civilizations made out of the original titan's crew after havin' been abandoned by its god, Amid and the captain previous to me, Mateus the Blessed by Flames, said that cleaning the corridors with rad-fire and exotic sounds is the best method to madden even more the titan itself, makin' it target of its own fragmented mind; five million lives for another life, is just a hi' price, but is murderfucking worth it when in the greater scheme of thangs,

 

So I proceeded to actually not kill everything in sight, as the titan might have expected from me to do; I, who i'm still think i'm jonathan lacks, thought after having noted that I'm not so mad after all, i'm just a extremely tired of this repetitive shit called war, but isn't anything one cannot overcome with pure persistence of wantin to know what's beyond the end of all of this, what will happen after all of this happens, amiwrong, creator? Hey creator, are you trapped in your own hell or you create it and let it flow? curious shit from a maddened one like me, just ignore

 

 

"just be ready for what comes after the end"

"You do that?"

"One has to; anyways, to prepare for what is beyond the end is something common of people"

"Not from all of you actually; even you might not been doin that actually"

"You are, indeed, right"

 

"Arpoxias, still with us?" I asked as if the titan was infron 'o 'me

"Yes, and ready for to fulfill my purpose" Arpoxias replied

"So you are not so maddened at all" I, who i still think i'm jonathan lacks, said to the titan

"Hey, over there, are you real??" asked the Alliance class titan

"are YOU over there??" Arpoxias replied to me

We, both three or four or five of us all are still 'ere amiwrong? asked meself with some curiosity

 

 

They, Jonathan and Arpoxias, fought in different fronts in the same war of the hero, where someone was about to unleash a hero but the ritual failed, or so what's Darwin made its armies believe, and its duty was to prevent further damages from the hero's summoning failure

"Ready for your final duel, Arpoxias? We met the same unGod today, so it's gonna see us tear ourselves like the maniacs we are" Jonathan Lacks shouted to Arpoxias, which the titan answered turnin' its flamers on, full white flame mode, emitting a binaric screeching like few have been detected. This meant that this fight was about to be not a simple slaughter, not an easy no-mercy

 

 

"RoE?" Arpoxias asked

Jonathan answered "Spare the flesh, the living, the not-you and not-me"

"Indeed"

"rules of the Elysian Knights?" Arpoxias questioned

"from the fifth legion" Jonathan replied

 

Then the captain proceeded to just make its way between the crowd, pushing them at most but the most of the time actually asking the most polite way possible to stay outta its way to the titan's core. Jonathan moved through the crowd in the titan's insides while the people was doing its daily things, trading resources and food and chatting in little restaurants and all of that, a typical tuesday

The titan was just watching with its little cameras all over its structure as both of them were waiting for the right time and place to actually fight. When the people finished its day and went to sleep, the titan deployed its flame turrets all over the place then the captain started firing at many of them as its brains let him do that

The titan was taunting the captain to break its pact by deploying cannons from inside the little houses of its own crew, to check if the captain would fail by killing accidentally the people inside. He didn't fire nor defended from the flame cannons from inside the houses, just from where there were not flesh things. Albeit the things of metal were properly annihilated by the many bullets of the microgun or gifted by the claw of life of captain Lacks. The gifted metal things tested its new, recently discovered hero by praising him in excess, to check if its "hero" was vulnerable to vanaglory acts or not. It should be known that albeit the eighteen heroes out there might be ranging from maniacs or crazed or infinitely enraged at everything, none of them asks for its feats to be praised

"You is complying to ur part of the pact, aint ya?" Arpoxias said thru its megaphones all over its own structure at the lowest volume possible, just the enough for the captain to hear it, after all, no one would want to wake up the entire crew and involve them in its own deeds, as both of them still had decence rather than honor in fighting but with no other casualties than themselves

The titan started to move to a deposit of solid fuel as it was starving again, and wanted something to snack at: a village full of hardened and maybe maddened adventurers inside the cavern system that is the iron wall that covers the world beneath them. Just a hundred kilometers and three hours ahead Arpoxias, its food was ready to eat: the village itself, and of course the villagers' biomass, is biomass after all

"I want to eat, but of course I will keep on this fight anyways, hErO" Arpoxias told to the captain but now through its radiotelepathic frequency

After some minutes walking between some alleys, the captain reached some stairs that led to the maintenance area, filled with more pipes filled with steam and water and other fluids better not mentioned and devoid of people, for all of them were sleeping inside its relatively comfortable homes above that section. It was just to reach another passage at the right side of the area and then a cargo elevator twenty meters from there, then walk another fifty meters after the elevator, then behind from one of the hundred doors, the titancore would be before him, ready to be destroyed

Then the captain heard hundreds of steps: the crew's townspeople and guards, armed with melee weapons, started to surround him from every access and secret passage to prevent him to reach the core. But Arpoxias moved its security bots away from the fleshmass it calls its crew

"This is a challenge: I brought the fleshy ones 'gainst ya. Will you kill your way thru them?"

"No and I already showed you that I can move through a titan with no killing fleshes" the captain replied while still moving to its goal "Then you will make me justify why i'm failing my part of our pact, but I prefer to stay to my word. You might be an animal, but i'm still Jonathan Lacks, (i believe)" shouted the captain to the surrounding area while still walking to the passage

Then the people started to surround the captain, armed with its spears, knives and everything at hand to melee the hero with

"If my guards were here, they would shield me with instructions of following the pact, not killing nor even punching them, just nonlethally push the people away. Then I am doing that" the captain thought while pushing people off its way, but saving the ones that were just near the edge of the titan, about to fall, actually saving them from falling then putting them in the safe side of the platform, even when he was being stabbed with very little success. Its new infested self was takin' care of the stabs and the materials of the power armor were being tested against tens of stabs of knife, spear and even some chainspears. He reached the elevator with twenty persons stabbing him at all times, at each available point. Arpoxias doped the crew to kill the captain but even with that as a reason to kill them all, the captain hesitated and didn't even damaged anyone. He even started healing the sickened and the legless people that was dragging to attack him, restoring them to its full strength.

That made Arpoxias to release even more airborne rage drugs to the crew, so potent that even the captain was falling to its effects, but he resisted them with pure willpower and focusing the killing intent to the titan and no one else

But the titan moving caused thousands of those crawlers, which are the last native species of the planet which survived all the aftermath of the war of the hero, to reach its location

And the crawler activity caused the nearby adventurers equipped with long range weapons and magics to snipe the monsters to gain easy experience points

The sniper type magicians started to kill monsters while the warriors, supported by hasten, healing and other types of magic as well as the magic snipers, with its mana-powered sniper rifles from the cliffs the titan was creating while passing by the walls and passageways.

Massive amounts of white and yellow magic rays illuminated the darkness of the corridors as stars in the night sky, impacting the crawlers and the titan itself, ricocheting in its insides, indirectly killing part of the titan crew, albeit they didn't explode, the energy rays simply pierced the titancrew people then ricocheted, causing troubles to the captain, due to some of the rays already hit him and pierced its armor. Some of the magic warriors already afflicted by the hero's curse boarded the titan with its mana-powered jumpjets, flying from the cliffs and from beneath the titan, shouting defiantly while boarding and slaughtering its way into the metal monster as if they were facing its own personal demon lords, readying its swords, claws, chainspears, chainknives, even meteor hammers...

all the saws and engines, the drugged against the possessed, all in blood-red armours, ready for carnage. As that massacre wasn't captain's issue, he just walked away to its goal

Chainspears clashed with extremities and torsos, splatting guts and other organs, both from possessed magicians and the drugged-up titancrew The only thing that could stop them was the direct decapitation. None ceded and even when some lacked arms already, picked chainknives with its mouths and charged to one another. The possessed, already in the phase 4 of the curse, started to fight each other, even mutilating themselves.

In each available corridor, house and passage of Arpoxias, slaughter and melee battles were happening

They (the possessed warriors in blood-red power armor) couldn't see another thing that wasn't the demon lord, even in front of a mirror. The possessed starting piling up the skulls and contesting for them, by even more slaughter, ignoring the magic rays that were piercing them all.

But after those forty five seconds of absolute carnage, when almost all the warriors and titancrew were already dead or dismembered enough to not being able to keep fighting, a new squad of magicians, visibly sane of mind, teleported in the titan's VTOL-port in the uppermost part in a flash of darkness, vested in full dark purple power armor, two of them armed with underwrist microguns crafted with magic, seven of them armed with swords equipped with flamethrowers; and its leader, located in the center of its formation, equipped with two sets of four wrist mounted .50 cal snipercannons with explosive ammo, and two grapple pistols, shouting "KILL THE DEMON LORD!!! GWAAHAHHAHAHHAHAH!!!!!!!" then the squad opened fire to the titancrew at its leader's will. Indeed, they were just in phase one, but they were doomed to fall under the possession as well, but is not impossible to live with sane of mind and possessed at the same time, it just requires discipline and lots of targets where to unload the rage

Its leader, which was the squad's healer, threw healing grenades to its allies, healing them from a distance

The titan, angered that its duel was interrupted, fired all its thirty two thousand micromissiles at different targets, killing thousands of crawlers that tried to board it, as well as stopping some epic air-melee fights from between maddened warriors enhanced with magic, armed with axes, enchanted halberds, and the crawlers themselves

It was a truly majestic scene: the air-melee between the monsters descending from the high ceiling, making living structures to safely reach  the titan, the maddened, enhanced by magic, warriors in armor, some of them even in power armor, and some of them with jumpjets, flying to the carnage, some of them being destroyed by the anti-tank missiles from the titan, some others boarding the metal monster, a squad teleporting inside it, the crew fighting and killing and falling to the possessed, then the snipers firing at what they wanted, even other snipers and some of them fired to even the missiles in midair, illuminating the slaughter with its yellow and white beams and midair explosions, due to this was a free-for-all battle for experience points. Each kill was an XP point to level up with. All of this was just XP farming time for the sanest, and time to kill the demon lord for the most possessed

Then the titan fired its nuclear missile to the roof of the cave, causing a cataclysmic explosion the magicians were even further enhanced with, and killing thousands of all factions and bringing down parts of the ceiling and shattering the walls for a kilometer long but just five milimeters deep, some of them caused dangerous memeshells, which are unexploded artillery shells armed with sound-based memes, or memetic runes, to fall from the sides and ceiling,and memebombs that "exploded" and caused even more literally unmentionable damage, so powerful that even trying to mention it is enough to spread the damage from the source, albeit is unknown if it can traverse dimensions, so it might be safe for you readers to imagine or talk about the damage of the bombs.

The captain reached the hallway that leads to the core. Will he be able to not kill anything in its way? has he failed its pact already? is there a knightpact still in effect while all this chaotic battle is still happening?

 

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