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Mission: A Battle Against TIME
Target: Baron Blade
Participants: Freedom Five Legacy, Freedom Five Bunker, Freedom Five Wraith, and Idealist.
Location: Mordengrad.
Briefing: The Sentinels have discovered that La Capitan has sold some temporal device to Baron Blade, and while the rest of them chase down the time traveling pirate, Idealist set off to share this information with the Freedom Five. Not certain what his plan might be, Legacy, Bunker, and Wraith head to Mordengrad, where he was reputed to be in hiding. While hesitant about bringing a child along, they begrudgingly allowed Idealist to come along, mostly because they knew that if they didn't, she'd find a way to come anyways and make things worse.
Mission Summary:
"And what did you call this... device?" Legacy asks hesitantly as the three of them approach the Mordengrad border.
"A Temporal Interference and Manipulation Engine, or TIME!" Idealist rolled her eyes,
"Seriously, you work with some of the smartest people in the world, this shouldn't be that hard for you to figure out." "You know, in my day, we respected our elders," Legacy responded in a guarded tone.
"We're not in your time, gramp" Idealist shot back.
"Not yet, maybe," came a mechanical sounding voice,
"If Stinson's theory about TIME is correct, it could be used to pull something as big as the moon back in time. Or forward, for that matter. Hold up, I'm getting a signal from Wraith. She must have found where the good Baron is holed up." "Then lets go say hello." With that, the three set off, closing in on the Wraith's beacon.
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The three of them quickly arrived at the beacon's location, only to look around confused at the seemingly empty warehouses around us.
"Well, we're here. Does anyone see-" "AH, YOU'RE FINALLY HERE, PARSON." a booming voice shouts over the intercoms,
"I'VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU." "Blade," Legacy hissed,
"What have you done with Wraith?" "I'M AFRAID SHE'S A LITTLE... TIED UP AT THE MOMENT," The voice continues,
"BUT YOU SHOULD BE MORE CONCERNED ABOUT YOURSELF. YOU'RE STANDING AT GROUND ZERO OF WHAT WILL VERY SOON BE THE FUTURE-QUITE LITERALLY IN THIS CASE! LET US SEE HOW WELL YOU STAND UP TO THE TEST OF TIME, WHEN TEN, A HUNDRED, A THOUSAND YEARS HITS YOU IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE. FIRE THE TEMPORAL CANNON!" The three brace themselves, ready to dive to cover from the inevitable attack, but it never comes.
"I SAID, FIRE YOU INCOMPETENT FOOLS! DO I NEED TO DO EVERYTHING?" "Sir, t-t-the transmitter isn't working! Something's wrong!" a timid voice comes from the speakers, appearing to come from far away. As he speaks, a feminine shape emerges from the shadows, holding a small box in her hand. Idealist lets out a snicker, and even Legacy can't help but smirk.
"THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE, I BUILT IT MYSELF! NO EXPENSE WAS SPARED, EVERY WIRE WAS DOUBLE AND TRIPLE-WAIT, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SIGNAL AMPLIFIER?...WRAITH." "Sir, Wraith has-" "ESCAPED, I KNOW. AND SHE TOOK THE SIGNAL AMPLIFIER WITH HER. WITHOUT IT, THE SIGNAL ISN'T STRONG ENOUGH TO REACH THE SATELLITE. WELL PLAYED, HERO, WELL PLAYED." "Give up Blade," Legacy shouts out,
"Its over." "ON THE CONTRARY, MY AMERICAN FRIEND. WE'VE ONLY REACHED HALFTIME. I MAY NOT BE ABLE TO CONTACT MY SATELLITE FROM THE GROUND WITHOUT THE AMPLIFIER," As he speaks, the ground begins to rumble. As the baron's mobile defense platform rises from the ground, the baron steps towards its edge to face the heroes directly,
"I won't need the amplifier for the signal to reach the satellite at fifteen thousand meters above the ground!" As the platform rose upwards, the heroes quickly moved after it. The space race had begun.
"We need to stop him!" Legacy shouted.
"No way can he outrun my omni-cannon," Bunker suggested,
"but if I'm going to bust his platform, I'm going to need time to charge." "Then we'll buy you that time!" Wraith replied, firing a grappling hook that just barely reached the rising platform,
"Legacy, see if you can't distract the baron. Get him talking, I'll try and take down the shields from the inside." "What do I do?" Idealist asked.
"Fire everything you've got at that platform!" Was Bunker's response.
The plan in motion, the heroes moved in to engage, but the baron had plans of his own. Several jet-pack armed blade battalion soldiers leapt from the ground in pursuit of the heroes, firing volley after volley. Though the heroes wanted to deal with the inconvenience, they knew the baron was the real threat. Giving the battalion anything more than a stern look was exactly what the baron wanted, so for now they would have to suffer the small arms fire.
With superhuman strength, Legacy grabbed onto the bottom of the ship, pulling back on it for several seconds. The baron managed to shake him off eventually, but the damage was already done-Wraith had managed to find a way in, unhindered save a handful of very persistent blade battalions that chased her inside.
From the inside of the platform, Wraith was able to do serious damage to its structure from within. And with the aid of her infra-red eyepiece, she was able to spot and preemptively disable the baron's toys before he even had a chance to use them. Even the timely arrival of some of the baron's engineers could to little to negate the damage the Wraith was doing. In just a few moments, the platform's shields were crippled enough for a...hedgy hog (?) to barrel through, shattering the shields and then chunking a small section of the platform itself.
"Boom! Pshhh! Hedgehog noises!" Idealist shouted with glee as she surveyed the damage from below.
"I appreciate the enthusiasm," Legacy sighed,
"but are the sound effects really necessary?" "Parson, Blade Battalions coming your way!" Wraith shouted in warning, her eye having picked them up.
"I see them," Legacy confirmed,
"Ignore them. If the Baron gets to fifteen hundred meters, then we're out of time." Bunker, from his position on the surface, could do little but prep the Omni-Cannon, but spotting the shields had fallen already and unwilling to sit completely on the sidelines, he took aim with his grenade launcher.
"Good thing I installed those long range ballistic enhancements," He muttered to himself before firing his explosive payload. The explosion took out only a small chunk of the platform, but also took out a few of the Baron's soldier's as well.
"Fools, the structural integrity of the platform is already below fifty percent!" the Baron shouts,
"Drive them back!" more battalion soldiers poured out from the platform to engage the heroes, but a blast of adhesive foam from Bunker gunked up the hangar bay and put a quick end to that idea.
"Hear that?" Legacy calls out,
"already halfway done. And we're barely four thousand meters up! Finish it!" Inspired by Legacy's presence, the team doubled their pressure. The explosions from Wraith's sabotage got louder with every passing moment and the volleys from Bunker and Idealist went from taking chunks out of the structure to chunking the structure.
The Baron could only shake his head in disbelief. How had it all gone so wrong so quickly? Perhaps if he-no, this ended now.
"You, there! Take the helm. I have work to do." The baron had only barely enough time to turn around before a final blow, delivered by Legacy himself, very nearly cracked the platform in half. Wraith quickly jumped from the building, firing her grappling hook towards Legacy, who quickly nabbed it to keep his partner from falling to a messy death.
The forms of all the crewmembers of the vessel could be seen jumping out as well, donning jetpacks and trying to flee back to Mordengrad. A few persistent and loyal goons even tried continuing the fight. But the heroes only had eyes for one survivor, and soon, from the falling wreckage, he emerged.
Donning his iconic Blade Suit, the mad scientist flew out , weapons primed and ready.
"Don't think for a moment that you've won, Legacy! I will-huh?" A bright light, and suddenly the baron was engulfed in plasma energies. When the smoke cleared, the baron's suit was left as nothing but a mechanical skeleton the baron frazzled but unharmed. With his free hand, Parson quickly reached out and grabbed the stunned villain before gravity caught up with him, allowing the suit to join his mobile platform in freefall.
"I charged my cannon," Bunker explained over communications,
"I wasn't going to not fire it." "Well done, everyone," Legacy smiled,
"But it seems now the good Baron is without a place to stay. What do you say we find him some lodging at a nice American cell?" "Woohoo!" Was Idealist's response.
"Wraith, do you want me to-" Legacy started to respond, looking down at the woman hanging from the rope around his arm, only to discover that she was no longer there. In bemused disbelief, Legacy could only shake his head and ask,
"How doe she do that?"
Final Report: The classic Baron is one of the easier fights, but even he can catch you off guard if you're not paying attention. But between Legacy's
two take-downs and Wraith's infrared eyepiece, Blade himself couldn't really get off the ground, pun intended. Incidentally, the environment ended up being the real threat, with a pair of blade battalion platoons arriving very early to put out consistent damage every turn. I chose to ignore them because the baron was already getting lowish by that point, but 4 damage to basically everything a turn could not have been ignored for long.
In retrospect, Bunker and Idealist might not have been the best choice here, as both struggled with awkward starting hands and spent the first two turns just drawing and deploying their key cards, but Wraith did
work. An early razor ordinance, plus utility belt, let her put out some very consistent damage while still manipulating the baron's deck. Idealist did start coming into her own by turn three, and admittedly probably did deal the most damage of anyone once she started going, but Bunker was a bust. The only useful thing he did was adhesive grenade once, and then finish off the baron with a single charged omni-cannon shot, but by that point, Idealist was dealing nearly fifteen damage a turn thanks to inspiring presence. He did get a grenade launcher early that helped, but Wraith was doing more damage
and controlling the villain. At best, Bunker shaved off a turn.
Well, this write-up ended up being longer than I expected. Dunno if the rest will be this long, didn't realize how much I had written until I actually stopped and reread it. In any case, I hope you enjoyed the read, and look forward to tomorrow's issue, when the Chrono-ranger calls in a favor from the Extreme Prime Wardens of Haka, Fanatic, and Captain Cosmic to chase down an old foe whose been a
plague upon his life, and who recently escaped from Fort Adamant...
EDIT: just a few spelling/grammatical errors
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