Much to their dismay, what they found at the bottom of the stairs was not the experimental labs but a large sign reading [Biomatter Storage] and a destroyed door with a large number of angry-looking Klem warriors in the traditional configuration glaring at them, but keeping a careful distance from the door, where a number of bodies already lay.
The security system was keeping them from going upward, which was likely the only reason that the Hybrids on the upper levels had survived as long as they had. These Klem were ravenous, so it seemed that they had already used up all of the Biomass that was stored in the facility, and they were ready to move on.
The rest of the planet had nothing for them, so in normal circumstances, they would evolve a single transport life form, which would fire the pods out encased in a sheathe of plasma, sending them into space with help from their inherited knowledge of the cosmos toward a location they hoped was inhabitable.
"I'll take the right. You take the left." Max sighed as he saw the mass of Klem on the other side of the door.
"Should I set a kill counter?" Nico asked hopefully.
"We're doing this safely, not in a hurry to get kills. I've seen how much damage you're willing to take to win, and it's far too early for that." Max grumbled.
The wave of affection and amusement that came from her at his response took him by surprise, and Max was a step behind when Nico moved to get into a position where she could shoot through the doorway to clear a path for them to attack the Klem.
The Warriors shrieked in rage as they realized that they were being targeted from behind the defences of the building, but there were so many packed up behind them that they couldn't flee. The gestation pattern in the room had assumed that they would be able to get out, so it had spawned until the Biomass ran out.
That left them starving and overcrowded, but the defensive weapons in the room wouldn't let them out. The only ones who had escaped were the six armed hybrid Warriors, as far as Max could tell. Whether they had made it out through a bad ventilation design that shared common piping or if they broke through and found other routes out of the floors was debatable, but he hadn't seen anything following them.
The lasers from the Mobile Suits tore into the Klem, and the Warriors began to charge, knowing that the only other option was death.
They carried the carcasses of the dead above them, reducing the damage they were taking from the defensive weapons, but the crowd was still only inching forward, with the two Mobile Suits working to keep their progress to a crawl.
"What say we reduce their shielding?" Max suggested, and he could swear he saw Nico do a happy dance while she pulled the Flamer from her Flat Space.
The capacity was limited since the weapon used a huge amount of energy that the Mobile Suits couldn't provide, but a power pack should last for a few minutes before it was dead again.
For the first half second, the Klem ignored the new weapon. They were already dying in waves. What was one more gun? It wouldn't stop their advance even if it was a Plasma Cannon.
But these Klem weren't from a lineage that had encountered the Fusion Flamers before, and they were unprepared for the carnage that was about to be inflicted upon them.
The flames rushed out, setting the Klem alight with equal efficiency whether they were alive or dead.
The alarms in the room immediately began to go off, and an energy barrier slammed shut in front of Max and Nico as the fire suppression system struggled to get the conflagration under control. The immediate problem was the heat. The initial stage of the suppression used what appeared to be carbon dioxide, attempting to snuff out the fire through lack of oxygen.
But it was a fusion flamer, and the heat alone was enough to incinerate nearby matter, even without oxygen. The carbon in their bodies would retain enough heat to spontaneously combust as the gas was vented from the room and spontaneously combust once oxygen was reintroduced, and that was even without the secondary hydrogen fusion that was occurring due to the Flamer's effect.
"I'm pretty sure we shouldn't have used that indoors." Max chuckled as he watched the second wave of fire suppression, the complete evacuation of the atmosphere from the room and a foaming spray from the roof began to fill the space with a white chemical spray.
"Minor oversight. But they've got a really good fire suppression system in here. I had actually expected to melt it and its control systems with the heat so that we could continue to clear the area.
That might have been a disaster for the residents of the complex, but since they were planning to kill most or all of them anyhow, Max wasn't too concerned. The standard Klem Warriors needed an atmosphere to survive, so they only had to wait for the process to finish, and the room should be completely cleared with minimal effort from them.
The alarms were concerning, though. Unless they only sounded in the stairwells to this floor, it was unlikely that anything in this complex didn't know that there was something seriously wrong.
Max stretched his thoughts outward and downward, searching for more thoughts to search, and found that below them were the research labs that they had been searching for. The minds that he could sense there seemed utterly unconcerned and were just going about their daily routine.
At least the alarm wasn't blaring through their level, alerting them all to the presence of intruders. Not that it would change much, but being able to take the occasional enemy by surprise was always a bonus.
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