From now on, if evil creatures with glowing eyes offered him vengeance on all who had wronged him, he'd say "no thank you."
It didn't help him now.
He'd seen the image somewhere and one of the Titans had plucked out the memory and used it to rebuild his body. No longer was he Ryoga Hibiki. No longer was he P-chan.
No, he was Pig Iron.
A fifteen foot tall armored pig-man who had tried to sneak his way into Athens and then to a ship. That hadn't gone very well.
Unless you call widespread panic, four demolished buildings, cars stacked up like cords of wood, and their military ricocheting shots off his body a positive development. There was only one thing he could do.
Get revenge on Ranma. Once Ranma was dead, his vengeance would have been completed and he would return to normal.
He hoped.
He also discovered that in addition to having a body of solid iron, if he came into contact with iron then he regenerated from the few things that could actually hurt him or could absorb the mass of the iron and increase his size and strength, he could fire heat beams from his eyes, and that even bombs and mortar fire were minor inconveniences.
He was pretty darn powerful, he had to admit.
How he was supposed to get to Japan like this - now that was something he was a lot less sure of.
Ranma pointed. He'd seen enough giant robot anime (when he could sneak it and nobody else would see) and Captain Harlock's adventures to know that as they were hitting atmosphere what was required. "Cue music!"
"Emperor," said a demure young blue-furred woman in a long black dress even as she hit the button that began playing appropriate music on the ship's sound system. "The Vindicator and Savior, as well as MT-104 and MT-105 are all firing into a set of tunnels in the ground."
Ranma had absolutely no experience with large weapons systems. "Figure out what they're shooting at and blast it into next Tuesday."
"Aye, captain! Emperor. Sir!" The Glacian Gunnery Officer, Kh'ei, on the other hand, knew a few things about her weapons even if she was unsure what to call the Emperor. "Turrets one and two. Sending coordinates. Fire when ready. Belly turret. Wait three seconds and fire. Aft turret. Wait six seconds and fire. Prepare missile tubes one through sixteen."
When the Mongoian factories had produced the Arcadia, they hadn't produced a 100% accurate replica. The galleon at the rear end was not made of wood and glass, for example, but composite armored materials. The choice of flag was a bit odd too - as nobody had understood the whole skull-and-crossbones reference except as a fashion statement.
Since they understood it as such, they'd managed to incorporate the skull and crossbones darn near everywhere on the ship. It decorated everything from the tips of missiles to the Emperor's underwear. It was on doorknobs to the head and on the ship's plates. It was embroidered on napkins and stenciled on dueling swords.
During the construction, someone had thought to ask the Emperor exactly what the meaning was. He had come back with the response of indicating that it was a symbol of tough outlaw patriots who had sailed the terrestrial seas. It therefore became even more popular with the Mongoian Navy who immediately dropped the pink lace garterbelts that the Unnamed Emperor had stuck them with to embrace this new symbol.
The turret guns of the anime Arcadia weren't quite understood by the technicians, especially with the Emperor being quite vague, so the technicians went with an experimental weapon of their own.
They weren't quite ready to try unleashing the Atomic Vortex Cannon though they had one almost ready for installation. So they went with gauss weapons. The spheres were steel and roughly 350mm across. When they left the muzzle of the cannon they had attained a speed of roughly Mach 18. These were intended for ship-to-ship combat, and weren't ideal for exterminating large insects.
They made large booms though, so the engineers and technicians rated them a qualified success.
Steiner, for all his faults of being overly serious, of having all the sense of humor of a tuna sandwich, of getting overly excited due to taking things too seriously, had his good points. He was one of the best power-technique swordsmen in the entire Marines division. He understood other weapons and the tactics of using them and when not to use them.
"The Emperor wishes to make a grand entrance," he noted and was just glad that none of his ships were between the Arcadia and the target. "All ships retreat one fifty and prepare to bombard from that distance. Beatrix?"
Beatrix sighed as her Savior was of an old design and the new ship for her forces, the Queen Emeraldas, was still over two months from completion. "We don't have any weapons capable of firing down those tunnels or burrowing new ones to reach the target. What of the Princesses?"
"Not particularly thrilled with the idea of a tunnel hunt," stated Steiner. "One of my men came up with the idea of using missiles around the cloud timed to explode all at the same time so that the pressure waves would crush the swarm from all sides. Corporal Firstenburg."
"That name?" Beatrix thought briefly. "Oh yes. The one who puts his stripes on with velcro to save time between demotions and promotions."
"That's the one," admitted Steiner.
"Well, I'll get the Saturn Knights. We'll have to go into the tunnels and fight it there," said Beatrix regrettfully. "Unless someone has a better idea?"
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(Posted Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:41)
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