>>5416957>>5416962>>5416980You slide into the seat alongside Casval and don’t waste any time, taking control of one of the joysticks controlling the weapons; yours seems to control the guntank’s arms, while Casval still has command over torso rotation and the main cannons. You give the controls a little test wiggle, and the independent crosshair for the arm guns drifts across the HUD projected over the viewscreen. With your brief moment of familiarization with the controls over, you start scanning for targets.
The first presents itself quickly, one of the enemy guntanks having backed out of the smoke rather than correcting its direction; its torso has twisted to face you, but it’s crawling after you at an achingly slow pace as it moves in reverse. You slew the crosshair onto the lower hull, a steadier target than the upper body, taking careful aim - Casval fires the main guns before you get a chance to open up, and for a briefest moment you see a faint silhouette of the pair of shells in flight, just a pair of little black blurs that are gone as soon as you notice them. Explosions rock the enemy guntank’s main body, one of its arms flying off as the armored plating is perforated and completely buckles in multiple places as the titanium armor breaks near its welds - It almost looks like half of the vehicle is disassembling itself, bits of fire and metal spewing out of it violently.
You pull the trigger, letting off a stream of armor piercing autocannon rounds into the weak rear armor of the lower hull, little flashes dancing across the metal like a sewing machine over cloth, eventually catching one of its tracks and chewing it into so much scrap metal with concentrated fire. The guntank, thoroughly ruined in a matter of seconds, spins entirely out of control and only manages to avoid crashing into a nearby building due to its slow reverse speed.
The other two guntanks makes themselves known a few seconds later, facing forward properly as they charge out through the smoke firing all of their weapons, arm guns scoring a series of hits on your own vehicle and sending impossibly loud clangs echoing through its interior. You wince, ducking slightly out of instinct as the flashes of impact briefly strike near the viewscreen, but Casval is already lining up a shot and returning fire - He takes the head off of the lead federation vehicle with a pair of roaring cannon blasts, leaving behind a ruined stump of burning metal and shattered glass, and something detonates in the interior near one of its main cannons. There’s a brief gout of flame shooting a dozen meters into the air from a hatch, and then a bright flash as the struck guntank just… ceases to be from the lower hull upward. Your own guntank’s viewscreen dims significantly to keep from blinding you with the intensity of the explosion.
