Quoted By:
Lightning fast for its speed, terrifyingly accurate, and more than willing to brawl in melee combat, the Warden could outfight everything in the Allied inventory.
Successful battlefield performance pushed the desire for more of the powerful machines, and assembled Warden pre-production models would trickle off the lines over the next few months before the ceasefire of 2645.
At that point, limited proliferation resulted in Wardens being on both sides of the Ferrum Revolution. Newer production models sent east against Confederation forces were pulled back and instead turned against rebelling units, to decidedly one-sided and lethal results.
Again, the advantages in speed, mobility, and flexibility allowed Wardens to utterly dominate slower conventional forces. Only the most skilled pilots in lighter machines, or overwhelming firepower with open sight lines could hope to force them to retreat.
Once again, however, problems with pilot endurance and technical malfunctions would minimize deployments, so much so that no more than two would ever fight on the same side.
This time came when rebel forces under General Marik marched on Victoria. Loyalist forces deployed two operational Wardens in the city itself to break the vanguard of the rebel assault.
This proved to be a mistake. At the peak of the fighting, cut communications caused loyalist commanders to believe that their frontline had been broken. In response, one nuclear weapon was fired at the most visible sign of rebel activity, a superheavy tripod being closely engaged by the two Wardens.
One was destroyed utterly in the blast, while the other survived long enough to be called back in defense of the Empress’s palace, leading to the only recorded Warden-on-Warden engagement to date. Although battle recordings of the respective combatants were not made public, footage from other mechs, city surveillance cameras, and responding disaster crews captured the fast-moving duel across the city.
>The blue rebel Warden of Thomas Caldwell faced off against the black State Security Warden of Haruki Kotetsu
>The blue rebel Warden of Sophie Pavlov faced off against the black State Security Warden of Thea Romanov
>The blue rebel Warden of Joseph Kinston engaged the red State Security Warden of Haruki Kotetsu
A/N
On account of me failing to actually write action two months ago, anyone still looking for an ending to Core of Steel this gets the epilogue.
Note that this is not necessarily what happened, but what the ‘official’ story a decade later is recorded as. Who gets the credit, who gets the blame, and what actually occurred is still somewhat in flux, to be decided here.
No, write-ins for this vote are not accepted.
