The Cutter was coming down fast, surrounded by drones and chased by the rest of the Android Army.
Nico was giggling with glee as she took control of the ship's weapons systems and began to target enemy support groups, trying to shorten the battle before it had even begun.
Max was focused on analyzing what sort of force they would be facing instead. What he had seen before was entirely Cathedral Ships, no other alien species, but there were a lot of Demonic Beings on the surface, with some of them reaching more than thirty metres in height.
That was going to be an issue, along with all the artillery that the enemy had brought. They also had an airforce with them, but Max had confidence that he could maintain aerial superiority with the Drone Fighters.
The Cathedral ship's forces weren't just the blood-soaked berserker Warriors this time, though. There were more respectable-looking versions of the Warriors with horns on their armour and some painted midnight black with grotesque mutated wings and claws growing out of their armour.
To Max, that implied that he was about to face a new set of tactics, so he hurried to update the Android Army's database with all of the infantry-led combat strategies that he could think of. If you prepared for everything, you were prepared for anything. Or so he hoped.
[Combat landing in ten seconds.] The ship's intercom announced, and the door behind Max began to crack open in preparation for the Mecha to be deployed, along with their small unit of twenty Super Heavy Android Mecha.
Max led the charge out the door just before the ship reached the ground, allowing his thrusters to soften the landing while the ship slammed down into the dirt.
Nico was right beside him, facing a wall of enormous red Demons. Max briefly wondered how the AI had picked this landing location, but there wasn't much time for contemplation as the Demons were already charging.
Max took out his sword and shield as the enemy closed the distance, then set his shoulder into the shield and used his thrusters to charge forward.
He slammed into the front lines of the Demonic horde with a sickening crunch of metal on flesh and then was immediately surrounded by fire as Nico detonated a pair of high explosive Mass Driver rounds into the Demons on his flanks.
The damage to his shielding was minimal, and now he had room to work, hacking upward to split a Demon's gut open from groin to throat, letting the foul innards spill onto the ground before the Demon vanished in a swirl of red energy.
"Well, isn't that convenient? A self-cleaning battlefield." Nico commented as the jagged edges of her twin blades took the head of a Demon nearly as tall as her own Mecha.
It might seem convenient to them, but it had to be terrifying for the locals, who only saw a field of attackers and no bodies to show for their attempts to stop the advance.
Max blasted a group of smaller Demons out of existence just as the Thunder Guns of the Androids began to thump their echoing rhythm into the hazy sky.
The burning fields, artillery rounds and the strange energy that the Demons gave off combined to make visibility little more than a Kilometre, but the sensors could still see much further, and with Max's System Functions active, the Androids had no problem picking targets.
Their first priority was the artillery and the living beings that wielded ranged weapons, while Max and Nico held the area around their ship.
The others had landed closer to the city and were in the clear, well away from the front lines, while they sent out a steady stream of Drones that they hadn't had a chance to deploy on the way down.
The tactic had left their drones scattered all over the planet at the moment, but they were fighting their way back to the ships and eliminating the enemy airforce on the way.
The rest of the Android Army was fanning out now, taking up the positions on their flanks to defend the ships against the wave of Demons, and the thumping of their guns was shaking the ground, terrifying the locals whose minds Max could sense unusually clearly.
Something solid impacted Max's shield, and he double-checked his sensors to see how he had missed an incoming attack.
It only took a split second, and he found the cause. A very sneaky group of heavy weapons-equipped Warriors had snuck forward between the legs of the much larger Demons, hiding themselves from detection as they approached.
A barrage of high explosive rounds from the light Mass Drivers turned them into a bloody mist and tore the legs from a half dozen giant Demons, who were howling in rage as they bled out before vanishing into clouds of energy.
A massively bloated Demon wobbled toward Max, heedless of the Mass Driver rounds that had torn large chunks of its flesh away. It had more, and what it had lost was already being regenerated.
[Well, that's new. I didn't know they could get fat.] Nico laughed as her sensors picked up on the Demon coming toward Max.
[This place gets stranger by the minute. But first, I need to find out how to kill that thing.] Max replied as he tried the Ion Cannons instead and found that they gave the creature little more than a smoking sunburn.
Since the ranged weapons were only making it mad, Max decided that slicing it into cubes was likely to be the best option, assuming that his blades would do the job.
They were based on the weapons that had been pilfered from the Demons themselves, so he assumed they would work well enough, but this ultra-resilient one wasn't like anything that he had seen before.
The lumbering giant didn't even slow as Max engaged his thrusters and hacked down on its arm, taking the limb completely off the creature's body, but the tentacles that it sent his way, which had at first looked like exposed intestines, quickly wrapped around the torso of Max's Mecha.
A point-blank barrage from the Thunder Guns to the creature's upper chest severed it in two pieces, and Max fell back to his feet, freed of the dissipating Demon's clutches.
[Well, that's one way to do it. Unconventional, but if it works, it works.]
