AIN SOPH, Part 8

Episode 2

Lilly let loose with the mouth cannon and ate the two that stepped in to replace. It only took one hit to eliminate an orc, but each time StarScream destroyed one, the hole was plugged with more. Lilly would run out of battery if she tried to fight the whole army one-by-one. She needed to get in the open where StarScream could use her claws.

Lilly opened fire repeatedly, blasting away enough orcs to give StarScream headway. She could not move and fire, but she could bite while advancing, and made short work of a few as they came to hit her with bone and stone swords and clubs. When she was clear, Lilly deployed StarScream’s claws. Each could attack a separate nearest target with only one command. The orcs were still coming in threes for each she killed.

StarScream jumped and fired her thrusters, incinerating those that surrounded her. That’s when Lilly learned an oddly remarkable characteristic of orcs. They have very good aim. 

Throughout literary history, orcs have been represented as fairly rag-tag, and to represent this, orcs spawn with an array of non-standard weapons, but always with one hand-to-hand weapon and one missile weapon. In melee combat, orcs are only effective in numbers. Some would argue goblins still weren’t even effective under these conditions. Orcs were devastating with a bow, and worse with a crossbow. Very rarely did this many orcs at once have such a large enemy pass from melee range to ballistic range. When StarScream took to the air, every orc changed weapons and released enough arrows to bring down even a giant cybernetic lizard. StarScream belly-flopped to the ground, killing a dozen orcs and goblins that had crowded beneath her to shoot up.

Each individual arrow did very little structural damage, but the one concerted attack cost nearly a quarter of StarScream’s hit points. Before she could recover, she was being beaten with swords and clubs again. StarScream lashed out with her claws, giving herself some breathing room and fired the mouth cannon into the army. The orcs drew back, but not out of fear. Morgoth was coming, and they wanted to be close to him.

Episode 3