"So?" He-6 inquired as his aide suspended the proxy communication. "Am I still command-capable?"
One wouldn't be able to tell much from his light-hearted tone, though the thought that he would have to hang up the coat and allow another, even if it were someone he trusted, to make the large, impactful decisions, made a terrible ache develop.
The "honor" was hardly palatable most days--and only because he was well aware that if he one day cracked under pressure, another would have to assume his position. It wasn't for the faint of heart.
"Unfortunately, I can't order you around yet." She heard a breathy sigh. It would've been well disguised were he still at normal proportions. At his current size, it was another gale strong enough to rip several Aud from the climb up the walls. "Don't let your guard down, though."
"Wasn't planning on it." He rolled his shoulders, then kneeled so his face was as close to the Aud as he was willing to get it without compromising his balance and safety. He lacked the feline agility of the Jackal, being both bipedal and top-heavy.
Sucking in a breathful of air, he let it compress in a corner of his mouth, then blasted it all out in a tight, sonorous whistle. The servicemen arrayed on either side of the isolated stretch flinched.
This was more concentrated than his breathing, and his reward was seeing a split open up in the advancing ranks. Hundreds ripped away--it was literal, for a few that had their appendages dug deep enough into the walls' surface that they lost them when the blast of air heaved by and through them.
He-6's aide watched his progress via one of the screens. The one next to it displayed the wall face below him, providing a real-time model of the swaths he cleared away, resetting the progress of many with each burst.
What he was achieving was already marvelous, but she was already dissatisfied with his performance.
"You should've followed up on your request for that Titan-grade rig. The Jackal cannot capitalize on all the opportunities you're opening up with your whistles; most of the tunnels extend outward from you, not us."
He shook his head in response, unwilling to compromise his rate of attacks to offer words. To compensate, he angled more of his whistles toward the clusters beneath the Jackal beside him.
Though this lowered the number of bodies he was striking with each whistle, by changing his attacks from perpendicular to diagonal, the Jackal no longer lacked easy targets that it could dislodge with one or two well-placed strikes of a sonic or cylinder launcher.
As for the Titan-grade rig, that was a fickle dream; he had known even before making the first inquiry with the R&D of the Fifth and Sixth that he was too low in priority to receive such a large investment.
It might've been more probable that the One-Light Directory would side in favor of granting him such extravagant equipment if growing larger than his original body was the extent of what his Vigor could do, but that wasn't all.
On top of the general statistical boosts to his strength, agility, natural toughness, thinking capacity, and so on, his Vigor also hardened his skin and insides to an incredible degree, so much so that it functioned as a second Vigor of its own.
Since he already had better natural protection than most servicemen, and even most carriers of the Old Man's Blessing, he had essentially, though not with impoliteness, received a government request to suck it up and work around his weaknesses.
Despite it being easy to follow the logic of the Directory's decision, his aide had not brought it up for no reason. The main idea behind the proposal had never been for greater protection. He-6 didn't need protection; it was a greater range he pursued at the time.
Though his supersized dimensions afforded him the ability to sling melee strikes and kicks far beyond distances that an ordinary serviceman could reach, it was still lacking when compared to actual ranged weapon systems. If he had received such a rig, then by this time there would've been far more Aud dead.
He could've coordinated his whistles with cylinder launchers, sonics, electrics, and even netting cannons, all extending from various parts of the armor that would've covered his body.
So all he could do was suck it up. And he would. His whistles continued to sow discord through the Aud ranks, and his Titan partner ensured that very few openings went to waste. Between them, hundreds were dying and creating a small pile-up at the base of the walls.
A similar state of carnage revealed its ugly visage across every single meter of the walls; the defense crews stood resolute, but even the sturdiest of them in mind and body were finding themselves hard-pressed to avoid looking down as the Aud climbed closer and closer.
They were impossible, living things that had no desire to abandon what amounted to a hopeless siege to engage in any form of self-preservation. Even once pain found them, with electrics burning their fur, sonics bruising, cracking, breaking, and bursting, and cylinders making their existences miserable through various means, they refused to find solace or a safe place.
At most, the smarter ones would either dodge around visible projectiles headed their way, or find shelter behind others larger or intellectually-challenged.
Another factor adding uncertainty to the defense crews' existing unease and growing, though still suppressed, dread, was that fractions of the structure of the walls' static defenses became uprooted mere days and hours before the first ring of Aud began its approach, signaling the ultimate start of the final stage of the human-Aud conflict.
The Jackal's new patrol lane on the southern stretch wasn't the only one made. Aside from the missing Titans, plus the Nyx Breaker harassing the edges of the first ring that had yet to pass through the entire killing field, there were four other Titans that could deploy on the walls as semi-mobile walking fortresses.
The psychological difference between seeing a field stretching as far as the eye could see of massive emplacements loaded with heavy ordnance or rounds larger than humans, and a single, even grander construct, was greater in distance than a few of the military minds within Directory Control might've thought.
Though the techs and engineers hidden away within the compartments on the inner faces of the walls were still collecting the data to find a concise determination on if a Titan, or an approximate number of wall-grade emplacements filling the space they required, would possess higher killing efficiency, reload times, and accuracy under stress, it was too easy for the defense crews to make judgments in their mind.
Against a foe with a superior quantitative aspect, they would subconsciously favor having a quantitatively superior force of their own to rely on. And as impressive as the Titans were, it was easy to see they leaned hard into quality.
But quality couldn't be everywhere at once. Quality and rarity had an inherent, inalienable relationship.
He-6 wasn't sure how long he had draped himself over the edge, but when his muscles began to shake and strain, he sighed and pulled himself back.
He looked over at the Jackal, still poised in a precarious balancing act with almost the entirety of its torso stretched out in empty air. Before he could move back into position after the brief respite, a bizarre thought struck him.
Seeing the Titan like this reminded him once again that its schematics had taken inspiration from feline anatomy. But its designation was the Jackal. Weren't jackals in the same evolutionary family as dogs?