At her order, the capsules ended their brief journey in a wave of explosive cataclysm. A fine salmon-colored mist escaped the casings; the gases expanded outward upon detonation without delay and fixed into a proper descent toward their intended targets within seconds.
The wave of mist passed through the roiling, climbing Aud force. It took several seconds longer for the mist to reveal what changes to the battle it had wrought. Several of the servicemen who couldn't contain their curiosity scrutinized the Aud. They were still alive.
But they expected that. If this most recent gas-based attack could kill Aud through exposure alone, then it would've been much more proliferated throughout the defensive infrastructure.
That didn't mean there were no significant changes. Both the servicemen and their assisting autonomous intelligences picked dozens of differences between the Aud pre- and post-exposure. The first collapsing wave of mist had dissipated after moving through several layers of climbing Aud, leaving it unable to travel to the base of the walls and deliver its effects to the entirety of the Aud threat sieging that part of the southern stretch.
It affected plenty of Aud, and they, for lack of a better correlation, seemed to suffer from a form of neuro-hijacking. Among the affected, around a fourth--comprised of the lower fur tiers--detached from the walls and fell to assimilate back into the masses beneath them.
The others, though bouts of jitters and useless motor looping of their appendages struck them, hung on due to ideal positioning of their bodies or some unknown factor. Some remained where they were, content to let the jitters play out while their brethren passed by them, providing inadvertent shielding from the continuous conventional attacks coming from above. And others ignored that their bodies refused to respond as they should, even their snarls muffled and contorted by their slackened or over-tensed maws.
He-6's aide monitored the condition of the Titan's servicemen. Those performing the essential duty of piloting and directing the monumental war engine were paramount in humanity's continuity today and afterward.
One thing she had remained worried about was how they would last until the Jackal began to pull out its big guns, and whether it would be enough to reassure the soldiers and raise their morale. She couldn't blame them for the way the Jackal's performance had demoralized them up to this point. None of the Titans were particularly flashy or bombastic in a way that demanded attention, though some could still achieve this by virtue of their design philosophies.
The Ephemeral Palisade and Ancheros were some of the heaviest and slowest Titans. It was natural that servicemen would find them imposing. The Dervish of Palm was the tallest Titan. That, in partnership with its illogical, swinging pendulums, made it a sight to behold as it danced atop its own Titan perch on the eastern stretch.
The Titan she temporarily commanded was an exception to the rule yet again. It had hardly moved since the start! There was little reason for it to, as its design philosophy's harder emphasis on mobility provided no benefits or boons to the immediate situation.
Yet despite all that, she smiled, seeing the servicemen rouse themselves from their dread as they rediscovered a fundamental realization that they had forgotten in the recent fogs of war: humanity would never have invested so many resources into the creation of an amateur or basic Titan. There was no purpose to that, and anyone with half an understanding of opportunity costs could verify that.
At the same time as the last of the salmon mists dissipated, another round of capsules launched from the Jackal's tail cannon. In tandem with those, the sonics firing bursts of concentrated sound--nicknamed "screamers" by some of the targeting crews--began their assault on the wailing Aud.
The mid-range acoustic devices were effective at disorientation, though they lacked enough of a direct damaging factor to warrant more emplacement bases reserved for their allocation. The screamers' deafening shots exclusively targeted green-furs and higher, singling out the pinpricks of color present on the results of the fur scanners. The Aud that beheld the pleasure of experiencing the screamers' effects all fell out of coordination with the rest of the Aud army, often turning uncoordinated and disoriented with their movements to the point of knocking several other Aud off the walls when they made an error in movement.
The strength comparison between a white-fur and a green-fur, or even an orange and a green, was paltry. It was less than comparing a newborn to an adult human, but that still served as an apt example in lieu of better ones.
The servicemen continued to become reinvigorated by the Jackal's resurgent execution, so much so that He-6's presence on the battlefield beside it began to become overshadowed. His long-range attacks were still contributing as much as they had been half a minute ago.
Even so, if she were honest, his aide would much rather have two He-6s present than one and the Jackal. No matter how effective the Jackal's NDS had proven itself to be through its opening salvos, few servicemen outside of those who serviced this critical system retained consideration for the immense cost associated with using the NDS.
It wasn't easy for the Sixth to synthesize all the chemical reagents en masse necessary that complex machinery measured, mixed, heated, cooled, and identified into various finished products before depositing them in one of the four delivery modules of the Titan.
Each day spent on those activities reduced the Directory's R&D capacity for another endeavor. Few engineers or techs could accuse her of exaggerating should she claim the Jackal was the most expensive Titan in humanity's arsenal, spending exorbitant amounts of time and resources.
They didn't begin cheering, held from doing so by their training. That relieved her. That, and seeing how each among their number was taking their assignments as serious as possible, it was less likely that one or two would begin to act out to the detriment of others.
A notification stole away her attention from studying data from graphs that Directory Control had sent back to what she would tentatively identify as the frontlines. The spotlight network had been a stroke of genius on the Second Headman's part, but it could only deliver messages, orders, and brief records of events with minimal delay.
The same did not extend to actual data that held relevance in a battle on the scale that humanity's remnants currently participated in. Couriers had to handle the responsibility of running carts of microchips through the walkways, handing off and doubling back to collect or deliver another cart.
This was an intricate chain that operated through almost every lane, except for those that would extend the transportation time of the microchips. Every courier wore a light WAV to enhance their speed, stripped down to the bare essentials to reduce any potential loads as much as possible. They weren't meant to fight, after all, but to run from points A to B, then back again, ad infinitum, until the first battle had concluded.
From the limited information she had access to, the Eighth was responsible for bringing that auxiliary operation to fruition. Its agents were active in the city, patrolling the walkways frequented by the couriers and keeping them as free as possible of unnecessary foot traffic. She frowned when she learned that.
Why were the citizens of the Last Light not directed to return to the residential scraper while the battle was ongoing? Because of that decision, whoever had made it, the information on the graphs and charts she dissected now was, in part, outdated; not enough to be irrelevant to the current state of the stretch she led the defense for, but still enough to mean that she couldn't rely on the insights she harvested as much as she could've otherwise, should the information have fallen into her hands faster.
She would have time to concern herself with the state of affairs within the city behind her later. The relevance of the latest emergency notification hadn't faded at all. It had only grown more prominent, and for a good reason: the Aud were seconds away from passing the optimal melee range for the Jackal and He-6.