Defiler Melee Crusher

## Tactical Information

* **Smashy smashy!**: The Defiler, as the name implies, is well suited for crushing things in close combat. It is in fact, effective against all targets in melee, blades tearing through infantry and light vehicles with ease, while its pincers crush heavy vehicles and structures with similarly little effort. It is also quite durable and acceptably fast.

* **You think you're safe?**: The Defiler can catch up to units who think that they're safe via their speed by using its pincers as additional legs, engaging in a strange galloping motion. However in this mode, only the tentacles are available to attack, drastically cutting down its ability to destroy tanks and buildings until it shifts modes.

* **Attack its weak point for massive damage**: The Defiler has no method of handling aircraft and as such, is vulnerable to even the most lightly armed of helicopters whittling it down over time. Artillery and other long ranged units that it is barred from reaching can also tear it apart.

* **Red ones go faster!**: Defilers that are determined as having distinguished themselves by the merit determining computers can be upgraded with kinetic accelerators, which via manipulation of kinetic energy allow them to go substantially faster than before and make their impacts all the more devastating.

## Unit History

### Incident at Kurmuk

Between the GLA and the Syndicate, the League had at least two mortal enemies. The former would cling to its backwards ways against the test of time, and the latter saw their beautiful continent as nothing more than a pit to dig money out of. There were others in Africa; some remaining Allied holds in the North, the Unionist bases in Senegal, the communist bloc in the west, India's hold in Somalia that had given the League another struggle to the death, and those strange silver demons in the Niger that he had heard about.

Yes, there were many forces at work in Africa, but Archange wasn't too worried. Coming from the Congo, he had learned to fight since he was a boy, and took pride in knowing that here in Sudan he'd have a chance to claim some heads of turquoise thugs. He set up his sniper rifle and took a commanding view of the area as the proud army of Africa marched out to deal with a Legion force spotted in the area. He took a look through his scope and saw his first target, an auxiliary smoking something and likely laughing about something stupid to his friends, probably left out here as they were considered disposable. "Dhi'b squad, I can see one of them. Auxiliary squad, left hill, right around its curve." He said through his communicator.

"The famed Archange isn't going to take a chance to get another kill? I am shocked." A Qadir snorted as the shooting started. The sharp crack and roar of ramjets and gyrojets started filling the air, with the Legion detachment not taking too long to respond in kind once the shooting began. Yes, the Syndicate's auxiliaries were poor soldiers, but the actual security officers were professionals. Thugs, yes, but professional thugs. Still, the League were well equipped to deal with the hated foe and its love of battle suits. He felt the wave through his shoulder as his weapon kicked back and punched into where he knew that the brains in a Hector Suppression suit was kept in, sending the suit sputtering to the ground as he reloaded before responding after a few seconds.

"Oh, you can go shove your wit up your a- hold on," He said before stopping himself. When he checked for targets again, he saw a glint. This glint only kept on growing larger as he blinked to see if it was there, thinking it was perhaps the Legion detachment calling for air support.

"Okapi squad, do you see that, north by north east," Archange said as the glint kept on approaching at alarming speeds before seeming to veer away, and now that he could get a good look, he was now able to see that it was actually multiple shapes in close formation.

"Not getting any IFF codes I can recognize... going to try shooting at it!" The leader of Okapi squad responded as his group started letting loose their volley cannons at the incoming aircraft. But what was really strange to him was that the certamen were also firing. Deciding to take advantage of this, he decided to fire again, this time picking off a Centurion who was also using the distraction to try and get a bead on some of the Shulas. Then, he saw brief shimmers in the air as the glints finally came into full view, showing themselves as elongated vessels that looked like the combination of fat cigars and shielded whale skeletons with rows of pods in their wings. Roaring overhead, they fired their pods like bullets out of a gun into the ground, with some of them being especially massive before flying away.

Then some people started shouting, and a odd whining drone could be heard as the shimmers revealed themselves to be floating discs, lifting people into the sky. Archange blinked as he turned to the pods that started opening themselves up. Out from them came things like rather little he had seen before. Some of them being large, mechanical walkers, others floating in the air, and some being drones with some more being...inhuman monsters. The discs also began to set down more of the monsters and immediately the air was being filled with violence.

He for a while, stared blankly at the scene, trying to process what was happening before he heard frantic shouting in Latin as an unseen part of the now three sided engagement erupted. He saw that the majority of the organic fighters were massive lizard men, some firing rays that threw those they struck back, others sweeping invisible heat-rays that caused men to burn and explode, and one wielding beams that punched their way through tanks. As a Takhar tank erupted into flames near him, he decided to prioritize and kill one of the anti-tank troopers, its head vanishing as he put a round into it.

Then the heat-ray wielders swept their weapons near him and he felt uncomfortably hot as they approached him, forcing him out of his position as some of his squadmates began bursting like balloons. He took a position farther back, looking back to see the Legion firing at something only for a Talos to be sent sailing through the air from behind the horizon. Or rather, chunks of a Talos. He decided to take a look at what could have thrown the vehicle as a whooping came from some of the anti-air crew, apparently they were taking some of the saucers down even as the new enemy started prioritizing them and parts of the Legion never stopped shooting at them.

Then he heard the ground shake as something big came from behind a hill, a mechanical monstrosity that resembled a crab in the vaguest of ways. Tentacles swept around it, neatly carving apart a Praetorian with an idle slash as it charged at the line of anti-aircraft gunners. The Morans that took up the position to supplement the Shula's own anti-aircraft abilities depressed their guns and started firing away. This was quite evidentally not enough as the first monstrous crab tank slammed into the nearest Moran and virtually up-ended it before its powerful pincer-fists started smashing into the vehicle, metal crumpling and buckling beneath their power while some claws tried gripping and ripping chunks of the vehicle away.

Then more came, one seeming to have suffered the bulk of the Legion's attention and was now showing signs of wear and tear, but was no less frenzied in its attempts to rip apart the anti-aircraft group. The infantry acting as guards fared little better when the tentacles with sizzling blades of light tipping them whipped around, carving them apart like roasted meat being served to the starving. The injuries did not bleed, but cauterized, sizzling as the energy went through them and the last of the Morans was now scrap metal.

Now already in the midst of the League, the beasts were tearing through anything they could find. They hunted, they butchered, and killed. He started running, going northwest to get back into League territory. He only looked back whenever he heard the thunder of the melee machines, hearing people screaming and firing. One of the machines had stopped moving, having taken too many hits, but the others kept on going. He went just a bit faster when he felt the thud of the torn off barrel of a Takhar tank crash next to him and didn't dare look back afterwards.

## The Unit itself

The Defiler Melee Crusher is a unit built for exactly what the name implies, crushing things in close quarters combat. While an odd idea to most human designers (though the not quite as odd to the Chinese and Japanese who also still use melee quite extensively in the age of the gun), the Imilki are quite stubborn and prideful enough to try and make the concept of a dedicated melee platform work in the face of whatever tactical developments have occurred that would perhaps make investing time and effort into such a system not the greatest of ideas. As such, the Defiler is built to ensure that it gets into melee where few things short of a King Oni or an Apocalypse tank with it's grinders at the ready will have any chance of surviving.

While the Defiler is a truly ancient platform by Imilki standards, modeled after a ferocious predator on the Imilki homeworld of Kryimiki, in it's time it served quite honorably before eventually being relegated to the fate of essentially being a "glory" vehicle kept around for Nostalgia in museums, demonstrations, and for war and/or historical productions so that actors and documentarians could have the benefit of having an actual Defiler to access. Though it was once a platform that saw constant war during the Imilki's earliest expansion phases, now it too would enjoy millions of years of peaceful retirement as the Ecumene stabilized.

With the time of troubles, the Defiler was brought out of retirement to serve in the observational corps, being sent to learn from grade C civilizations so that the Ecumene could keep on advancing and prospering and perhaps; avoid the decline that many feared the vast and bloated empire would undergo. After all, an edifice of civilization that had stood for more than a galactic rotation could hardly be allowed to fall and let barbarism go back into the vogue. The Ecumene was order, it was the only proper order. It had stood for so long that to allow any other system to take it's place was blasphemous.

On the Earth, the Defiler would again serve, finding that the denizens of the planets are surprisingly averse to melee combat. Though they found some hold outs of those who still fought within spitting distance, such as the Talon, the Chinese, Protectorate, some of the Monsters of the Combine, and the Japanese and of course the various animals recruited for the war effort, the Earth at large had seemed to go entirely with the gun, missile, and beam as the weapon of choice. This wasn't entirely unexpected, many other polities encountered by the Ecumene had decided to largely forego melee in favor of ranged weapons and had, like the Earthlings, declared melee combat dead and buried.

The fleet-Council of Minds decided that it would use this belief that melee was obsolent against the earthlings and make heavy usage of melee platforms in their observational attempts to pry into the Earth's technical and tactical abilities. Afterall, a platform rather unlike anything seen on the Earth ought to draw some very creative responses to stop it. And if the Earth was getting creative, that meant that they could get more data. And more data meant more for the Ecumene's continued advancement in the face of it's growing stagnation.