Upon making contact with the AGA air forces, the drone squadron suddenly turned tail and retreated as fast as it could after only the briefest of skirmishes. Capitol and Triarch aircraft retreated rapidly while EPA fighters simply continued their suborbital paths and passed above the formation of enemy craft fast enough to outrun the majority of their missiles. The slower but nimbler Capitol jets and their stealthier Triarch counterparts dove away to gain more speed towards the large equatorial urban centers of Rubikon II hoping to bait enemy aircraft away from the frontline and towards the land forces' concealed SAM positions. All in all the intermeshing of AGA and APP formations had been less a duel and more like a jousting match: a single fierce moment rather than a drawn out struggle. 150 smoldering wreckages from APP aircraft now littered the ground, scattered all over thousans of miles of desert beneath the re-entry path of the AGA transports. Now that neutron bombs weren't an issue, Capitol's next sorties of fresh aircraft could be directed by human pilots to fight the increasingly depleted AGA air forces.

The arrival of the AGA forces' first wave had landed them in a vast sprawl of urban and industrial development a few thousand miles north of the equator and close to the major city of Pythagoria. While the level of urbanization was next to nothing compared to the labyrinthine stacks of thousands of fused arcologies of the capital region, the area of operations was still relatively densely populated. The shipyard dominated the area of operations without a doubt. Not only was it massive - the largest planetary facility of its kind inf Capitol space - but the intensive industrial demand it created meant that almost every single one of the smaller cities was dedicated to covering its needs, be it additional energy, highly refined materials, computer parts, optoelectronic systems, decomissioning facilities or even just food and entertainment.

The IRS troops had landed in the far end of the shipyard, one of the few places that had been completely evacuated of any civilian presence. To say it was a ghost town was an understatement, not a single living soul could be seen as far as the curvature of the planet would allow. Unlike in the neighboring cities there had been no desperation, no screaming families jam-packed into every single outbound vehicle and no rioting once the airports ran out of shuttles. The Yamanashi Shipbuilding Corporation had shut down the shipyard well in advance of the invasion, having enough time even to clean up before their staf was evacuated and their workforce sent back to the residential area.

Already sentenced to agonizing death by the tens of thousands by the neutron bombs, the soldiers of the IRS were expecting an immediate counterattack upon touchdown; an opportunity to go down in a blaze of glory for their nation as soon as the doors of their transports opened. Yet there was no AA fire or pillboxes immortalizing their names in the eyes of their fellow patriots. They were met by something much more tormenting and grimly reminding of their inevitable fates: the silence of a foggy graveyard. The fog was the densest inside the trenches as they trapped the moist morning air; towering forms lined these trenches gazing down upon the advancing troops. While upon reaching the first one by the troops saw they were enormous industrial mecha holding extendable cranes, it was hard to not see them as an assembled line of sword-wielding giants through the vagueness of the fog. The gray mist gave life to the colossal forms of the warriors who had died for the Republic before them, the ancestors, who the soldiers would soon be with. They had come to them in their final moments, giving them a faint reflection of the much higher purpose for which they had thrown their lives. They weren't there to speak or offer, they were there simply to witness and act as yet another omen of death; one different from the others, one about its dignity and honor. Death surrounded them on all sides during their advance along the deserted trench and only began to materialize once they approached its end. Mines detonated, sniper rifles cracked distantly and lone ATGMs streaked orange trails through the fog. But the men who had gone in the trench had come out as warriors, one with their fates in a state of limitless peace, sent off by their ancestors onto the lines of killing machines.

At the base of the trench was what could have been best described as a warehouse city, a vast expanse of container stacks and hangars that was, unlike the yards the IRS had passed by on their way along the trench, built up very vertically. The tallest structures were several control towers measuring miles in height from which the swarm of railway and flying cranes that handled the containers were coordinated. The millions of containers were arranged in echeloned pyramids or skyscraper-like piles requiring structural reinforcement, presenting the IRS with what was a mix between the hardest aspects of urban and mountain warfare. Defending the area was a taskforce of the innocuously-titled 'Self-Defense Force', known to those more aware of their purpose as the Enforcers of the Rangvald Cartel; the private military subcontracted by a coalition of corporations that included Yamanashi.

They had left behind a minefield, one not made of simple explosive devices but of a whole network of sophisticated fighting drones. There was almost no presence of Rangvald's armored forces, being overwhelmingly outnumbered by the enemy, the Enforcers avoided direct mechanized combat and instead turned the warehouse city into an ecosystem of machinery that waged merciless guerrilla warfare on the invaders. This militarized ecosystem spanned all sizes of drones, from insects that acted as EM-silent communications courriers to bipedal, quadrupedal and even squid-like machines that scurried and crawled with stunning ease over the maze of terrain, getting off single railgun shots to pin down enemy forces and make them cluster together, at which point seemingly random containers in the gigantic yard opened their doors to fire missiles at suppressed forces and vehicles. The missiles themselves were no less biological in their motion; rather than flying in simple parabolic paths, their flight resembled that of hummingbirds, allowing them to fly in the cracks between containers or even undeground sewer pipes to avoid interceptions. Wherever they walked the movements of the IRS forces were mapped out and followed by synthetic fungal growths hidden in ever crack and hard to reach place, which used pheromones to indetectably attract insect drones that would carry the data towards bigger drones or ATGM containers. Major underground tunnels had been flooded, blocking the mechanized forces of the IRS from passing but allowing their own drones to swim through like reptiles as well as allowing for a myriad of flying fish-like missiles to stalk the invaders.

"Holy shit, guys, your infomercial game is god-tier." Laikos said, his eyes wide open at the holographic display in front of him. In order to demonstrate how seamlessly the hive mind of their robotic armies could be integrated with existing APP communications networks, the Rangvald representatives gave Laikos and his staff a live feed from one of the squid-like creatures that stalked the darkness between containers. He had not been impressed at first but he quickly became fascinated with it once he saw that it was interactive and he could control the grenade launcher-equipped squid.

Its whole body was a continuous hydroskeleton, allowing it to squeeze through cracks or pipes less than ten inches wide, using static forces to stick to walls or ceilings. The only solid part of the drone was its grenade launcher, which had been made articulable and very compact to not hinder its movement. Guided by Laikos and positioning data fed to it by the insect drones, the machine emerged from a sewer as a mass of tentacles that instantly gripped the two nearest IRS troopers while the mouth spat out a cloud of firefly-like drones. The fireflies quickly swarmed around the troops, lighting up the area for a missile to turn a whole platoon into twisted gore.

"As you can see, Master General. we have managed to develop instant and cryptographically secure linking with the entire depth of standard APP protocols." The Rangvald representative told him from the other side of the hall. "We have developped the E2 system to serve as an alternative to bioweapons programs benefitting of lower cost, superior ease of manufacture and much more significant cross-compatibility with conventional force-"

"Oh boy." Laikos interrupted. The IRS soldiers in Laikos' tentacles had survived the blast, shielded from the shrapnel by the ballistic skin of the squid yet crushed into submission, unable to do anything but scream as Laikos pulled both of them simultaneously into a small sewage drain. "It's nice and all, but if you think this is an alternative to bioweapons then you've clearly never been in the same room as anyone from the Panopticon. Or ever heard of the Immortal Empire at all. They'd make good mall police though."

He made the squid come out of the drain to finish off any wounded that could still pose a threat as highlighted to him by the squid's HUD. The tentacles moved with such speed that they were a black blur amongst the smoke and fire, one that the soldiers could only see for a fraction of a second before they wrapped themselves along their limbs, pulling them apart or cracking their necks.

"By the way." Laikos gestured towards the screen. "I don't get the controls for the tentacles. I've been trying to shove them up a guy's ass this whole time but it just kills them in random ways."

"The tentacles are equipped with self-targeting systems that calculate the most effici-"

"Boring, shoot yourself." Laikos waved down to delete the hologram then turned back to his staff. A gunshot echoed in the room.