Only Human (closed to Vanguard)

A pack. The idea was in Dressler’s head, planted by his encounter with the youngling like himself. But a pack needed more than two members to sustain. It also needed to grow. Recruiting would not do to populate his ideas. No, people could have other allegiances if recruited, other lives that Dressler could not implicitly control. But what if a being was brought up in his delicate care? He was ashamed he had not thought of the idea before, breeding his perfect genes into a populace of beings like himself. Tiny little Highforms, the birth of the dominate race on earth. It made so much sense. Homo sapiens had pushed out their genetically inferior brothers the Neanderthal with their superiority. Sure there was cross breeding but the dominant race of the time prevailed. He would now do the same to humanity with his own breed. All he needed now was a harem to bear his children and start the true first generation of Highforms. The thought twisted a smile across Dressler's face as he drove a van into the heart of the city.

As in Louisiana he had been at this now for about a week and the number of missing women in the city was starting to become suspicious. Today would be his last trip in the area before enacting the next step of his plan. Parking the van in an alleyway he exited and took the form of a large rat, not exactly an uncommon sight in the city and waited to find a suitable candidate to pass by. Hopefully it would not be too long, patience was not always Dressler's strong suit.

Criminals followed patterns, all of them did when you looked deeply enough into them. Even the one Vanguard was following a certain pattern as soon as they entered Chicago, and perhaps even further back than that. Women had begun to go missing in the city, at first it was nothing but it was starting to become suspicious. Just thinking about who would do something like that was more than enough to send a chill down Colin’s spine as the figures ran across his visor. There was someone or a group of people kidnapping women for unknown purposes. Likely it was nothing good, as kidnapping tended to end up in something less than wholesome. Wind roared past his suit as he flew through the air, thrusters creating a bright blue trail behind him as he flew at almost breakneck speeds.

However aside from the missing women, well the patterns were not something he could easily follow. This made precognition something he wished he had, but Colin had to make due with what he had. His scanners ran over the streets as he flew over them, taking in everything they ran over and letting them compute through the suits central processors to sort out anything interesting. The only thing that came up as interesting beyond the many people was a rat that was larger than usual, though nothing to really put much thought into. Just flying around would likely get him nowhere, but that was just the first stage of things really. There was always some manner of crime going on in Chicago anyway, so he could find something to do if the kidnapper did not mystically materialize.

Good, it wasn't long before a suitable target presented itself. A young woman, apparently on her way to work by her appearance began to stroll past the alleyway. Quickly Dressler changed his form into that of a Scottish Fold cat. In addition intertwined with his fur he wove thin pneumatocysts packed with a low dose of tetrodotoxin. Despite the alteration he would appear visually to be nothing more than an adorable stray cat.

And the ruse worked. As he exited the alley the woman's attention was immediately drawn. Of course she was under the impression that he was a stray despite his well groomed appearance. She was not about to start petting a potentially parasite ridden cat. But she didn't have to pet him. With the woman standing there trying to shew hi away he gently rubbed against her exposed shin, purring as he did so. The skin contact was all he needed. Within seconds the woman's knees were buckling and she had collapsed face first into the pavement. Poor thing, though paralyzed her body would still be able to feel pain so that fall must have cause quite a bit of discomfort. But Dressler could not be concerned with such things.

Quickly he would assess the area. The woman was in fact alone and the surrounding area was clear of any prying eyes. Good. He'd have to work fast to ensure his getaway. Hoisting the woman over his shoulder he would walk her back to the rear doors on the van and would hastily throw her inside. There was no need to restrain her, the venom in her veins would keep her paralyzed for at least an hour. And with the woman secured Dressler would slam the doors shut and hurry to the drivers seat where he would start his vehicle and exit from the alleyway.

Well it appeared that his search would not last too long, as something rather interesting came across his scanners rather quickly within the city. Granted, normally women randomly fainting was not something he would pay much attention to, but then again with context it was all the more interesting. Stopping his flight path as quickly as possible, Vanguard would turn their attention upon said unconcious female and that was when he noticed a cat, a little too finely groomed to be just a stray. However it did not remain a cat for very long, as it went from cat to something else entirely. Well this went from weird to downright criminal in a sort of daterapey sense. So it was something he had to stop, as the man seemed to take her into a van and then sort of drove off. Not that a van could really hope to out maneuver his suit, unless it was some manner of super van in disguise. Add in the fact it was an alleyway, and well...that sort of adds to the creep factor.

Diving down from his lofty position within the air, Colin would cause the suit to accelerate, before rapidly turning and letting his feet impact with the street below. With the force the suit could exert and the speed he reached, it would likely caused the concrete to break underneath him, thus making just driving past him nearly impossible. Once that was done, he would let his boosters continue to burn as they suspended him before the  likely now slightly derailed van.

It all happened so fast, Dressler barely had time to process what was going on. He was out, his getaway was sealed and the woman contained. Who or what had done this? Or had it been a freak accident, a meteor or a piece of debris flung from a far off storm? It didn't really matter, at the moment there was only survival, the singularity of an event.

As the pavement before him shattered like glass and the front end of the van dug into asphalt Dressler curled himself up like an armadillo, coating his outer shell in a combination of rhinoceros hide and bone. As the van came to an abrupt stop and began to upend itself Dressler was certain that he would survive, his passenger however he assumed would not be so lucky. He felt plastic and metal crumple around him once the van came to rest on it's roof. Slowly Dressler unbound himself, curling metal around his form so as not to cause harm to himself. With a clear sphere of view inside the upended vehicle he had a moment to peer into the cargo hold of the vehicle. His passenger was jammed between two large hunks of metal. One pinned her abdomen to the wall of the van, the other was planted firmly into the left side of her neck. Trails of thick blood leaked from her limp body and pooled in a corner.

Dressler sighed at the loss, he would have to find another broodmother. But for now, he needed to assess just what had caused the accident. Hmmm, well that was interesting. Hovering above the crater of collapsed concrete was a suited man, or an android of some kind. Why had it decided to attack him? Had it somehow seen him abduct the girl? Impossible, he was sure he had been alone. Either way this entity had delayed his work, an inexcusable crime.

You! he called out angrily at the thing as he stepped from the wreckage, pulling the woman's body with him. Do you see what you've done you fool!? He dropped the woman's body at his feet, blood still fresh her death dealt wound. She had a glorious future ahead of her and you have robbed her of that. What excuse do you have!? Dressler was furious. Whatever this thing had to say, it had better say it fast.

The damage was slightly above the perceived parameters but then again there was always room for errors when it came to trying to put numbers to real life. All he knew was that he had managed to stop this unknown metahuman before they could get away with the woman in question. The vehicle had been thrown off of it’s course, knocked aside and seemingly forced them to rise from the wreckage. If he had seen correctly they had some manner of animalistic shapeshifting, but there was something different about it. Normally cats didn’t have any sort of knockout powers associated with them. This meant Colin needed to be careful with whatever it was this person could do. The tone by which they spoke to him was angered, outraged almost by being stopped by him. Which made sense considering that he had just caused his vehicle to crash like that.

Just add in the unexpected portion of the whole thing being the now dead woman and you have a major issue. Just looking at the blood oozing from her neck wound make him nauseous, but he couldn’t afford to let it show through his suit, not when it would likely only cause more issues for him. ”I don’t know what you mean by a glorious future, but I have a feeling it may have not been so glorious for her.” He stated trying to keep a level head. Not so easy when he was now responsible for a woman’s death, but then again freaking out had to wait for later.

You will pay for this! Dressler called out to the man hovering before him. He had mocked his work. How could that woman's future not be glorious? To become the mother of a new race of beings was a right far beyond what she would have been destined for in her every day life. But now she was stripped of that and all else. This metal encased man would need to be taught a lesson for his interference.

Inside of Dressler's throat a powerful weapon began to take shape a human sized version of the tongue of a giant palm salamander. Its coiled musculature was by some considered the strongest singular muscle in the animal kingdom. Along with its strength was its unique and powerful ballistic properties, able to fire from the salamander's mouth and stretch to its full length in a total of 10 miliseconds. But Dressler was never one to leave his transformations to just one animal. His throat and head began to distend with the sheer size of the grotesque tongue in his throat as it became coated in the oversized limpet teeth of a sea snail, the strongest known biological substance. Each individual tooth was capable of grinding through rock without much force but with the projectile strength of the monstrous salamander tongue they would be instruments of total material destruction. And with the weapon formed Dressler took aim and fired. His long and disturbingly spiny tongue shot like a bullet out of his mouth thirty times faster than a human can blink. Every inch of the tongue was covered in metal shredding spines and it was heading straight in the direction of Vanguard. If made contact Dressler had no doubt that he just might get a look at the man beneath the machine.

Well, it appeared he would have to fight his guy now. Granted that had been the intention before but then again he had no idea the real scope of the man’s powers beyond the fact that he could change shape, along with a few other minor things. That did not help in the slightest when it came to reacting to the attack thrown his way in the form of what looked like...his tongue but something about it was off. Colin barely had the time to react, let alone assess what he was dealing with while trying to get out of the way of said attack. While the suit was durable, something about the attack had a way of...well getting around that. True, he had gotten around what would have been a lethal blow by moving to the side, but the forearm of the armor had been stripped away easily.

A jab of pain lanced through his arm as the damage seemed to extend beyond simply his suit as he backed up from the attack. The suit exterior had been damaged by this attack, something far better than what he had been expecting from this unknown man. The damage assessment for the suit had been extensive, a large portion of the arm had been ripped away and a bodily diagnostic showed massive damage and bleeding coming from the arm as well. Raise the sync rate to 50%. He couldn’t afford to play around and so he would have to amp things up from the start, otherwise he had a feeling he would die. Already a mixture of painkillers and high powered coagulants were being administered, both meant to more than anything keep him going in the fight. It would prevent bleeding out anyway, though the feeling within his right hand was already beginning to leave him.

Repairing the damage done would not be an easy task either, considering that a few circuits were taken out too. With expert aim, he released a few bolts of high powered energy from his non damaged arms wrist mounted gun, aimed to cripple rather than kill.

Blood spilled over Dressler's elongated radula of a tongue. It was absolutely a man beneath the suit, relatively young he determined as he absorbed the man's genetic information through his tongue. And a wonderful surprise as well, he was human. An neanderthal in the face of Dressler's own advanced greatness. But he didn't have time to mentally gloat over his genetic superiority, for now he had a bug to squash.

Retracting the weaponized tongue he assimilated it back into his regular human form, taking note of it's effectiveness against the human's attempt at armored protection. You taste good human! he taunted at the man as he moved to fire his wrist mounted gun. Volleys of energy reigned in a concentrated pattern towards his legs from the armored human. While Dressler moved to avoid them he would not come away unharmed. A few of the blasts tore into his leg, leaving deep puncture wounds. Quickly he formed spinnerets around the wounds and patched them up tight with spider silk. It would work both as a natural coagulant and flexible stitching to keep the woulds from reopening.

With his wounds attended Dressler took to action. Both of his legs morphed quickly, bending and breaking along multiple axis as they formed a chitinous shell. Over his torso arms and head he formed a thick layer of rhinoceros hide encased in a three inch thick black and white shell of an ironclad beetle, the toughest insect shell on the planet. Row after row after row of  elongated limpet teeth formed over the forearms of his thickened shell as makeshift weapons. Atop his head bulged the compound eyes of a fly. And beneath all of the shifting and shape-changing on the surface, his musculature detached and stretched, linking itself to his exoskeleton, giving him the proportional strength of an ant.

Before Vanguard stood one of Dressler's fully realized Highforms in all of its glory. But the man would have little time to admire its majestic brilliance. Hunching down on his spring like flea-legs, Dressler release all the energy stored within them and fire off like a rocket at Vanguard. As he approached he would bring his limpet teeth covered arms forward, so as to attempt to crush the metal man between his powerful arms.

His shots would make their mark, colliding with the makes legs in a slightly bloody display as he was sure that would remove some of their mobility. However, that only seemed t prompt a rather morbid transformation that managed to more than anything disgust. This continued to show how this person powers worked, though that didn’t make the current predicament any less annoying. Making use of their new legs, they would propel towards him with impressive speeds, but it wasn’t beyond his suits processing powers.  Likely they would have the same means by which they could slice through his armor, meaning that he would have to avoid taking any major damage. With a burst from the thrusters on his feet, Colin would find himself being propelled upwards with enough room to avoid the initial strike. Being caught between those arms would have been instant death, but now he had a chance to react on his own.

With the armor repaired enough, he made it it move the damaged arm as the repulsors would power up with the intention of using the full force they were capable of. Likely he would be thrown down to the ground or something along those lines, though likely they would not be harmed.

Instead of the soft squelch of flesh crunching beneath metal, Dressler felt only his club-like arms collide with each other. This man's suit was fast. But we he was just a man, human, beneath him. He would crush him beneath his might. And with his bulbous fly eyes, he could track the trajectory of his adversary's escape path. It also allowed him sight of the large repulsor beam fired from the suit's gauntlet. Because of how he had thrown himself at the man, he had no ability to avoid the strike. So instead he thickened the shell on his back to reinforce his defenses.

Sure enough the beam made solid contact with the carapace on his back and sent him careening towards the earth. Acting fast, Dressler stretched out two pairs of wings from his sides; the set farther up his body were those of a Peregrine falcon for speed and below those a set of dragonfly wings for stability and control. Twisting his dragonfly wings in a figure eight motion he rotated his body nose first to the ground. Using the added thrust given to him by the repuslor's thrust he shot at tremendous speed straight downward before angles his wings upward. The thrust forced him on an accelerated incline up into the air, all the while keeping his eyes on the metal shelled man. Like an owl he would rotate his head mid ascent by 180 degrees to face the man and once more release his lightening fast radula of a tongue at him.

His repulsors would make contact but they appeared to adapt to even that by sprouting wings which helped them stay aloft within the air. Still, already he had thought of a few ways to take away the mobility of the wings themselves should he need to. Granted, something told him that the damage would not get him far should the strange meta really want to keep flying. ”This guy is just full of tricks.” Colin muttered annoyed as he prepared to react once again as something told him they would have some manner of attack prepared. They would release their tongue much like a bullet once again, though this time Colin was ready for such an attack. preparing for the attack, he would managed to move out of the way via some fine tuned flying while a blade of energy would release from one of his wrists.

With a slash, he wpuld aim to sever the tongue quickly. Sure, they had exceptional durability but tongues tended to not be very durable compared to the rest of a creature, making slicing through it with pure energy rather easy. Well if that did not work, well he would have to rethink his strategy. No one was invincible, not even this rapidly adapting guy. Not sure what to do from there, he would release one of the chaos spheres from the suit and with a hard throw, tossed it at Dressler. Once it was close, the bomb would violently explode while releasing a powerful wave of energy that would rapidly vaporize or horrifically burn everything it touched before collapsing in on itself. Colin would fly back enough that he was out of its range.

Ah the young suited man was clever in his thoughts and his actions, but he had underestimated the adaptability of a creature such as Dressler. As he watched the energy blade form and come down at his tongue with his fly eyes he changed the physiology of his tongue. There was no way the appendage was going to survive a hit, that was certain. But the loss of the limb would be on his own terms not this flying metal man's. Six inches behind the blade the tongue would detach like the tail of a lizard. The man would be slashing at air. And from the newly formed stub he would form two sets of massively proportioned trapjaw ant pincers. The trapjaw ant has tiny hairs on the end of its jaws that once irritated snap shut with unthinkable strength and speed. So as Vanguard's arm came down it contacted the trigger hairs, snapping the vice like jaws around his arm.

But with one threat dealt with, another still loomed. The grenade flying at him was coming in fast. He was certain that he could move out of the way faster on his two sets of wings but while towing the tin can behind him flying away could prove difficult. Then again, he thought, down was always an option.

Instead of flying away Dressler dive bombed to the ground, the massive Peregrine Falcom wings providing him with deadly speed heading for the ground. All the while he began to reel in his tongue, trying to draw his prey in closer to his waiting maw. But it would seem that the grenade would detonate a bit sooner than he had anticipated. White hot energy seared his outer shell as he charged for the ground, the force accelerating him faster than he could control. With a loud thud he crashed headlong into the ground. Thankfully an exoskeleton physiology meant minimal damage from any type of blunt force trauma, that coupled with his thick beetle shell meant that most of the damage he had taken was superficial. And now his prey was at least partially in his grasp as he stood once more to his feet. He looked forward to what would come next.

The blade came down towards the tongue and the anticipation of the tissue being disconnected was there, yet there was no blood being rent from the tissue of the tongue. Instead it appeared that the tongue had detached from the main mass leaving him swinging into the empty air with a little more force than require put into the attack. Reaction now was important really, considering that likely this person would have some kind of reaction prepared. His scanners were already move about as if looking for a counter attack, but that did not give him enough time to actually respond to such a thing. In less than a second strange pincer like formations were coming after his arm, far too quick for him to properly defend against such an attack. All he could do really was try to defend, yet his suit did not have the time to divert enough energy to the kinetic dampening field.

The metal would crunch under the sheer force of the bite, crumpling inwards as it bit into the arm to the point that bone was utterly broken. There was a sharp amount of pain before..it felt as if nothing were there at all. His grenade was still in motion while all of this happened, as a roar of pain ripped from his throat and was drowned out by the explosion of the weapon. Then there was something wrenching down as he found himself being pulled down as well, though the pain itself made all rational thought give way. Muscle, tendon and bones ripped, tore and broke as a spray of blood was the only thing he caught sight of. Within a matter of seconds he collided with the ground as cracks would spiderweb outwards from the point of collision. Damage critical. Rapid blood loss detected. So, he was losing a lot of blood but this seemed like something that had happened before.

A diagram of the suit and the body underneath could be seen. The arm itself was missing as well as some of the side, though he could not tell if that was just the suit or him as well. Painkillers were already begin injected, though he knew the suit had it's limits as far as those were concerned. Still it was enough to keep him from being overcome by any more of the blinding pain. Managing to rest himself upwards with his one working arm Colin ground his teeth together. W...what the hell was that? He managed to think, through words were a bit beyond him at this point.

He was not disappointed by the outcome of his attack, even surprised. When he had clamped down with his jaws he had felt the give of flesh and the crunch of metal but it had clearly done much more than that. As he rose to his feet and retracted his tongue Dressler felt a considerable amount of lessened weight. When his eyes scanned to the end of his tongue he found the man's arm clamped tightly in his mandibles. The armor too had come along with it. Well that was wonderful. A sinister smile stretched on the abomination's face as his mouth grew large and sharklike.

With a sick snap of his tongue the arm enter Dressler's maw, the hand flopping limp from outside of gnashing teeth. A few chomps and Dressler was through with his grizzly meal, the man's arm digesting in a series of specialized stomachs to make short work not only of the biological material but the metal as well. And with a full stomach, he scanned for his prey further.

He did not take much to find. A crater was formed where the man had landed, blood rapidly gushing from his body. Pathetic human Dressler gawked as he approached the scrapped suit and man contained in a metal death trap. Swiping his arm across the man's visor it ripped jagged from his face, clearly exposing the man beneath. Dressler would drop to a knee and hold the man in a sitting position as his head resumed its more human appearance. Whether or not the man was conscious he did not care, he would have his moment. I want you to remember my face human. I want you to look upon me, for my visage to be burned in to your subconscious. You are playing among gods morsel, a feeble mouse in a den of snakes. On some level I know you know this, otherwise you would not encase yourself in metal and pretend at greatness. Once again standing Dressler would wipe his hands free of the human filth allow the man to drop to his back once more. If you survive this I want you to remember this day and your defeat. But more importantly remember this, you're only human. Dressler would then step over the unconscious man and go to the nearest payphone after assuming his human form once more. Yes I need an ambulance he would speak to the operator after depositing an amount of change. Come quick, the man appears to be bleeding to death. And with that done, Dressler would leave the scene, off to find another broodmother for his harem.