The Eighteenth Angel-story

I  n the olden days, no one used robots to fight. It was all done with hands, swords, armor and shields. On the fields of ancient Rome, a legionnaire could count on their gladius to work for them, rain of snow. The tools of war used to be reliable.
That was millennia ago.
  The angel came in for another hit on Cobalt’s lame chassis, smashing against its shield with a flaming sword.
  “Asuka, how much longer till you restore the Oracle?!”
  “I’m working on it, Riddick! The Magi aren’t doing much. I’m not sure, but I think the angel gave you a virus. Either that or The Lone Oracle doesn’t want to cooperate.” Asuka shouted back over the intercom. It was amazing that the intercom worked still, considering that everything in Cobalt’s cockpit was flashing between static images and pictures of some archaic actor named Richard Dean Anderson. Who was Richard Anderson anyway?
The angel, Morningstar, came in for another hit. It landed directly on the mech’s right shoulder.
  The previous hit had caused the problems with The Lone Oracle, Cobalt’s operating system. The swords slash had completely severed its left arm, costing the mech its shield, and main defense against the angels’ attacks. The Oracle had begun freaking out and glitching once the arm hit the ground. Without an operating system, the mech was nothing but a standing target for Morningstar’s attacks.
  The angels were some kind of monsters, which had begun attacking the area of Neo-Edo seventeen years ago. One angel would attack each year, and only one. Morningstar was the 18th angel, the three-winged demon. Once it attacked, Riddick Picard and his mech, Cobalt, had been launched to fight it.
  Another hit, this one knocking Cobalt’s legs out from under it.
“Bloody hell! Asuka! I don’t think I’m gonna last that much longer out here if you don’t hurry The Magi up!” The Magi were the three supercomputers that ran the entire mech battalion. “I’m moving it! We just found The Oracle’s base program, and I’m uploading it into the computer now. You should be running in a couple-“ And Asuka was cut off, just like that.
  The angel swung its arm, this time smashing right into the intercom-relay.
“ASUKA! ASUKA!!! Cripes, I don’t know what she’s saying.” The intercom was too damaged for any signals to get through. If this rate of attack kept up, Cobalt would be nothing but a pile of scrap metal, and Riddick was going to be destroyed by the angel. That couldn’t be a good thing.
  No one knew what happened to people once they met up with an angel face to face.
  Flash.
  Suddenly, the logistics screen for Cobalt’s right arm snapped back to life. The restore program must have came back into effect, courtesy of Asuka and The Magi. Gods, that girl was a genius when it came to computers and the mechs. If it hadn’t been for her, most of the mechs would have been destroyed by the sixteenth angel, Malignant, two years ago.
  Morningstar raised its sword, preparing for what it must have thought was the final strike. The sword came bearing down on cobalt’s neck, like the ancient guillotines of France. They had learned about France and the invention of the guillotine and  Napoleon’s rise to power in military history class, required for all of The Children. The strike was poised to destroy Morningstar’s foe.
  When it glanced off of Cobalt’s raised arm. The mechanical hand wrapped around the blade, and slammed it into the ground, pulling Morningstar’s levitating hand down with it. The  forearm followed, pulled by the invisible force that held its disembodied left side together. The upper arm came after, slamming into the ground next to the rest the arm. The pieces  lost their magnetic connection to each other, and suddenly the area around the two feuding giants looked much more like the battle fields of ancient Gaul.
  Flash.
  The logistics screen for the legs of the giant mech snapped back to life, displaying the splayed position of the two legs.
  Morningstar backed away, overwhelmed by the loss of one of its limbs. Flapping the three wings that were in the place of its legs, the angel flew back to the air, seeking to regroup itself before another round broke out.
  Flash.
  The Lone Oracle’s face flashed to life in one of the remaining screens of the cockpit interior.
  “Hello Pilot Riddick! I am the operating system for this—“ The Oracle began. “I don’t give a scarp part! Get that energy sword back into working order now!” Riddick snapped to the A.I. “Right away sir!”
  Using the leg-movement synthesizers, the mech’s pilot moved back into position, and raised the entire body back to fighting position. Minus one arm, anyway.
  The Morningstar raised its right arm to position to swing, and shifted it into the shape of a giant mace. The angel’s right arm was created from various rocks, and held together through what looked like a giant red lightening bolt. The tension reached peak, and Morningstar released its arm to coming smashing down, like a comet of divine wrath, upon the human’s own majestic warrior.
  Flash.
  The energy sword snapped up into life, and came to guard against the angels attack.
  The legs pounced, launching the giant metal humanoid into the air.
  The sword slashed right through the angel’s arm, and carried right up, shifting at the last minute to pierce right through the chest of the holy creature. The holy heart, created to destroy the humans, had been stopped by an instrument of those it was to annihilate.
  There was a saying an ancient China. Only when the student has beaten the master can the student master themselves. The humans had proved for the eighteenth time that they were the masters of themselves.
  After millennia of destroying each other, the humans had moved on up the spiritual food chain. Eventually, even god himself would not be safe.