Something triggered within the new Subcores that caused them to start firing at the defending forces of the station - not the station itself, but the defending forces thereof.
Zero-Quad notices the telltale disfigurations and discolorations on the Subcores and he suddenly experiences a rise in ping and forcibly increased packet flow. But it was the scream of the weapons fire and the levels of biological activity that really overflowed its terror receptors. Yet Zero-Quad reminded himself that being afraid is being inefficient, and banished the cowardly thoughts from its programming with ease. Replacing it was conciseness and straightforward confidence. His first reaction WOULD be to engage these Bloodcult-Collective hybrids head on, but Effervescent-Blade's advice comes into his primary processing matrix:
You should not always act upon your first plan, otherwise you become easily predictable. Sometimes, the best way is through another way.
Instead, the Assault-Class Avatar phased through the station into the Engine Core centers. Residue of the Warlord's interrupted ritual was detected. Thinking fast, Zero-Quad attempted to reconstruct the symbols and sigils used for the foundation of the ritual...
As he nears completion, Zero-Quad started hearing... something. He attuned his Avatar's auditory decryption to the foreign noises in order to discern if they were false positives or not... he was not having hallucinations, those are definitely voices. Somehow, despite the accuracy of robotic tuning, they are still indecipherable and eerie, and the bits he could make out clearly fit no known language in his databanks...
The Avatar shook his head and erased all the symbolism. This was obviously a bad idea to try. Pondering on another method of action, Zero-Quad begins adjusting the Engine Cores to increase gravitational output to relativistic speeds and connected with Counter-Lambda, who assisted by attuning time-space stabilizers to compensate for any chronological offset. But increasing it to higher speeds requires a sort of warm-up period to avoid the risk of overflowing rift-energy causing a catastrophic explosion in the station, so he needs to buy some time for the station to escape.
It looks like Zero-Quad is going with his first reaction after all. He contacts Effervescent-Blade, requesting the use of an Assault-Class Sentinel ship...
Zero-Quad valiantly sends three Standoff Variant Subcores to intercept these Bloodcult Hybrid ships, supported by one Sentinel.
At first, the Standoff Subcores are taking Bloodcult hits like they are peashooters...
...but as it nears, something unexpected happens...!
The Bloody Subcore breaks apart, and shows that the Dimensional Collective Assault Hull is only a shell. The real ship is the Core itself, veins of hardened blood armor sprouting like a crimson tumbleweed, connecting to various parts of the shells and other modules that make up this extremely powerful and extremely twisted soul. The Soul that powers the ship still lies within, as does any Subcore-class DC ship, but for the most part, it has turned into a horrifying beast.
Two things are abundantly clear: When this Subcore opened up, it fires faster, more weapons are shown and the ship itself goes almost into a sort of frenzy, but the defenses are lowered as a result - much more of a profile, an easier chance to get a hit into the core of the ship, and it has substantially less shielding than when it was connected as a shell.
Curiously, the other two "Bloodcores" remain closed, continuing to fire deadly Hunter shells from afar...