Garvesh was right in that removing her own voidkey wasn’t difficult, but it was an order of magnitude harder than Krahe had expected. It was a sickly, ticklish sensation, one which sent waves of shivers down her back with every centimeter. Once it was out, she felt a yawning emptiness that slowly closed up like biorepair gel rushing in to fill a wound. The Black Sun Coupler took in the key without issue, and the stamped readout around the slot shifted to form a dial with a handful of increments, the head of her voidkey becoming the selector. Donning the belt, it was somewhat loose until she buckled it in the back, at which point it shrunk to fit.
Pulling the dossier out of its box, Garvesh flipped through it, muttering: “Insert fuel cell… Release the safety switch… Connect contactor… Ah, here it is. Rotate the dial forward until it clicks once - from the first position into the second position.”
Krahe gave him an incredulous look at the wannabe-idiotproof instructions. She still did as he said. There was some initial resistance, but once it was overcome the dial spun freely until it snapped into the second position. The belt awakened, several connections clicking into place as it emitted a rising tone. It reminded her of a fusion bomb being armed.
“Now turn the dial forward until it circles back around to the first position. This should initiate the transformation since the prototype doesn’t have a cognitive trigger safety. Fair word of warning, it comes with an arm-mounted hardpoint catalyst. Like a gun that spits out a basic offensive thaumaturgy at a rapid rate of fire.”
“So that’s what it was. Should’ve said so sooner,” she sighed as she started undoing the straps of her bracers so she could swap them around. Once both bracers and shoulder-guards had been switched, she finally completed the sequence. The gaped-open serpent maw that was her voidkey’s head spun around and came to a halt.
For all her effort, she found herself briefly losing awareness of her surroundings. A typical symptom of momentary nervous overload caused by abrupt integration of new hardware; a type of benign seizure. It was all too much like getting into fancy power armor and quick-booting the unit. Her spine felt like it was buzzing for a few seconds after the fact, but it soon settled down.
When she returned to awareness, she saw two things - a gobsmacked Garvesh and the diagnostic unit spewing lines of data with a distinct absence of errors. A homely HUD partly filled her sight. It even had an ultra-retro searcher reticle! Looking herself over, Krahe raised her hand to see that her bracers had not only grown, but bulked up significantly and changed in shape, including armored gloves and upper-arm guards. The undersuit, visible on the palms and in the elbows, was innocuous dark-grey, almost matte-black, looking like a dense ballistic weave. Reaching up, she raised her hand into her field of vision, and couldn’t help but notice the short-barreled machine gun bolted to her forearm. It had something resembling an action but devoid of the mechanics of such a thing, with a cable shaped like an ammo conveyor snaking up her arm and under the shield-like shoulder plate. The HUD pointed out where the “gun” was aiming with a separate crosshair.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“Mirror?” she asked.
“Uh…” was the reply.
Garvesh looked around, and after manhandling some very heavy-looking boxes, he hauled out an antique full-body mirror in a frame of precious metals, or at least one made to look the part.
Krahe almost laughed when she saw herself in full. On her head was a helmet whose shape was only a half-step from the infamous stahlhelm, and her face was concealed by a plague doctor-esq beaked gas mask with green-glowing eye ports. Not even an iota of humanity shone through that ominous guise. The pattern of stark, aggressive shape language rendered in dark metal continued with the rest of the armor, though nothing quite matched the helmet’s ominous impact. The upper body had a full chest-plate, while the lower was covered by segmented, interlocked plates to preserve mobility. Her right arm’s forearm and shoulder plates were big and thick enough to act as quite impressive shields.
A skirt of plates hung down over her upper legs, her normal pants still there, seemingly unaltered, though with some focus she could feel the undersuit beneath them. Much like her pants, the Black Sun armor had incorporated her boots into itself as well. The armor’s boots were half her own, and half the Black Sun shin-guards, merged and amplified into the platonic ideal of death squad headkickers.
“I look like some activist’s rendition of a tyrannical regime’s enforcer,” she said, barely suppressing an amused chuckle.
Garvesh, caught up in checking and re-checking the diagnostic readouts, ignored the remark and said: “Do some squats.”
When she fulfilled his request, he continued: “Alright, now hop in place.”
This banal game of simon-says continued for a few minutes before he finally, mercifully, brought out an unreasonably handsome bust of some guy and set it on a crate.
“Last test. Shoot. No need to worry about the noise, I’ve got this place warded.”
Cracks of ionized air ripped through the storeroom, and rays of seething death tore through the air. Flashes of deep orange coloured everything. The burst lasted a number of seconds that could be counted on one hand, but half of the bust was gone by the time she was done.
The lizard looked at Krahe, then at the bust, then back at Krahe. With a somewhat accusatory tone, he said: “...You know I’ve tried to smash that thing with hammers before.”
“So we can call the test a success, then.”
“The system’s throwing alerts about anathema contamination, but otherwise, yeah. I’ll turn off the safeguards for when you take it out for a ride for real. Don’t expect it to survive. Right now it’s the diagnostic unit powering it, but that cell will melt down once it’s out of juice and it’ll be a coin toss if it takes the whole belt with it. On the optimistic side, you might get five minutes out of the thing if you pace yourself.”
“Five minutes of this kind of performance are all I’ll need. Just need a Mamon Knight name, now.”
“Seriously? For five minutes.”
“You never know. I might get myself one of these once all the kinks get ironed out. I’m thinking ‘Viridaimon’.”
“Please do not explain the wordplay behind it.”
“Casus told you, huh.”
“Of course he told me.”