Ronin walked out of the dropship, in his new body and wearing his new armored suit. K3 and Elyria had already gone back to their respective tasks since they hadn’t had to get fitted into an armored suit. Ronin took a deep breath, flexed his hands as he walked, reveling in the absence of lag he felt with each movement, and the clarity of thought that his new body afforded him. The new body was largely the same as his old one, only much sturdier, with a brain enhanced by a third. The suit, in contrast, was even larger than the one he’d worn before, standing at ten feet, and bore a striking resemblance to the armored suits the Anthropos knights wore.
With each step, Ronin marveled at the subtle feedback he actually felt on the bottom of his feet. This new suit had come equipped with a tightly fitting body sleeve, like a diver’s wet suit. It registered all his movements and fed them into the suit’s processer, which in turn translated into suit movement. It was also connected to sensers covering the armor just under the surface layer, allowing for tactile feedback. He pressed his thumb and forefinger together, and smiled when he felt the body sleeve pressing on his skin lightly. Then he pressed a finger into his own chest, again, the body sleeve pressed on his finger, and on his chest. It wouldn’t give him pain, but being able to know when something was touching him, or damaging the suit, would make combat, and day-to-day operations, much easier.
Ronin stopped walking at the edge of the ramp and looked around the cube hangar. His new eyes were far better than his old ones, and although they didn’t give him the mini map, or project information over his vision, they could now zoom in a little bit. Thanks to a muscle Owl Two added, allowing him to manually manipulate the lenses in his eyes to focus further away. He smiled as he looked around the cube hangar, now a bustle of activity.
Beetles swarmed over the ships, and several members of Karr’s squad, and Daoist priests, were using exosuits without armor to move cargo from one area to another at the beetle’s direction. They’d gotten a lot done in the last three weeks. Ronin was shocked, not having paid much attention to this place since Xerox had given him the tablet. Now, he had a brand-new body and a new and improved suit, he felt mentally recentered and thought he should do a quick walkthrough of the ship they were working on. If only to be sure they were making progress.
“Hheelloo huummann Ronin.” Jade said, rushing up to him and doing her customary greeting dance. Ronin smiled down at the dog sized beetle, glad that despite all the terrible things that were happening, at least someone was constantly optimistic.
“Hello Jade,” he said as he looked around. “I haven’t been here in a while; would you mind giving me the tour? I’d like to know how well the construction is coming along.” The beetle wiggled her body around in excitement, lifting up one leg after another in a rhythm that looked like a wave traveling around herself before hopping into the air.
“Yay, a tour would be the perfect way to get out of work for a while… I mean, I would be happy to show you what progress we’ve made lately, human Ronin. But it will have to be quick because I have a lot of work to do. You understand.” She said, ending her sentence on a solemn note. Ronin wasn’t sure how the beetles spoke human language in these bodies, it didn’t look like they had the mouth parts to produce the sound, but they could, and that was good enough for him. So, he smiled at the lazy beetle, and motioned for her to continue.
“Okie then. Come right this way,” she said, motioning him forward with a two- toed forelimb. “You see, the first thing we had to do was dig out the *%^%&… I mean, cube ship, our AI suggested we use… and can I just say, it’s an honor to be working so closely with the ship’s captain? I mean sure, you are a human and this is a %$&*, I mean lizard ship, but still… Anyway, captain, once we got the ship our AI thought was the best dug out, we split the teams in half, some of us are robbing new hull materials from the other ships, while some are using the *((&%^%, fabrication units, or fabricators? You humans have so many words for the same thing I swear… anyways, we’re replacing damaged sections of lizard hull plating with plating we pulled from the other lizard cubes, and patching over areas that aren’t bad enough to do a full replacement on. You see, we make a really good glue that holds…” She talked about how the work they were doing on the exterior of the hulls as they approached the ship, then switched gears as they entered an open hatch on the cube ship.
“… in here we’re doing something similar. Taking parts from the ships we don’t intend to use and patching them into place with our freshly fabricated glue. Unfortunately, most of the ship’s machinery is no longer working. Engines, monitors, life support systems, nothing works. It’s just a big, ugly, blocky, shell without anything of value… thankfully the elders used the same crystal matrix for the lizards as they did for all their creations, and the nature of the matrix means it’s still in nearly perfect condition. So, we’re just ripping out all the old stuff that doesn’t work and replacing it with things the living copy of our AI salvaged from our colony ship, wiring it into the existing matrix. It might not be the most esthetically pleasing but it will get us into space…”
They walked the ground floor corridors of the giant cube ship, and Ronin couldn’t help but notice how ugly the place was. Everything was in the form of a square. Except the beetle equipment, with its curves and natural lines that had been glued in haphazardly. It really did look awful, but he supposed it would have to do. It was also clear they mainly focused on essential systems, and the outer hull. Most of the interior passageways were in really rough shape, with only the barest amount of work done to them. With a ship this huge, and ancient, it would be a miracle if they got it space worthy at all, let alone refurbished to new quality.
“Will we be able to make repairs once we hit space?” He asked when the beetle had finally run out of breath. He didn’t like the idea of floating through space in a ship that was effectively a cobbled together hull with no intact interior walls. He’d read enough sci-fi in his youth to know if the outer hull got damaged, they needed to seal off interior bulkheads to prevent the whole ship venting atmosphere into space.
“Of course,” Jade said waving her arms around. “It would be dangerous not too, but the problem is in raw material. We are stripping the unused ships of everything we can to recycle once we have time for the fabricators to break them down, but with limited beetle power, we can only move so much. Perhaps if we had more hands in here to help, we could gather more, but…” Ronin tuned her out as he contemplated her last statement. They could break down the raw materials from the other ships given enough time. He also had hundreds of refugees who’d been banned from the cube room, and who were cooling their heels in Temple city. It would be difficult, because he’d need someone to oversee them, but there was no point wasting that manpower. He’d talk to the Priest and Xerox, if all they had to do was break away chunks of broken cube ship and pile them up in a hangar, even those entitled pricks should be able to manage. Ronin thought about viable solutions as they walked through the ship. Thankfully, the corridors were large enough for him to walk comfortably, even in his ten-foot-tall suit. A fact that gave him pause, as his newly enhanced brain wondered why the lizards needed corridors this high, when the soldiers were only six feet tall.
“Calling all fighters, this is Priest in observation. Is there anyone currently in the city?” The old man sounded panicked, and Ronin answered instantly.
“I’m in the cube hangar, but can be there in a moment, what happened?” He asked, already running from the ship with a quick wave to Jade, who was still talking about how the whole ship would have rotted away if the cube hangar hadn’t been vacuum sealed for nearly all the time it had been down here, until the water had eroded its way inside.
“My wife and I are in the city, we’re currently off rotation.” Bartholomew said at nearly the same time. Ronin hadn’t worked closely with the clockwork couple, but he’d observed them in the field, they were competent fighters.
“Half my court is currently in the temple as well,” Amaris, the female lead of the twilight court answered, followed by a pause. When no more responses were forthcoming, the Priest continued.
“We’ve had a breach in the temple, some of the refugee LAPRers left through the teleporter.” That didn’t sound too bad to Ronin, they’d had too many refugees for a long time now, if they weren’t going to help fight, and couldn’t be trusted to work, then they might as well leave. He was in the process of asking why that mattered when the Priest answered his question. “They must have jumped to a settlement already taken over by lizards, because minutes after they left, more than two dozen lizards came through. They aren’t like any we’ve seen before, Mycroft is calling them enforcers, and they’re massacring the people. Please, come quickly.”
“On my way,” Ronin said, rushing into the dropship closest to the water. They’d emptied it already and it was left available to ferry large groups of people through the underwater tunnel. “Any free yokai teams, join me in the tunnel dropship, there’s trouble in the Temple.” Ronin said over short-range comms, waiting at the top of the ramp. They’d stationed a few yokai teams inside the cube hangar, to help with construction, and guard against unwanted intruders from the city. Now, he’d take them with him to intercept the lizard threat.
“Yokai teams 03 and 04 reporting,” a red skinned oni woman said, giving him a quick salute as her team passed him on the ramp. “We are the only yokai teams in the hangar sir.” Nodding to her words, Ronin rushed onto the ship and keyed in the destination. It shouldn’t take long to reach the temple with the dropship doing all the work, and Ronin unslung his custom PCP .50 made for the new set of armor, and double checked his kanabo was in place.
“Boss, I heard what’s happening, should we come assist?” K3 asked less than a minute later, his voice coming in filled with static from the distance.
“Negative K3,” Ronin answered cooly without conscious thought. “There are only two dozen of them currently. It will take you too long to get here to be of any real assistance, and we can’t leave the front lines under-protected by pulling your teams out. Maintain your position, and we’ll handle this.”
“Understood boss, just… try not to overdo it, ok?” Ronin frowned, wondering when he’d ever overdone it. Unbidden, his mind conjured up a catalog of images. Ranging from when he’d rushed the wall to Valley’s pass while kaldarr were firing down on him, to when he’d jumped out of the kaldarr dropship to engage the locust queen, and another time when he’d jumped off the honeycomb wall to engage another queen in close quarters combat.
Shaking his head to clear away the unwanted thought, he frowned. As useful as this new skill was. Being able to remember everything more clearly, it made self-delusion more difficult. That could be a problem for Ronin, since he planned on deluding himself whenever he needed to, in order to take out his enemies. Still, after seeing some of the monumentally stupid things he’d done play across his vision, Ronin planned to be careful.
“Spread out, try to get the civilians to safety and take out targets of opportunity, but don’t risk yourselves unnecessarily. I want to save these people, but if I lose you, then saving the next group of helpless people who find themselves in over their heads will be harder.” Ronin said as the landing tune played throughout the ship. His mind had been playing through the possibilities of this fight, using what he knew about enforcers as a base. He didn’t know much about them, other than they were bigger and stronger than soldiers. Another factor were the refugees themselves. He was dropping in with valuable yokai teams, to save people who refused to help themselves by taking up arms when he’d asked them. Was there even a point to this? His soldiers were more valuable by a large margin. Perhaps he should just leave them to fend for themselves like Unyielding oak… Ronin froze at the thought, his hand resting over the ramp button.
Now, his mind was playing through everything he knew about the wood elf. How she’d abandoned everyone who couldn’t keep up, and starved everyone who wouldn’t fight for their lives. He remembered how poorly that turned out for her. He also remembered just how much work he’d put into building up his camp, so the refugees had better living conditions, while they waited to capture Undercity for them… now, he was debating on leaving these people to fend for themselves? O54, the red oni in charge of yokai team 03 cleared her throat after Ronin hadn’t pushed the button after thirty seconds of holding his hand over it. Blinking, Ronin returned to himself, deciding as long as he focused on killing the enforcers as quickly as possible, he wouldn’t have to choose at all.
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“K3, Elyria, this is Ronin.” He said into his comms, using the channel the three of them had set aside for their personal communications. “I’m experiencing changes in my new body. Be careful and think about every decision twice before committing. I feel more detached and have lost the guilt I’d been feeling for the last few weeks… it’s refreshing, but it could cause a distraction if it happened during combat.”
“Understood boss,” K3 said simply.
“I’ll be careful… still glad you’re feeling better.” Elyria who was on overwatch, responded. She was sniping lizards with Dandelion and Stone from a ledge their enemies couldn’t reach without climbing and was hard to aim at from the ground. Ronin smiled, warmth blossoming in his chest when he thought about Elyria worrying about him, the heat feeling more intense than his remembered feeling. Was that an effect of the new body too? Would he have to second guess every thought he had from now on? Rushing down the now open ramp, Ronin refused to watch what happened with Owl Five play out again with Elyria. Silently, he cursed Owl Two in his heart. That damned android just couldn’t leave well enough alone.
His internal struggles ended as soon as he hit the streets around the temple. He saw people in various forms screaming and running all over the place. Making it difficult to determine who was friend and who was foe. At least, until he saw a pair of enforcers walking down the street, shooting passersby with short, powerful railguns. Ronin looked them over, comparing them to the scouts and soldiers, in his mind.
Scouts, were four feet tall humanoid crocodiles, who wore black body armor with the protection the equal of owl team scout armor, and carried railguns on a power level with PCP .025’s. Soldiers were six feet, and wore grey body armor as thick as the first set of armor Owl Two had made for Ronin, and carried rifles that were equivalent to the PCP .50’s. Ronin knew those were generalizations, since the technologies involved were so different from one another, but it was easier for him to categorize in generalities, than to keep track of several civilizations worth of tech.
The enforcers, in comparison, were eight-foot-tall humanoid crocodiles, with short weapons that seemed to pack a punch on par with a PCP 1.0. Their white armor looked thick, covering them from ankle to wrist and neck. Their heads were covered in bearded helms, which protected their skulls, but left room for their long snout to stick out the front. Ronin brought the PCP .50 up to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel at the closest lizard. Pulling the trigger, he was shocked when the round ricocheted away, barely leaving a dent behind. The force of impact rocked the enforcer on his bare clawed feet, but no more than that. Cursing, Ronin adjusted his aim, and shot the lizard through the open front of the bearded helm, hitting right below its beady yellow eyes, smashing its face to pulp.
“Their armor is tough, shoot for the face, the feet and hands are also exposed.” He said into his comm calmly, as he ducked away from the return fire of the remaining lizard enforcer. The exchange was silent, apart from the snarls of the lizard, and the screams of the fleeing refugees. Their weapons were both silent, only making a noticeable noise when the rounds impacted something. Ronin admired his new armor with every move he made. It was so responsive he forgot he was wearing it from time to time, until he tried to move into a space too small for him to fit inside. His mind played over the duel Staz had taken part in against Grybellus. The knight had moved so fluidly that his armor must have been like this. If so, however, Ronin was appalled at the lack of skill the man displayed. It indicated the Anthropos knights relied on their armor to compensate for lack of ability on their part. Something to remember, but of little relevance at the moment.
Ronin traded shots from cover with the lizard for almost a minute, until a black wraith flowed through the field between them, and the lizard crumpled to the ground without another sound. Squinting, Ronin had to look hard to make out the form of Amaris, who was ducking and weaving her way through the shadows so seamlessly, Ronin kept losing sight of her.
“Thanks for the assist.” He called, running forward to engage another enforcer. The twilight court matriarch didn’t respond to his thanks, just continued forward while keeping to the shadows. Ronin, who was now looking for them, spotted several more moving shadows, as the court moved to engage. Ronin put the twilight court from his mind. They weren’t strong, but they were even more agile than Elyria, and had hand eye coordination that rivaled the goblin scouts. If they were able to approach unseen, they’d come out on top of any engagement.
It didn’t take long before Ronin spotted another pair of enforcers randomly killing civilians. Wrestling down the thoughts that told Ronin they deserved it if they didn’t fight back, he moved to engage. It proved to be unnecessary, however, when a pair of clockwork guardians entered the street. It looked like Bartholomew, and his wife Genevieve were nearby.
Ronin couldn’t see the couple from where he was. They engaged from range, while using their guardians to distract the foes as they shot from cover. He watched as another pair of clockwork guardians flanked the enforcers from the other side of the street. They’d been highly modified since Ronin had first seen them back on the colony ship. Back then they’d been the textbook example of steampunk robots, with cogs and gears covering them. Now, they had been reoutfitted with heavy armor and heavier shields. Each also carried either a gatling gun, or a cannon, like what the SWAT teams used. They weren’t capable of complicated maneuvers, requiring constant verbal input from their masters, but since the pair were likely watching from a rooftop somewhere, and in touch with the machines over comms, it wasn’t much of a problem in this situation.
Ronin watched as one of each pair opened fire with their cannons. The massive rounds tearing through armor and pulping lizard ribcages. It was enough to kill the enforcer pair instantly, yet Ronin took note of something. The rounds hadn’t had the energy to exit the other side of the armor. It wasn’t powered armor, just heavy plates worn over their bodies, and still, it was thick enough to prevent double penetration. Just how strong were these lizards? Ronin vowed to grab the body armor after the battle ended, perhaps it was something he could have reverse engineered and incorporated into his own troop’s protective equipment.
“Nice shooting,” he shouted, not slowing this time to try and spot the couple. He knew how well they could hide and figured it would be a waste of his time. Instead, he charged ever deeper into the Temple city, towards the teleportation platform. He caught a glimpse of a yokai team engaging another pair of enforcers and did a quick mental count. They weren’t doing very well, with only six lizards downed or engaged so far that he’d seen. Whereas more than six refugees had been killed by the first pair he’d encountered alone, before Ronin and Amaris had dropped them. That only encouraged him to run faster, not wanting to be outdone. Rounding a bend, be caught the backs of two more enforcers entering one of the crumble-down cube buildings. Slipping the rifle into the weapons harness on his back, Ronin drew his kanabo as he ran, determined to put them down without collateral damage in the house.
Entering the building at a dead sprint, Ronin saw he’d come too late, and at least half the bodies huddled together against the far wall had stopped moving. That didn’t slow his momentum at all, however, and he brought the kanabo around in a swing any major league batter would envy. The club was new, created to replace his old one, since it had gone down with his old suit of armor. It was likely resting at the bottom of the lake, amid a mountain of broken ships. Ronin was grateful for the new weapon’s stronger construction, as it cracked into the first lizard’s spine. He felt the reverberation through the suit, even without the pressure the body sleeve exerted on his palms, and it became instantly clear the lizard wouldn’t survive the hit.
Back arching in a direction it was never meant to bend, the lizard’s spine broke with an audible crack as it hit the floor at Ronin’s feet. The second lizard, whose reflexes must be at least as sharp as Ronin’s own, spun around and fired a pair of rounds into Ronin’s chest. He felt the pinch as the body sleeve imparted the damage to his body. Except the feeling didn’t dissipate, and he realized the chest plate, which was thicker than his hand was wide had dented under the impact. Staggering away, Ronin swung his kanabo at the enforcer still on its feet. To his surprise, he missed the swing, the brutish lizard moving faster than he’d have thought possible and firing off another round towards him at point blank range. Unable to dodge, Ronin took the hit in exchange for another swing with the kanabo. Thankfully, he connected this time. Smashing the weapon from the lizard’s hands. With the gun being knocked from its grip, and no room to draw the club it carried, the enforcer flung itself onto Ronin, who dropped the kanabo in order to grab the lizard’s hands.
What followed was a brawl to rival any Ronin had experienced before. He found himself thankful for all the times Jackson had pounded his face in, since he was able to take the blows from the lizard and keep coming back with hits of his own. Granted, he wasn’t forced to feel the pain of impact on his bare skin, but the experience had still primed him to take advantage of the large openings in the lizard’s defenses. Hearing Jackson’s taunts clearly in his head, Ronin turned the tables on the lizard and got his knee into its neck. After that, it was only a matter of time before its struggles ceased. Panting for breath, Ronin looked up at the people in the room who were still alive. They looked human, if perfected beyond what was possible in nature.
“If you won’t fight, you need to hide,” Ronin said, once he’d caught his breath enough to talk. “There are more of them around here. Just stay down until you are given the all clear, ok?” Waiting until he got a nod, Ronin picked up an enforcer’s short-barreled rifle and looked it over. A battery to empower a pair of rails to propel the round, and a small hopper to hold a number of large cylindrical bullets. Ronin wasn’t sure if it was his enhanced mind, or just how simple the weapon was, but he had it figured out in short order. Double checking to be sure the refugees had left; he pointed the gun at one of the downed lizards to test fire the weapon. A smile split his face when the round penetrated the armor. Snatching up the other lizard’s weapon, Ronin went back into the streets, to continue the hunt.
It took him nearly an hour to find the last lizard, with the help of the twilight court, who proved to be as useful as having a goblin scout team, but eventually, they finished off all the intruders. Looking down at himself, Ronin sighed in frustration. He’d only just gotten the suit, and it needed to go back to the shop already. Still, he was better off than the clockwork guardians. All four of which would need extensive repairs before they were combat capable again. As for the twilight court, they’d come out mostly unscathed, only losing one member who’d gotten cocky and come into the open to take a shot. He’d killed the lizard, but its partner had retaliated faster than the black clad man could have predicted, shredding his torso with a single shot of its big railgun.
“… managed to shut down the teleportation pad, but the damage was already done.” The Priest said, finishing up his explanation of what had happened, after Ronin contacted him. “I’d requested power be cut to the pad, but it wasn’t enough, someone had the knowledge needed to reconnect the line it seems. We lost upwards of fifty people to that attack.” He looked around sadly, at the bodies they’d now gathered into the dropship. Along with all the lizards and their gear. “What will you do with them?” He asked, though the look in his eyes told Ronin he already knew.
“We’ll have to use them as raw material.” Ronin said coolly. “I’d bury them under normal circumstances, but as things stand, we can’t afford to waste anything.” Before any of the other Daoist priests could comment on that, Ronin continued. “Would you like me to send a team up to disconnect the teleportation pad entirely? I don’t want to sound greedy, but we have at least one of them on board already, a second couldn’t hurt.” Ronin had finally learned the teleportation pads were actually an invention of the elders, never intended to be given to lizards or beetles. Yet, after the Lizards lost it and began killing everything, they’d distributed the tech to help their people survive the lizard attacks. He still didn’t understand the science behind them, but that didn’t stop them from functioning.
“Take it,” The Priest said with a careless wave of his hand. “It’s clearly not safe to use anymore, and it would be a waste for it to remain here once you’ve left.” Nodding, Ronin made a few calls over comms, to get an extraction team lined up to collect the pad. He’d probably have them collect the crystallization pod while they were at it too. Since the crystallization matrix that could store crystalized people were now on board the cube ship they were fixing, it might be handy to have.
Once he’d bid his farewell to the Priest, who looked older with every day that passed, Ronin left Temple city in his dropship, headed back to the cube hangar. He had a load of raw materials to deliver to the woodchipper, and an appointment with the technologist chief to get his armor fixed. His mind was clear, as he ran down possibilities and the next steps he would have to take.
“Hey, White Flame?” Elyria’s voice said into his ear. He’d already told her and K3 he had finished the fight, so something must have happened out in the field.
“Go ahead, what’s up?” Ronin asked, assuming the worst.
“You said the enforcers were eight feet tall, carried strong rifles, and wore nearly impenetrable white armor, right?” She asked the question so calmly he relaxed.
“Yea, if that was all you wanted to know then I’ll keep one out of the woodchipper until you have a chance to…”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” she said, cutting him off, and causing his mind to race. “Because they just showed up on the front lines. There aren’t many of them, but we’re having a hard time putting them down.” Ronin sighed, looking down at his damaged armor and doing a few experimental flexes. It was still fully functional, if a little stiff. It would have to do for now, because, if the enforcers had started funneling into the mine, they’d just lost any downtime they’d had.
“I’m on my way.” He said wearily, counting rounds and checking battery charge levels in the newly acquired rifles. “I’ve got fifteen, fully loaded rifles captured from the lizard enforcers. They have mostly full charge and will penetrate their armor. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Until then, aim for their faces and feet.” Changing the destination, the dropship was heading too, Ronin looked at yokai teams 03 and 04.
“Trouble on the front. I’m heading there now with yokai team 03.” He picked that team because he’d spoken with O54 a few times and still hadn’t learned the kaldarr man’s name who led yokai team 04. “Yokai team 04, once we disembark, I need you to return with the ship to the cube hangar. Guard the place as best you can but try and help out with the construction as well. I know that’s contradictory, but we are rapidly running out of time. We’ll buy you as much as we can but…” He trailed off, with a sigh. Wondering if they could get this done in time. Especially considering the ship was nowhere near ready yet.