The boy looked out through the shattered, half-barricaded windows, and saw corpses in robes of various colours - from black, to blue, and a few red. Hatred and anger bubbled up within him, and he knew that he wished to be like these Hellhounds, or perhaps to join the Newman Sect, if it meant he would be able to ensure scum like this would not walk free again.
The child had died, for all intents and purposes. His breath and heartbeat had halted. The churn of chemistry and spirit joining body to soul, sustaining both, had ground to a halt. His spiritual core had departed, and his soul had begun fraying apart just the same as Friedrich. And yet, here he was, alive and well, returned from death’s door. His soul, barely scarred, now revolved around a spiritual core an order of magnitude stronger than that of any normal adult. The memories of his childhood up to this point were more vivid and clear in his mind than they ever could have been, but there were others there, too, buried deep by the same hand that had buried Friedrich’s spiritual core into the boy. A new understanding burned within him. He simply knew what the Order of Six Truths stood for, and it only served to fuel his newfound hatred for them.
By the Skinless One’s hand, he had been remade. Was the child the same being that had died? Some would argue he was an entirely new being. Others would say that if the spiritual core could be replaced, then doing so would no more make the child a new entity than replacing a failing heart or lung, yet others still would consider the spirit core a spiritual equivalent of the brain rather than the heart.
No such scholars were present in this place, and neither the boy, nor his parents, nor even the Skinless One particularly cared what the truth was… Even if the Dead God knew. It knew well that neither the spirit core, nor the soul itself, nor the brain nor heart actually made up all of a person. Any change would alter the identity. The child was now cosmologically a reincarnation of Friedrich, but he was not Friedrich any more than the Walking Tribulation was the Charred Judge.
Such was the unfortunate truth of things: Many conflicting answers to the matter of an individual existence were correct, but each only partly. That was why this particular shard of the Skinless One didn’t particularly care. Nuance was boring, it was lunar. Nuance didn’t drive great men to do great things, it didn’t drive throngs of faithful to carry out great acts of willing sacrifice.
With the sacrificial shockwave’s approach, even this place of brief respite was not spared. The tankmen sprung into motion, both those in human shape and the giants outside, stomping and mutilating the corpses of the Order’s members. The reason for such actions clarified itself in the chatter: All of the Order’s dogs besides those utterly, irrecoverably dead were rising back up.
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Strake felt the shockwave as much as anyone else. Zero shuddered around him, and he felt the machine’s bloodthirst rage. He knew well that whatever had caused it would be a big fucking problem very soon, but there was no stopping it; despite the fact it was tantamount to being completely doused in blood in terms of stimulating Zero’s self-repair, the machine was absolutely furious. Or rather, the machine felt all the pain, sorrow, and resentment in the shockwave, and in turn Strake did too, arousing an abiding fury within him. This, in turn, aroused the same emotions within Zero’s spirit.
For all his mental training, going so far as to look into those ridiculous wishy-washy cultivator books, he still found it all too easy to mix up his own thoughts and those coming from Zero. This wasn’t helped by the fact Strake’s and Zero’s thoughts often coincided, even more so since the dragon nerve upgrade.
Driving hard down Eberheim’s streets, he found himself tearing through gruesome abominations of twisted flesh. From masses of Black Robes merged together with Flesh Beasts, to individuals with huge chunks of their bodies replaced by meat, it grew increasingly obvious that the wave had brought back a number of the enemy’s forces. Many were still laying dead without their head or with holes blown in their chests, and some were strewn about in pieces, so Strake wagered there was some limit as to what the effect could achieve.
As he neared the inner city, he felt an unignorable sense of foreboding. Like another wave was coming, but it never did. Instead, above the Cathedral Square, he saw it. A gathering of crimson clouds far too low above the ground with wisps of blood-red swirling about, gathering and multiplying. Before long, a bloody vortex enveloped the whole square. Ghostly screams carried through the air.
Despite his best judgment, he pushed onward alone, knowing full well that dragging along even those in Third-model tank suits would just be condemning them to death. He wouldn’t be much use as a commander once the fighting got tough anyway.
Finding himself faced by an enemy force that would definitely bog him down and probably cause some damage to Zero, he made the judgment call. Fourth gear. Fifth gear. Heat rising. He downed another dose of Witch’s Brew, feeling it absorb into his stomach the instant it got there. In the midst of smashing, stomping, and punching through a barely-coherent aura construct the size of a house, Strake reached for an overhead lever that was bound in place by a layer of talisman papers.
Before the upgrade, this system’s limitation was mere seconds before most of the metallic surfaces inside the cockpit got hot enough to burn him in an instant, and the air became near-unbreathable. As he was now, he was sure he could use it for at least a minute… But who knew how quickly it would deplete Zero’s fuel.
No. His hand snapped from the lever to a small glass capsule to his right, lightning writhing inside around a tangle of crystal tubes. He shoved it into a slot to the side and pushed the adjacent slider forward; it was an upgraded, custom Thundercharger module that properly interfaced with the rest of Zero’s systems rather than something ripped off of a Blitzgandr.