When I regained consciousness I realized my body was gone. The first giveaway was my vantage point, my view expanding outwards across a hilly, grassy field, from the middle of a massive trough in the ground. Dead cattle, some mangled and mushed into the still steaming mess of mud and grass extending far into the distance provided a measure of scale.

I tried looking around, my monkey consciousness sending out signals that would have rotated my eyes in their sockets if they still existed. It worked, my quite large field of view shifting left, right, up, down, and I saw my legs. My front legs.

Their sharp black tips dug firmly into the mud, a few flattish blades angled out from indentations near the bottom of the leg spread out to provide additional stability and surface area. I traced my left foreleg in my view, watching its stiletto-like form widen. The upper portion of the leg joined a bit below the top of the lower leg, which flared out like an upside-down kite shield to protect the joint. A thoroughly mechanical design, but strangely insectile in a way; the deceptively thin and narrow looking limb likely possessed strength and agility far beyond what its appearance might suggest.

I looked further back, seeing an additional 2 pairs of legs dug into the ground before I encountered an issue. My view was upside down.

It was a strange feeling, almost like tucking my head between my legs, though it felt even stranger when I managed to rotate my vision back to normal and stared straight back behind me. 

Sitting there, with dirt and a few broken trees plowed up onto either side, was a large, empty black cylinder. It sat at an angle, dug into the ground after presumably smearing its way through this field. A thick threaded plate dug itself into the mud below the front of the cylinder, matching threads and some exposed machinery lining its insides behind its armored wall, a wall that was several times thicker than my legs at their widest point.

I suppose that explained how I got here, but the question still remained: What was I?

[User Interfacing Complete. Enabling Basic System Features]

The message sat in the middle of my field of vision, white text floating on a black box in a sterile, sans-serif font. It disappeared after a few seconds. Immediately after, my HUD appeared.

I was first drawn to the top left, where two boxes sat with a mechanical insect in each. Me. The box below presented a side view, my legs shaded a flat green supporting a frankly terrifying body. A long and aggressive set of jaws took up more than a third of my body length, the bottom flat for most of its length before curving up near the end in a vicious, triangular fang. The top jaw was similar, though it fused near the back with the carapace itself, fixed in place with the body. 

The top of my body was a smooth curve towards the back, where it extended quite a bit past the bulk of my center mass.  Below the long, overhanging plate of my rear hollow grey boxes of various sizes were overlaid, some reaching into the core of my body itself. Large, translucent green sections were overlapped across the middle of my body, above where my legs joined. Armor perhaps. Many solid green sections sat in the middle, likely inner mechanisms of my body. 

I switched over to the top view, which shed a different light on my design. My intimidating jaws were actually quite narrow from the top, though, given my size, they were likely more than enough for any purpose I could use them for. They curved outwards to smoothly flow into the body near their base. The body itself was a rounded rectangle, with a smaller rectangle at the back. My legs were angled radially from my core, spreading out quite a bit from my body.

So, I was a big metal bug. Why? How? What was I supposed to do?

[Tutorial Activated]

Another box appeared, this time removing all the HUD elements apart from the body displays. When the message finally disappeared, it revealed a translucent black box with a blue and white, spinning, circular image stuck to its left.

“Welcome to the Tutorial, User,” said a soft, feminine voice. The same words were displayed in the text box in the middle of my vision, while the image brightly pulsed with each word.

“If you would like to change or disable the voiceover, use the response words [Change Voice Pack] or [Disable Voice Pack] right now. These settings may be accessed from within the [Options] menu at any point.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I could sense that the bracketed words in the voice’s monologue had a different weight or feeling to them, almost like they were resonating in my mind. I latched onto that feeling, issuing my first command.

“[Change Voice Pack],” I thought forcefully, making sure whatever system responsible for reading my mind knew my intentions. I didn’t want to interrupt the tutorial with the options menu in case I couldn’t pull it up later, and I still wanted a narrator.

“If ya wanna pull up the tutorial again, just use the command word [Help], or sit confused for a bit and the System will do it for ya.” The voice had changed into a gruff, masculine one, and the blue avatar had swapped to olive green. The speech pattern itself had also changed with the voice pack, but I assumed all the important bits were still there.

“Is this a game, “ I said in my thoughts. I couldn’t make any sounds or hear myself talking, but it would help to divide my consciousness into thinking and talking modes, though I doubted whatever AI or computer I was running off of would make that distinction.

[Vocal Segmentation Enabled]

Apparently, it did.

“Kid, this ain’t no game. It may be packaged all pretty and smooth, but this is a real war. And don’t think you’re safe in some VR tank some lightyears away, you are physically here right now,” said the voice. The text box moved up to the top of the view, and the side view of my mechanical body expanded to take up most of the screen. There, flashing in the very center of my body, was a small, lumpy ball simply labeled .

“That’s me?” I asked. 

“Your flesh and bones, yeah.” The voice responded. “The easiest way to make sure there’s no lag on our fancy war machines is to stick the Users right there with them. A lot cheaper and smaller than a Quantum Gate.”

“Why, though. Couldn’t you send trained soldiers or combat AI’s instead? I don’t even know how to walk in this thing, “ I said. 

“The brass deemed you a bright and shiny pilot with plenty of potential. You are, or will be, a trained soldier, at least after a few runs. Throwing AIs at problems is how we got ourselves into this war in the first place. And you’ll learn to walk, jump and run once you get over being a bot.” Said the voice, snappily providing answers.

There were still so many things I could ask, but I decided to get my last, most pressing question out of the way.

“What happens if I die?”

“Ain’t that something everyone asks. Well, technically the standard FTL transport protocols kill you every time you get transferred, so take that how you will. The Federation won’t know a difference, or hell, even the universe itself, but you sure as hell will. Just know that a perfect copy of you with whatever memories were last transferred by your mechanical body to the local fleet cloning vats will carry on in your place. And before you ask, you signed up for this, even if you don’t remember. It takes a special kind of person to throw themselves at something like this, and apparently, you were one of them.”

I knew I should have been having an existential crisis, but strangely, what the voice said merely assuaged my thoughts. The words only served as a confirmation that I, in the broadest sense, was fine, that my ego would persist even after my physical death. An immortal being who merely went to sleep between physical incarnations.

“Why was I sent here?” I asked.

“Got your demons in check, huh, kid. Sure didn’t take you long, but it’s good to see. As for your mission, which you must accept and have already accepted by being here, is to take out a strategic processing complex established by the Seed which took root on this planet. This Seed was quite a clever one; it managed to pacify the planet’s locals and subvert them into working for and defending it in the decade or so it was left alone here. This makes your job all the more hard and messier.” The voice said, before pulling up a map.

Squares of various sizes covered the entire map, with arrows leading between them. In each box were a name and a Roman numeral between 1 and 5. The numbers appeared to go up heading towards the top right, which was a box with a skull and crossbones label. The one currently glowing and highlighted was an zone called in the bottom left corner. Below it was a black cylinder symbol, which appeared in various quantities scattered among the other zones, along with some yellow triangles, blue half circles over similarly colored rectangles, and grey diamonds.

“You can probably tell what’s going on with this map, but just to make sure, here it goes: The zones are various places of interest you can head to, with a number indicating local resistance. is nonexistent, is likely some local militia or civilian forces, and are where things get tough; local militaries with heavy weapons, armored vehicles, and air support working alongside Seed forces. is that, but they've dug in across an entire zone with stationary emplacements, multiple fallback lines, and have outside reinforcements.“

I could see the zones one to two away from me were mostly to , but the numbers varied between different paths I could take. One path would go through the low-number forested areas and across a zone called , before crossing a river to a zone in the mountains before the objective. Another set of paths went through an increasingly urban area filled with , , and even a zone.

“The zones are connected in a way that if you follow the arrows, you’ll be able to blitz through the important areas while building up a force to eventually take your objective. Take too long, and the major Seed forces will lock you down and you’re gonna have a real tough time surviving that. Our assault was timed to hit everywhere on the planet at once, so the really nasty stuff in the Seed’s arsenal will be tied up defending more critical areas, but not for long.”

“As for the symbols, blacks are your fellow Users’ drop points, yellows are the location of strategic weapon materials you can salvage, blues are orbital defenses which you can disable to call in reinforcements, and greys are resource points you can harvest to churn out equipment and Units.”

The black cylinders were much more common in the zones heading towards the urban area, with only 4 combined in the 2 forest zones around the edge of the map, but 3-4 in each of the several zones leading up to the urban area. There were only one or two in the proper urban areas though. Those probably wouldn’t survive long, given the and zone ratings. The map minimized before I could inspect it further.

“The brass put you on a tight schedule here, so we’ve got to get moving. I’ll teach you the basics while you take your baby steps.”

A timer appeared on the top right of my screen.

<30:54:57>, and ticking down.