I stupidly stood in the trough left behind by my transport pod for a few seconds, my giant, terrifying mechanical body completely still. The timer on my screen displaying a little less than 31 hours dropped a few more seconds before I decided to take initiative and started trying to move.

I first tried raising my left leg, imagining I was still operating a human body, and surprisingly, I began to shift. I was moving really slowly, but I could see and feel my rear left leg moving. I could also feel other parts of my body shift, so I panned my view back down between my legs, rotating my view this time so I wouldn’t be upside down when I looked forwards.

While my vision was moving, I could actually see my middle right and left foreleg move as well, leaving a tripod of my remaining legs to support my body. It was really an elegant system, allowing me to move around while almost perfectly stable. Having this many legs was a bit hard to keep track of though, not to mention the walker interface hijacking my proprioception to make me actually feel there I was controlling two additional legs while moving only one in my mind.

I set my “left” set of legs down before trying out my right, which similarly lifted a set of three legs off the ground, the ones that stayed on the ground before. I then had a thought, lifting my left set of legs in my mind while my right set was still a good bit off the mud. Instead of simply hanging in the air a bit before falling, my entire body smoothly went downwards, including my suspended right set of legs. Apparently, I lacked the ability to jump, but given my size, it was probably an unnecessary movement.

Squatting down a bit further, I began working out where the rest of my mental body mapped. I imagined leaning towards the left, my real body mimicking the motion while my legs shifted around beneath, their tips maintaining their position in the ground while displacing some chunky, semi-baked mud as they angled. I went as far as I can, managing to shift my left side all the way to above the legs on my left before I started feeling a bit wobbly.

I went faster as I shifted over to my right, my leg-tips on the right getting dug deeper into the ground as I dumped my inertia into them. I went a bit over my tipping point, my left-side legs pulling out slightly from the earth, but I managed to regain my balance and shifted back to my left.

I did this a few more times at various speeds, shifting left and right to work out my balance and bodily tolerances. I could definitely feel the difference having a body the size of a suburban house made, but my mechanical muscles coped well. The hard, black material most of my body was made of also helped, being surprisingly light for how sturdy it was; not deforming the slightest from my movements.

Before long, I was ready to take my first step. The timer indicated my exercises had only taken a few minutes, so I felt relatively comfortable in getting a bit more practice in with my body. Besides, I doubted the enemies I would be facing could be overcome with the wobbly steps of a toddler, even if that toddler weighed several hundred tons.

I lifted my left set of legs, but instead of setting them down immediately as before, I shifted them forwards. This bunched up my rear left and front right pairs of legs, and my front left leg couldn’t actually touch the ground. I had to awkwardly shift my body forwards, then move up my right set of legs about halfway to reset my stance. I tried moving my left leg and body at the same time next, managing a somewhat disjointed stride, before repeating the same with my right set of legs, this time going all the way with them. A few steps later I managed to synch up my movements forwards and backward, before realizing an issue: I didn’t know how to get out of the big trench I was in.

The massive cylinder I arrived in had essentially melted a trough through the prairie and the livestock on it, and the heat the pod let out from arriving essentially baked the mud into a hardish, crumbly mess. I couldn’t actually lift my legs high enough to simply step out of the semicircular walls of the trench, built up even higher on the sides from displaced dirt. After attempting to walk straight into the walls and only managing to scrape some holes, I sat for a bit and thought. Then I figuratively facepalmed as I remembered I had hands.

I struggled for a bit to find out what my mental-construct-of-a-human’s arms did, but I definitely was feeling something. I focused on the sensation, and put more power behind shifting my arms. Then, my mechanical body shifted backward as my two forelegs transferred control from being part of my leg set to now being my arms. I found it was much easier to move my arms around, now that I had apparently switched modes. I raised my left arm, feeling my entire body shift around slightly to stabilize against the movement of so much mass. Twisting it around and playing with my newly awakened limb flexibility, I suddenly felt pain across my cheek.

I stumbled back a bit, unused to the wobbly, 4 legged gait, before trying to figure out what happened. Imagining where my mental body-mapped to my physical one, I looked forwards, before realizing what was missing. I had slammed my arm against my massive invisible snout. Having no idea how to make it visible, I asked for help.

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“Tutorial, how do I see the rest of my body?” I said, hoping the system would pick up my question and resummon the window.

“If you want to switch between camera modes, mentally select the highlighted button or use the command word [Change View Mode].” The tutorial window had reappeared, and so had the gruff male soldier voice, though the window was quite a bit smaller and left at the top of the screen instead of taking up a large portion of the center. I could see a rounded rectangular button with a stylized eye bordered with a flashing neon blue, in amongst some other similar buttons going down along the right of my view window.

Accessing the button was easy, and my view immediately swapped to looking directly forwards. All the HUD elements stayed in the same place, and I could still move my imaginary eyes around to pan the view, but it was actually locked within a certain angle this time. I could properly see my long jaws in this view, noticing the bottom jaw was actually split down the middle into two separate parts. With this change in view mode, I also felt a few more connections in my mind, which I tentatively poked, switching my screen to one from a higher vantage point from before. This view was actually a bit fish-eyed, the horizon and clouds much more curved than before. I also felt a lack of close-up depth perception as I looked down the top plate above my jaws, likely due to the previous view being binocular, stitched together from two cameras, while this was only one. I activated a different connection in my mind that tingled with a similar intensity to this one and was put back to the lower view.

“Good work there figuring things out on your own. One thing you missed when moving was that you can actually shift your ‘head’ angle compared to the rest of your body. Beyond that, if you need any help on command words, any combination of [Help] or [Info] with [Words] will display the most common ones, with prompts to select more specialized lists.” Said the tutorial voice. “Now, climb out of this hole and I’ll teach you the fun stuff.” The tutorial screen winked out.

Eager to put all my discoveries together, I walked forwards towards a wall of the impact trench, still in leg-arm mode. Most of my body was actually higher than the trench; the issue was that my legs had difficulties extending that far up in standard walking mode. In arm mode though, I was able to set my fore-legs flat onto the grassy ground outside the trench and cycle my other four legs to slowly lift myself out. Using camera mode, I made sure not to shove my jaws into the dirt as I tilted forwards. My legs dug out literal tons of dirt onto the floor of the trench as I ascended, but I made good progress and eventually laid myself out onto the ground outside the trench, before getting back onto my feet by pushing up with my front legs. The timer read <30:47:51>

“Alright, now that you’re here, it’s time to learn about your built-in weapons systems.” The tutorial said, now back on my screen. “Use the command word [Enable Weapons] to start.”

“[Enable Weapons], “ I said, a group of 4 boxes with surrounding symbols popping up on the bottom right of my view. The two on top had a line with a spiky explosion-looking symbol at the end, one labeled R and the other L. Their text labeled them each as a Directed EM Beam, followed by an empty bar, three green boxes, and a -4/s indicator next to a battery. The other boxes had a dashed-line symbol between two horizontal bars; again one left and one right. These were called 40mm Railguns. Again, they each had an empty bar, two green boxes this time, and showed -1 next to a bullet symbol with 500 indicated by it, in addition to -1 yellow lightning bolts.

“You need to manually arm each weapon before you can fire. Just so you know, the energy beams are gimbal-mounted on either side of your ‘face’ area behind your jaws, and the railguns are locked into your front legs.”

Having switched back to a panoramic view, I could see an area down the front of either foreleg flash, with it being particularly bright about 2/5ths the way down the legs. I couldn’t actually see my beam emitters though, even after quickly switching on the front-binocular camera view. Playing it a bit safe, I decided to go with the weapon I could actually see first.

I first tried arming my left railgun, focusing on the glowy bit. With a click, the once clear box turned a semi-transparent blue, with ARMED in red text to the left of it. All the symbols and text for the box also got much brighter. In addition, I could see a transparent red line drawn from the front of the gun out towards the distance, with an imperceptible curve to it. I could also feel a handle-grip and trigger appearing in my mental body, attached to my left hand.

“Now, point towards the opposite wall of the trench and fire. You’re in semi-auto, but there’s a switch that can make it fire full-auto. You can try that on your own later.”

I depressed the trigger and a bright flash appeared out of my leg, accompanied by a massive crack and tearing sound. It reverberated among the hills, before petering out. A deep hole half as wide as my leg dug into the baked clay before some of it collapsed under the weight of the earth above and partially filled the hole.

“It’s important to maintain good trigger discipline with your weapons. You physically cannot shoot yourself as failsafes will stop your weapons from firing directly at you, but that doesn’t apply to your allies, units, or structures. I would suggest disarming your weapons while not expecting combat; in an emergency, they can be armed extremely quickly if needed.”

I disarmed my railgun, now at 499 shots, by imagining letting go of the grip entirely. It worked and the ARMED text disappeared, along with the box reverting to being colorless.

“Your beams act somewhat differently, but the general mechanisms are all the same. I would suggest using your front cameras to fire them, as body mounted weapons are quite hard to aim.”

Switching views, I tried focusing on the weapon’s box on my display this time. I succeeded in arming my right beam, upon which a targeting reticle in the center of my screen and a similar line to before; purple this time, appeared. I moved myself to look adjacent to the railgun hole, but the reticle surprisingly moved faster than my body and was now off-center to the right of my view. Firing was also tricky, somewhat like squeezing something with my eyelids.

A brilliant purple beam lanced out, leaving an ionized corridor of air in its wake. It persisted for a fraction of a second before I shut it off, but in that time, it managed to superheat the clay at the point of impact into a melty ooze letting off steam, the center of which glowed with autumn colors before rapidly hardening. I relaxed my eyes, disarming the weapon.

“Pretty cool, huh. Return to your transport pod and you can fetch the rest of the goodies the brass gave you.”

Back into the ditch again.