Armless responded calmly, somewhat surprised that such a ubiquitous mode of controlling a machine was novel in the slightest to his compatriots. “I'm just walking. It has a mind-machine interface, controlling it is like controlling one of my own limbs,” he said.
“B-but acclimating to a new machine-limb takes months, sometimes years! It took you only a few hours with some trickery, sure, but still,” Vezkig sputtered from the other end. Armless did wonder why even Apeiron's bleeding-edge systems seemingly placed themselves at his command, why Amalgam recognized him as someone with administrator privileges. “Guess I was important, before all this,” he thought to himself. He heard Vezkig make a brief “Eck-” noise, which was soon drowned out by a muffled growl of “Shut up, let him focus! Do you want the fuckin' thing to come falling down on us?!” from Orsha of all people. Then, it was silence. For minutes and for hours, Armless continued to impel the walker forwards in the rover's tracks.
Left.
Right.
For hours, he watched as the town vanished over the horizon and the seemingly endless nothingness began to stretch all around. The rain had turned it to sandy mush, and while the walker's titanic legs were too powerful to get stuck, the rovers' wheels were not so.
Left.
Right.
Left.
He brought the walker to a stop, ready to unplug from the machine and leave the cockpit to help his comrades dig the rover's wheels out of the muck. Before he could do anything, Vezkig's voice came through the radio. “Don't worry about it, stay in the cockpit. Can't risk having it take as long as last time for the walker to get runnin' once you get back in there,” the lizard insisted. He couldn't do much other than agree. In this weather the rover would have to keep moving, and if resetting the hardware-level man-machine connection with Amalgam took as long as the initial sequence did, it would create a sizeable gap between it and the rover.-
And so he sat there, watching Rika and Orsha using massive shovels in concert with their own feet to dig the back left wheel out of the sandy muck. With how disproportionately large and muscular she was, Armless almost felt like Orsha was there more for moral support than anything else. Despite her frankly Herculean efforts, the muck was too watery, and mixed with the rain to fill the hole before it could be dug out further. With each failed attempt, Rika grew more frustrated. Slowly, her tattoos began to glow, her movements became faster and more erratic.
She went from throwing shovelful after shovelful of material to the side, to propelling a continuous stream of high-pressure sand and mud onto a pile nearly a dozen meters away. Orsha made the decision to step away before he got caught in her wild swinging. It was a good decision. In mere moments, the furious amazon dug the rover's wheel out of the muck, herself having gotten heated enough to evaporate a small amount of the water which was running down her scaled hide. Her tattoos, still glowing despite her having stopped some moments prior, were especially heated, violently evaporating any water that came in contact with them for a few seconds before they cooled down to a sufficient degree. She exhaled a long puff of steam, picked up her half-ruined shovel, and returned to the rover. Orsha followed in a timely manner. It was then that Armless realized that lizardmen probably don't get winded the same way humans do. “All clear,” Rika's voice rumbled in his mask. He didn't even bother responding, and simply made Amalgam continue walking once the rover got far enough.
Right.
Left.
Right.
For seven hours they drove on and he walked. For seven hours, the thick curtains of rain saturated the flatlands.
Left.
Right.
Left.
The longer he walked, the easier it became. With each step he made Amalgam take, its legs felt more like his own. With each step, he became more accustomed to its proportions and its sense of balance. He felt its shifting braids of musculature, its plates subtly grinding away at each other as the metal shifted and grew on a microscopic scale.
Left.
Right.
Lef-
For a brief moment he brought the walker to a stop, and its left foot lingered in the air before stomping down into the sandy mud below. What he saw made him pause - just above the horizon, the walker's supreme sensor suite detected a three buildings, surprisingly not prefabbed. One was a tower, almost like a lighthouse, rooted deeply into the ground. The other two were low to the ground, anchored yet floating atop the mud - as though they were vessels upon a quicksand sea, designed with the rain season in mind.
Right.
“I see buildings,” he stated matter-of-factly into his radio. “A tower and two boxy-looking structures.” It wasn't more than three seconds before he received a reply. A huff of agreement, followed by “The supply station. Be on guard.”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
A few more minutes of walking. Mud and sand squelching beneath feet the size of several grown men. The rover's wheels deforming under its weight, trailing tracks in the muck much like a vehicle with threads would.
Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right.
As Rika pushed the rover to go faster at the final stretch, so did Armless push Amalgam. Only… Something was off. That feeling he's felt time and time again. First when he arrived in town, then again when he first left Vezkig's shop.
Left. Right. Left.
They arrived at the supply station. The three buildings were painted with three different colors - the tower was a deep blue, while the boxy structures were orange and yellow respectively. Though filthy, the structures are outwardly in good shape, their doors still holding strong - held shut by bulky, bunker-grade locks, like a can of beans meant to last a hundred years. “Perhaps that was the intent,” he mused. He watched his compatriots get out of the rover, Rika saying something to Orsha, and Vezkig helping the Word-bearer hold his balance on the shifting mud.
With a flash of yellow, Rika ran over to the smallest building. With no gentleness or ceremony whatsoever, she grabbed the door's locking valve and wrenched it counter-clockwise with the strength of a dozen lesser men. In the moments after the bulky door was made to slide out of the way, the yellow building's valve began to turn of its own volition. Its door slid open, and from within stepped a warrior-caste lizardman.
An imposing specimen, wearing a long duster reinforced with metal plates. The scales of his left hand were a pale lilac, in contrast to green of his natural scales. In the grip of his left hand was a strange firearm, an energy projector base mangled and desecrated with deep purple crystals instead of power cells mounted in a metal ring that circled around the main body of the gun. His chest laid exposed, a circular, spiral pattern of lilac scales in the center, bare for all to see.
His reptilian right eye scanned his immediate surroundings. The orb of baleful purple where his left eye would be darted around wildly, and almost immediately locked its sight on Amalgam's cockpit hatch. An eager snarl built in the lizard's throat. “I knew you'd pass through here on the way north. Get out of that walker, so that we may fight as free men, so that I may give thanks for my freedom the only way I can!” he roared. There was excitement palpable in his voice, but his tone remained measured and controlled, entirely unlike the unhinged hollering he displayed when they first met.
His left hand tensed and twitched as it gripped the techno-arcane abomination that was his gun, tiny sparks of purple flitting within the heptagon of crystalline power cells mounted just in front of the trigger. In a way, it resembled an ornate, hand-crafted revolver - only instead of a cylinder an inch across, it had a wide metal ring mounted where the “cylinder” would otherwise be. The metal around its muzzle was scorched and scarred, crystalline residue glimmering on the metal. Armless would've sighed, had he lungs to do so with. “Amalgam, eject cockpit contents,” he commanded in his mind. For a moment there was silence, and One-eye glared into the main holo-lens as if he was staring into Armless’s eyes, his gaze filled with anticipation.
Amalgam’s voice rumbled “Affirmative,” as a lilac glow filled his surroundings and the hatch slid open, its torso tilting forwards ever so slightly. At the moment that the gap was large enough for him to pass, a tremendous force pushed him from behind, a burst of lilac light accompanying it. Then, the world slowed to a crawl. He could feel a veritable tsunami of data and energy from the walker flooding his body. Some of it was corrupted, or random strings of fragmented data that hadn't been overwritten yet, which his body automatically reconstructed into what seemed to be various video and sound files, or at least pieces of them. The other data, however, was a live sensor feed, a final burst of information before he would be disconnected from Amalgam for who knows how long.
In a burst lilac sparks he flew through the air and into the ground, throwing up a cloud of dust and shards. To Armless, the flight was long enough to equate to nearly ten seconds, giving him plenty of time to position his legs such as that he would land upright and decelerate quickly. To Red-eye, it was… Similarly so, much to the lizard’s own surprise. He’d gotten faster, much faster. But it was only now that he’d realized just how fast his perception really was.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Red-eye paused for a moment, taking in the former idol of worship which now stood before him, committing to memory every detail of his appearance. A toothy smile spread across his face. “I guess I’m not the only one who changed,” he pondered aloud. Then, the gaze of his right eye shifted, ever so slightly, from Armless to the rover. To Vezkig. He rumbled out, “Vezkig. Count to three for us, would you?” - causing the diminutive engineer to shrink back briefly. Nevertheless, he did as told.
“O-one… Two… Th-”
Neither waited for Vezkig to finish. Red-eye’s gun rang out with a shrill, short-lived screech and a thin beam of lilac directly into Armless’s torso, exactly where his heart would be, melting and ripping apart the outer plating and even penetrating deep enough to wreak havoc on whatever was underneath. ‘Outer plating integrity at nominal levels. Minor auxiliary locomotive system damage sustained,” his machine-self chimed. Armless didn’t have time to pay attention, even with his senses supercharged to where he could leisurely count the raindrops and still have time to do what needed to be done. There was enough void energy coursing through him to awaken systems which long laid dormant, systems which, in retrospect, made perfect sense.
The vent on the back of his left calf sputtered. His left leg shot up towards Red-eye’s armpit, and just before impact, a burst of lilac from the vent propelled it upwards at yet greater speeds. There resounded the sing-song tones of a living-metal edge meeting flesh, and the sheer force of his kick sent him spinning backwards, cartwheeling through the mud thrice over before he managed to jam Apeiron into the ground and land in a low stance.
Rey-eye hadn’t even flinched at the unceremonious amputation of a limb, and his weapon had already cycled - the crystal which just left the firing chamber was now a dark purple, dull and empty.
Their fists met faster than the electrical impulses within a human brain, quite literally faster than thought. Another shot rang out, and this time it hit Armless square in the chest. His plating deformed, shredded, and burst inward around the point of impact. The blacktech firearm’s pulsed beam spread out on impact, then somehow re-focused itself into a single point, before completely losing focus. Once more, Armless felt his machine-self chime in his head, “Anti-armor munitions detected. Torso armor integrity compromised, deformities interfering with secondary locomotive system. Recommended course of action: upper-body armor decoupling.”
“Confirm course of action. Apeiron, ready firing mode: Pilebunker,” he commanded. Apeiron responded instantaneously with nothing more than “Ready to fire,” a glow rising within its muzzle.
The hiss of escaping gas and a series of clangs as though hammer striking anvil.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Piece by piece, the armor encasing his body from the waist up fell away, even undamaged plates on what remained of his original left arm. Beneath the plating laid a twisting, uneven network of dark muscle, seething with heat so intense that raindrops which landed on him evaporated completely before reaching his waist. One could discern the individual fibres, and the lilac glow between them. Arcane machinery bulged outward across his torso, tubes and cables snaked all-throughout like some sort of blacktech serpent trying to suffocate prey which draws no breath.
The soil behind him exploded as he did likewise in a single forward motion. Red-eye’s gun had already cycled and he was ready to fire - which he did. The beam would’ve hit and possibly even cut one of the thicker visible tubes on Armless’s torso, had he the speed and range of motion he did before. But there was no solid plating to restrict his body’s movement, no need for his myriad combat processors to take it into account when calculating his movements.
He coiled and twisted his body in an entirely unnatural manner, one which would have torn muscles, crushed organs, and severed the spinal cord if performed by any normal human, all so that the beam would hit the shield-plate of his left arm. As the beam didn’t impact on a single point, it couldn’t re-focus itself and penetrate the plate. It did, however, mangle the immaculate etching which Vezkig no doubt poured countless minutes into programming on one of his many machining devices.
Red-eye knew he’d wasted the shot, and he knew he couldn’t cycle another before Armless reached him. He knew what Armless was, he could see it clearly now. His new namesake couldn’t witness the world as its predecessor did, but it saw things from a different perspective. It saw the imprint others had on the world-between-worlds, even if they hadn’t yet partaken of its waters. His was no footprint - it was a tapestry of a dozen lives, each filled with greater deeds than those before it. But at the end… There was a wall. As though this doubtlessly ancient creature had so intensely desired change, that he completely cut himself off from his past, his deeds, his power. In exchange for what?
Armless slammed into Red-eye, Apeiron’s tremendous grippers slamming forward and locking around his waist. The sheer force of his charge carried them forward and into the building, only stopping at the other side when Red-eye hit the wall. Armless had disengaged the thrusters on his legs well before then, not because he intended to, but because he’d burnt up all the extra energy that Amalgam imparted to him.
Red-eye didn’t struggle. Armless didn’t fire.
They stared each-other in the eye, and a thought sparked in Armless’s mind. Red-eye nodded, despite having no way to figure out what Armless was thinking beyond his own instinct. Apeiron’s grippers retracted, and he was allowed to stand on his own feet once again. A rumbling laugh and a puff of steamy breath issued forth from his nostrils, and Red-eye let his gun fall to the ground. He raised his left hand in offer of a handshake. “You win. Now I am of your clan,” he said.
Armless responded in kind, and accepted Red-eye, the First of the Liberated. A froggy voice sounded from the doorway. “Well, this is a surprise,” the Word-bearer rasped. Armless stepped aside to look at him, and the pinpricks that were his eyes flicked towards him while his head only tilted to the side slightly. Vezkig was still holding him up, his eyes nervously flicking between him and Red-eye. “They would worship you as a saint back home, you know?” he smugly croaked at Red-eye. “Are you certain this is the path you wish to choose?”
The void-scarred gunman locked his gaze with the Word-Bearer, a frustrated huff of steamy breath escaping his nostrils. “Yes, my sight is clear now. The High Ecclesiarch would lock me up in the dead-god’s bowels rather than risk me challenging his word. I would rather be a free heretic than a captive saint,” he rumbled out with the same undertone of frustration, the frustration of a man who isn’t used to admitting he was wrong to those he doesn’t respect. The Word-bearer didn’t see fit to respond, instead he just turned his head as if to begin walking away and Vezkig took the hint.
Armless couldn’t help but feel like the two had history - it only made sense. Both were former Truthseekers, and while one had merely pretended to believe their tenets, the other had been a true fanatic up until very recently. He began making his way towards the exit as well, only to stop at the entrance. Red-eye nearly stumbled as he abruptly stopped in his tracks, having followed closely behind - then, he stumbled backwards a little when Armless’ voice somehow projected out the back of his head.
“We’re all on the same side, now. Do not make me regret that trust,” he said before continuing on his way towards the yellow building while Red-eye stayed behind, now only observing from just beyond the same precipice which he had previously crossed to issue a challenge to his icon of worship. Rika had entered it only moments prior to Red-eye’s appearance, and the door had closed behind her. It still hadn’t opened, and Armless was quite confident that she would’ve been able to force it open had she gotten stuck inside. On his walk towards the other building, he noticed what the others were doing - Vezkig was watching him, while the Word-bearer seemed to be quietly muttering about never fighting blacktech again as he drained a bottle of stimmix, in turn taking sips and pouring it over his back, the rain washing it off and causing it to mix with his blue blood into a ghastly, blueish-yellow puddle under his feet. The Marksman was perched atop the rover, tinkering with his rifle and basking in the rain, while Orsha was nowhere to be seen. “Guess he’s not so fond of the rain,” Armless thought to himself.
Whine. Clank. It took surprisingly little effort to force the valve open with just his left hand - Vezkig staring at him from next to the rover only furthered that thought. His expression was at first nervous, only to turn to relief tinged with self-satisfaction when the mechanism yielded without incident. The door swung open with a smoothness entirely uncharacteristic of a prefabbed building in the middle of a desert, and what he saw on the other side was a number of shipping crates, and slightly off to the side, Rika digging through one of them, a number of cylindrical containers to her left on the floor.
They were mostly plain, metallic silver, with lengthwise windows of transparent material through which one could see slightly the liquid inside. These had luminescent light-green in most cases, but there were a few with yellow, and even orange liquid inside. Stim-mix, of course. As she seemed to be too engrossed in looting whilst personally emptying one of the containers to pay him any mind, Armless took this opportunity to speak up, leisurely walking towards her as he did so.
“We were ambushed just after you entered here,” he said, and Rika immediately froze. Her head shot up to look at him, her eyes scanning him from his feet up - then wandering all over the exposed, winding network of muscle and metal that was his upper body. She did the closest equivalent her kind had to going wide-eyed, her snake-like pupils expanding to their limits. “It was the man I killed - no, thought I killed - when I first arrived in town. He challenged me to a duel as “thanks” for “freeing him”. He said “Now I am of your clan” when I had him at gunpoint, ” Armless stated plainly. At the words “Now I am of your clan,” fluorescent yellow liquid burst out of Rika’s nostrils in surprise. With a flash of yellow, she set her can-bottle down on the floor, got up, and moved across the room over to Armless, all in the span of less than half a second. “Where is he,” she demanded, doing everything in her power to maintain her composure. The fact she had what might as well have been glowstick fluid covering much of her face and running down her chest didn’t help in that endeavor.
A few drops even landed on Armless’ forehead, so closely she was glaring down at him. He opened his mouth as it ran down his faceplate, and felt an overpowering citrusy flavor, moving through the range of sour and tangy and sweet within the span of seconds. As she stood there, still staring down at him, his eye-lights wandered leftwards, and his head turned to follow. “Still in the second building,” he said. “I think he’s gathering the supplies.”
Rika continued to stare down at him for a few seconds, only to disappear from before him in another flash of yellow and return to her crate, now going through its contents with a sort of frustrated focus. “He might be useful. I will not kill him. That is the most I can promise,” she rumbled. His final response was no more than a simple nod before he turned on his heel and began making his way back outside and towards the rover,
Armless thought he knew why she acted that way. “It only makes sense for her to distrust him,” he thought to himself. “Analysis incomplete,” his machine-self chimed in, stating “Elevated biometrics detected. Emotional state likely.” He didn’t quite know what his purely analytical side meant by that, and he wasn’t so sure it meant anything. Perhaps those cerebral processors had gotten more damaged during re-entry than he had previously thought. He ruminated on this whilst he walked, and he made a mental note of Vezkig’s absence. The Word-bearer was the only one immediately next to the rover, now leaning up against its cold metal instead of Vezkig, while the Marksman had somehow scaled Amalgam’s body and took up a seat atop its chest-mounted hololens.
When he approached, the Word-bearer turned to him, beckoned him to lean in with his free hand. Armless obliged, and the Word-bearer let out an unpleasant croak-like cough.
“He will betray you,” the froggy man whispered. Armless stared at him for a moment, as if considering what to say. His skeletal mouth opened and closed briefly, and an equally quiet vocalization reverberated through the Word-bearer’s mind.
“Then he will burn.”