After Armless returned to Amalgam’s cockpit, his companions spent several more hours going through the supplies in the depot, taking only a small fraction for themselves and leaving the lion’s share for other potential travelers. Seven crates in total - two containing several varieties of stimmix, one of various spare parts, one of what seemed to be more specialized medical supplies including things like high-concentration biogel and heavy-duty structural gel, and three of shelf-stable food, mostly made up of things that couldn’t be easily obtained in the desert such as canned fish.
The great machine’s prodigious size was more than helpful in loading the supplies into the rover’s remaining cargo space, as the containers were large enough that even Rika couldn’t lift them without danger of overstraining her body and possibly even ripping muscles. This didn’t make the ordeal any less stressful however, as Armless nearly crushed two of the containers into scrap metal before he became accustomed to Amalgam’s disproportionate grip strength, even given its size.
The torrential rain seemed to fade away some time before they finished loading the supplies, and before the group could depart for the remainder of their proverbial crusade against the Truthseekers, the Marksman climbed atop Amalgam’s head. He would remain perched there for hours to come, seemingly unbothered by the winds. Red-eye accompanied him by taking a seat on the walker’s left shoulder, in greater part due to his own survival instinct than a love of heights. He had reattached his right arm at some point, a ring of pale lilac scales already in the process of growing where it was severed.
Thusly, they made their way deeper into the desert, which had become a blossoming ocean of white flowers after the life-giving rain awakened centuries of seeds hidden in the dry soil. One could even encounter innumerable lizards and strange insects whose hives lay deep in the ground crawling out, an ecosystem perfectly adapted to short bursts of activity broken up by weeks and months of drought. Vezkig at the rover’s wheel, whilst Orsha continued to endlessly frustrate Vezkig with his questions and Rika with his incessant accusations of the Word-bearer’s inevitable betrayal, which the aforementioned took in good spirits, each time stating plainly that he could barely walk, much less kill someone in their sleep.
For hours and days, they traversed the desert, only ever stopping for a few minutes at a time to relieve themselves. The flowers in Amalgam’s wake turned lilac within hours, creating a trail spanning hundreds of kilometers.
----------------------------------------
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left right. Left right.
With each passing step, with each passing hour, Armless became more united with the machine. Being connected to Amalgam somehow served to release more of Apeiron’s potential power output, as though something about the walker could somehow override the weapon’s internal limiters. Its steps were a little lighter, it strained less to lift its legs its joint actuators rotated faster, its synth-fiber muscles responded quicker when Armless willed them to contract.
Left right left right left right left right.
As he walked, Armless sifted through the data he had recovered from Amalgam’s corrupted banks. Fragments of video and sound, some a few seconds, some of them several minutes long. A few complete sound files that seemed to be songs. He went through the smallest fragments first, almost all of which were too short to be comprehensible or useful in any significant way. Single syllables, short sounds, brief flashes of video - these almost exclusively showed interior spaces entirely unlike what he had seen previously, and the closest equivalent he could think of was the wrecked up interior of his crashed voidship. They were populated by humanoids that looked much more like himself than any of the lizard-men. Some of them looked like entirely normal humans, at least if his memory was anything to go by, with pale skin covered in angular, barely-visible seams, various colours, lengths, and styles of hair, variations of rounded or pointed ear shapes, two to six arms, some had cybernetic tails, some had second pairs of eyes or horns. A wild variety of minor customizations, but generally in keeping within the same body plan, the same mostly organic appearance. Some files showed him individuals who looked rather similar to him, encased in armor plating, their faces obscured, the only expressive aspect of their faces being a pair of glowing orbs set in gaping holes instead of eyes. Some were sleek, some were bulky, some had tremendous crystalline tails while others had tendrils, and some had neither. The guns in their hands were familiar, too. They were the same sort of graviton accelerator that the Marksman carried, only, much less organic, the livingmetal inside them hadn’t yet taken over.
He chose to further examine the footage later, and moved onto the longer recordings. Most, if not all were sound files. Song after song. Synthesized, pulse-pounding, vocal-less music, which evoked a nostalgia for a tiíme and place he wasn’t sure even existed. One after the other he listened to them in his mind, drifting away on a wave of barely-remembered emotions. Then, the first one with lyrics came up. They spoke of a place called Nova-Tokyo, of a beast in black with flaming eyes, of neon lights and stimulant cafes, where customers could rent bodies and use them for some form of recreational gladiatorial battles. It seemed as though the singer was disgusted with the subject matter, but the song brought on yet more powerful feelings of nostalgia, more concrete ones.
A faint memory even floated to the surface of his mind. A small cafe, on the other side of the window a concrete street, lit by purplish pseudo-neon lights, a drizzling rain pouring down. There was a clinic across the street, and the local youths liked to gather there to try out temporary body modifications like horns that would crumble away after a few weeks, or glowing eyes that would return to normal in a few days. He felt like he’d helped to build that city, a long time ago.
Leftrightleftrightleftrightleftrightleftright.
The radio in his mask hissed, yanking Armless out of the depths of introspection. *”Sl-sl-slow do-o-own!”* the Marksman’s panicked voice rumbled through, partly disrupted by the sound of wind whipping past.
He - or rather, Amalgam - was running, its arms tucked tightly to its body. Armless wasn’t sure when it had broken into a full run, but the Marksman’s panicked squawk was more than sufficient to make him slow down to a much less breakneck gait, Amalgam’s hoof-like feet ripping channels the size of small riverbeds into the ground. “When did…” he pondered aloud, only for the Marksman’s voice to derail his train of thought with an answer of “You started steadily accelerating some fifty klicks back, about an hour ago. It got real bad what, twenty seconds ago? I could’ve held on, but you started to outpace the rover.”
“Thank you. I got too caught up sifting through this thing’s databanks,” he admitted. Had he lungs to do so with, he would’ve let out a sigh of relief. With a greater focus on controlling Amalgam’s movements, he impelled the machine forwards once again. The rover hadn’t slowed down to a safe speed until either Rika or Orsha saw him slowing down, and it was now quite far off behind. They had come to a near stop less than a kilometer further to let him catch up.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
While he was in the here-and-now and with plenty of power to spare, Armless chose to route some of it into the hololens and get a good reading on the path ahead… Only for his mental map to light up with unidentified organic contacts, all of them moving at a speed very much consistent with the powerful legs of a Warrior. He willed the lens to switch from wide-range environmental scanning to a long-range focus, and after slight adjustments, his suspicion was confirmed - he saw a force of Warrior-caste lizardmen marching in opposition to their path, clearly having spotted Amalgam due to its height, if their sudden intensity and occasional raised rifle was anything to go by. He even spotted a few flashes here and there, but either their weapons lacked the accuracy or the range to hit his walker.
“Hostile contacts closing in on my position, stop and wait for further instructions. I repeat, stop and wait for further instructions,” he commanded. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Nobody in the rover had responded yet. “I think they’re out of range,” the Marksman stated flatly, then continued on with “I think we should deal with them before the rover comes into view. Two minutes tops.”
Armless couldn’t see the top of Amalgam’s head, but he could swear he felt the Marksman’s body shifting atop it as the lizard took up a firing position.
It wasn’t safe to get out of the walker again, not here, not now, not with how long it took to get all the dataplugs in place. Armless knew that, and so he made a judgement call. Something in his head switched, the same way it had every time he’d fought before. He mentally questioned the walker’s VI whether it had any integrated ranged weapons, and received an image of its lower right hand accompanied by three words in its rumbling voice, stating “Oscillating Distortion Projector.”
The four jaw-like grippers opened, and a matte-black, spiraling drill extended out of its forearm. A faint lilac glow flowed up through the spiral grooves on its surface, and as it did, a timer labeled “Charge Time” appeared underneath, counting up to “3:26:78”.
“Buy me three and a half minutes, and try to get them as close together as possible,” he commanded the Marksman, and nearly instantly received a simple “Got it. Red-eye’s gone, let’s hope he doesn’t turn on us now.”
Clang. Clang. Clang. Shot after shot rang out, and one after another, man-sized metal balls of spikes appeared where the projectiles hit. Ahead of truthseekers, to the side, each with an unpleasant metallic scraping noise as it dug into the soil. Each a deterrent that made the nearby warriors back off. Whenever they started to stray near one, the Marksman made one of them explode into a mess of spikes and viscera, a nonverbal second warning.
In the meantime, Armless had made Amalgam go down on its right knee and stretch its lower right arm as far forward as it would go. He willed all available energy to be routed into the weapon, stating flatly in his mind “Apeiron, read course of action. Continuous energy transfer to unit AIM-P T-228-89. Maximum power.”
This time, he didn’t receive a denial or request for authorization, only a simple statement of “Affirmative, Administrator.”
He could see the section within which he believed its main power source to be glowing brighter and brighter, a faint shine even escaping the barrel. He could feel a tremendous wave of power sweeping through his body and leaving through the dataplugs in short, closely-grouped pulses, like a heartbeat.
Through the hololens, he saw them approaching. Some had been picked off, some were marching on undaunted, but most were feigning it. He could tell. The exaggerated bravado in their gait, the way they purposely straightened their backs, the aggressive manner in which they kept firing bursts in his general direction despite the obvious fact they were wasting either ammo, or stamina to use their reality-warping and rewind fired bullets back into their guns.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Clang. Clang. Clang. The Marksman continued firing, whilst the timer continued to tick down in Armless’s head. Two and a half minutes now. Two and a quarter. Two minutes. The approaching Truthseekers were close enough now that their piddly bullets began to ricochet off Amalgam’s plating and whiz past the Marksman’s body, which, to his credit, didn’t serve to shake his aim or nearly clockwork pace of fire whatsoever. The rover, too, was now close. Close enough for the Truthseekers to see it above the horizon, but still too far for the mask radio to reach them. The Distortion Cannon just wouldn’t charge in time, he had to do something…
Then, there was lilac, a patch of flowers turned off to his right, at two o’clock. He zoomed the hololens on that spot, and sure enough, it was Red-eye. He seemed to be aiming his revolver at the Truthseekers, all its crystalline capacitors seemingly charged. Then, it cycled, the crystal which was chambered now empty. Again. Again. Red-eye repeatedly cycled his gun, dumping all the energy contained in each crystal into the firing chamber without actually firing his weapon, the tremendous quantity of void energy he was gathering turned the flowers around him in such a large area that it was nearly impossible to miss.
Then, there was light. An earth-shaking beam of lilac and white ripped the ground in front of Red-eye asunder, sweeping away no fewer than a dozen advancing men in the frontmost lines as though they were no more than dust, carving a channel into the desert soil and turning the flowers around it lilac for tens of meters. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. The Marksman took the opportunity to pick off more of those in the front and turn them into formerly-living barricades, further solidifying that a line had been drawn.
They wouldn’t dare to approach close enough to see, but Red-eye collapsed into the flowers moments after he fired, and armless clearly saw that his left forearm had turned to iridescent gemstone almost up to the elbow.
One minute to go.
Clang. Clang. Clang. This time, of three shots, only one hit its mark. “They’re not as stupid as I expected, I’ll give ‘em that,” the Marksman’s voice hissed into his mask, an undercurrent of frustration and mild anger running through it. Armless shifted the hololens’s focus from where Red-eye collapsed back to the proverbial killzone, and sure enough, most of the Truthseekers were out of view, taking cover behind the very same barricades the Marksman set up to stop them from advancing.
Clang. Clang.
Forty seconds.
Clang. Clang. Clang. A frustrated hiss of “Oh come on! How’d he squeeze in-between two of ‘em?!”
Twenty-seven seconds.
Just as the diagram showed, a lilac glow was steadily making its way up the drill’s sole groove, spiraling. Barely-contained, violent energy was crackling and sparking between the drill and the arm’s grippers.
Twenty-three seconds. Long before the weapon was supposed to be charged, the light reached its tip, and it began turning clockwise, ever so slowly, speeding up with each revolution. Faster and faster it spun, and as it did, a vortex of energy formed around the drill, the flowers in front of Amalgam turning lilac in a nearly fifteen-meter cone already. Amalgam’s voice rumbled in his head, its monotone depth somehow able to convey surprise in a simple statement of “Oscillating Distortion Projector fully charged and ready to fire. Pilot power output greater than expected. Error: No trigger phrase detected. Please define trigger phrase.”
He sent the great machine a mental command to fire the weapon. The shearing vortex burst forward and out, shredding the flowers and the ground, briefly ionizing the air wherever it passed into plasma in the form of localized ball lightning, which appeared and disappeared in fractions of a second.
Armless briefly pondered to himself at the sight, “What million fireflies flashed…”
The ceaseless gale of un-worldly power destroyed all in its path many times faster than the speed of sound, shredding the hedgehog barricades that the Marksman’s projectiles had created, as well as everything behind them for hundreds of meters. It went through the Truthseekers in its path like some sort of blender, shearing them apart into slurry. Some were swept away faster than they could cry out in pain. Others… They were not so fortunate. They were too resilient.
“Fuck me, they’re still alive… They’re...” the Marksman’s bewildered and slightly horrified voice conveyed, and Armless felt his weight shift atop Amalgam’s head when he stood up to get a better look. He willed the walker itself to stand up, mostly to give his companion a better view. Firing the Distortion Cannon had released the tremendous pressure which had built up within Amalgam’s power infrastructure, like draining a dam all at once. As such, he had to route power to the hololens all over again to get a good look at the aftermath. It was just as the Marksman said. Carnage. Blue blood and indistinguishable viscera painted the flowers all around the channel, intermingling with the lilac and creating a grotesquely beautiful sort of mosaic to compliment the utter desolation that remained in the weapon’s wake, a channel deep enough for a river carved into the soil. “Trigger phrase accepted: What million fireflies flashed,” Amalgam rumbled in his head.
Those who survived were missing huge chunks of flesh, some were missing entire limbs, blue blood pooling in the channel, the sun glistening off it. Some had the strength to sit up and regain their bearings, but it seemed none had the will to try and attack. Armless watched as one warrior’s gaze go from the stump of his left leg, to a gash in his left side from which a piece of what looked like a vital organ was hanging, to the crumpled mess that were the fingers of his left hand, without so much as a shimmer of fear in his eyes. He hissed and grimaced in pain with each movement, but he wasn’t controlled or crippled by it. He might’ve been in shock, or it might’ve been his nature as a Warrior-caste. Then, he turned his mangled hand over, and his eyes went wide. The elaborate patterns of discolored scales were burnt, the scales falling out at the faintest touch or movement. The shock of it seemed to wake him up, his gaze frantically scanning his surroundings, his head whipping to and fro. He followed the path of the channel back to its source, to Amalgam, his eyes crawled up it until they met with the machine’s faceless head, atop it a hawk-like figure holding a weapon of gleaming silver, only visible as a silhouette in the face of the searing sun. The warrior reached around with his good hand, grasping for his slug-thrower and raising it up. The Marksman took aim, ready to strike him down before the warrior could fire a single shot. The anvil-strike noise didn’t come. The warrior had raised his gun to his chest and bowed his head, rather than try to fire it or get into some sort of cover. It almost seemed as though…
“He’s praying,” the Marksman mused, entirely bewildered by the warrior’s actions.
They remained like this for a few minutes. Watching. Waiting, both to see what happens next, and to let the rover catch up. Every few seconds, Armless transmitted a simple phrase to test if it was in signal range yet, things like “Rover, this is Skull-1. Confirm if you’re receiving.”
No response. Again and again, no response, not until the rover was within a few hundred meters of Amalgam. “-es, we hear you. Sig-l is w-ak. In-erfer-nce,” Rika’s voice rumbled from the other side, barely legible through the static.
He stopped sending transmissions after that, satisfied with that confirmation of the rover’s radio functionality, and instead refocused his attention on the praying warrior. He hadn’t moved an inch as he sat there in a pool of his and his comrade’s blood, steam rising from his wounds as the wondrous machine that was a warrior’s body sealed wounds shut a speed almost deserving of comparison to Novahuman self-repair systems.
Those around the warrior that were still capable of movement had been shifting, crawling, and doing everything in their power to get into at least slightly upright positions, the bravado and aggression entirely gone from their demeanors. They all somehow knew exactly where their guns were, even after being thrown around by the Distortion Cannon’s maelstrom. Those who still had at least one functioning arm placed their guns to their chest, and even those who couldn’t move at all seemed to enter a noticeably different, focused state.
Only minutes later the rover caught up, stopping a few meters behind Amalgam. Its doors swung open, and the passengers came swarming out. Vez ran up to Amalgam the fastest, his diminutive size not nearly sufficient to impede the relentless curiosity and potential for explosive bursts of speed contained in his cybernetically enhanced body.
He seemed utterly fascinated with the Distortion Cannon’s effects on the environment, plucking handfuls of lilac flowers and stuffing them in his pockets, as if they were any different from the dozens of void-contaminated flowers he’d already seen, plucked, and thrown away.
His attention entirely fixated on the machine and trying to figure out how it did that, not having seen the Distortion Cannon fire himself, Vez didn’t notice the half-dead, burned-out Truthseekers which knelt, sat, and laid in a pool of their own blood, praying to the thing they had been sent to destroy. Rika noticed, as did the Word-bearer, who was now able to walk almost normally, with only occasional spurts of blood bursting from his scars if he strained too much.
“Th… Hgeck- They’re praying. To you.” He croaked out, coughing out a small glob of congealed blood as he did so, looking from the warriors to Amalgam’s hololens, fully aware that it was equivalent to looking Armless in the eyes.
Armless asked Rika that she give the Word-bearer her radio, so that he may speak with him. While she did so reluctantly and clearly annoyed, she obliged, and once she did, Armless questioned, not quite able to grasp the reasoning. “Why?”
The Word-bearer took a moment to gaze upon the warriors again, as if looking for something. “They were likely warriors that tried deserting and got caught, bound by the sent on a suicide mission to reclaim their honor. The Ecclesiarch’s “Blessing” allows him to sow seeds into the minds of the weak-willed, pushing them towards a singular goal with unshakeable conviction. Whatever you did, it…” he explained, only for Armless to finish his statement with a realization of his own.
“...It burned the blessing out of them and thus removed them from under his influence, the same way it did with Red-eye and you.”
The frog-like lizardman nodded, continuing on with “Yes. They must think themselves purified. I’d suggest you let them pray and don’t approach them. That deep state of focus is the only thing keeping them alive at this point, best to give it time and hope for the best. Heh-hehh-gheck...” Another glob of congealed blood splotched into the flowers.
Orsha’s voice piped up in the radio, loud enough to be picked up by the microphone. He was almost yelling, his voice halfway to a growl.
“This… There is no honor in this. You...”
He yanked the radio from the Word-bearer’s hand, holding it to his mouth while he pointed accusingly at Amalgam. He roared into the receiver, his tattoos surging with light as he lost his temper and unintentionally channeled his blessing into strengthening the radio transmitter. Not only did Armless hear Orsha’s voice in his mask, it could be heard from the rover’s speakers, it reverberated through the metal in Vezkig’s implants, and carried onwards for who knows how long before it faded into the background noise.
“You are a disgrace to everything your people represent!”
The receiver was slammed to the ground, and Orsha ran off into the desert of flowers.
“Shouldn’t we-” Vezkig started, only for Armless to interrupt.
“Stop him? He is free. If he does not wish to travel with us, then so be it.”
“But his father-”
This time, it was Rika that interrupted. “He has no father. Their family home collapsed. He was the one intact egg. The warrior whose place he took in our group did not know someone was replacing him.”
“O-oh. That half-dead whelp you brought in back then was him?” Vezkig questioned her.
“Yes.”
“O-oh d-dear.”
“What did you do?”
“Uh…” he stammered out, suddenly not fidgeting anymore, as though the revelation overpowered his anxiety.
“Answer me!” she growled.
“H-he’s got a lot more in common with Armless than he thinks.”