“What. Did. You. Do.”
Something inside Vezkig snapped, and so did he. He strategically smacked his chest and hit the remote which was in a pocket of his apron, and his hoverslate darted out of the rover’s open doors. Then, as though Rika wasn’t able to just punt him into the stratosphere were she so inclined, he began ranting at her in what should’ve been a squeaky growl, but turned out to be a deep rumble very reminiscent of the way Amalgam sounded in Armless’ head, only less mechanical.
“I did what y’asked me to do, you fuckin’ luddite, I saved his life. The stress the egg went through made him hatch prematurely!” he rambled, his hoverslate finally arriving and him stepping onto it, then smacking his chest again. The slate began to rise, emitting an audible whirr as it lifted him nearly two meters so that he was face-to-face with Rika.
“His lazarus organ was underdeveloped, he didn’t even have half the vital glands to keep it in check! He’d have turned into a walking tumor in months if I hadn’t replaced it!”
Rika seemed unphased by his outburst, and Armless wasn’t sure whether she was truly calm, or if this was what she looked like when she was really angry. “What was the replacement?” she questioned further.
Vezkig sighed, seemingly beginning to calm down, but still visibly and audibly frustrated. He continued on to explain with “Take a wild fuckin’ guess, tons of fun. I made a self-repair unit out o’ one of those alive-metal plumes like the one hothead’s gun has and salvaged blacktech I’d bought from the Truthseekers back when they were just archeologists.”
He gestured at the Marksman’s perch with his left hand at the word ‘hothead’. Rika looked at him, then at the gore-covered metal hedgehogs that it created when it struck a living thing, then at Vezkig. She didn’t need to say anything for him to understand the question, and the underlying threat.
“Nah, he won’t turn into that, ain’t how alive-metal works. I don’t think he’ll ever be able to metamorphosize though, without the lazarus organ to trigger it. But it was that, or… Well. You of all people should know he’s better off this way,” he finished, the anger lost from his voice, merely staring Rika in the eyes. She huffed, nodded, picked up her radio, and turned to walk back to the rover.
Vezkig lowered himself to near ground level, and before he could also return to the rover, the Word-bearer approached him. “What do you think will happen to him?” he asked.
“The older he gets, the more the module will integrate with his body, and the greater the void energy exposure. His Blessing will inevitably fade... Like mine did. But he’ll learn to live without it. He’ll have no choice,” the tinkerer admitted, a twinge of sadness evident in his voice. “Get on, yer still weak,” he beckoned his froggy counterpart, and the Word-bearer obliged. He slapped his chest, and the hoverslate carried them both back to the rover.
Rika’s voice hissed inside Armless’s mask, the signal still somewhat muddled. “We will follow closely. Signal is still weak. Try not to run ahead again,” she rumbled. “I won’t,” he responded, impeling Amalgam to stand up slowly enough that the Marksman wouldn’t fall off. He raised its upper right arm, pointing at the spot where Red-eye had collapsed, marked by a circle of lilac flowers and a smaller channel in the soil originating from its centre. “Red-eye needs help,” he broadcasted to Rika, “He bought me time to charge the walker’s weapon.”
All he received was a grudging rumble as the rover took off, driving towards the marked spot. He followed, watching closely through the hololens as she walked to the edge of the lilac circle, shuddered, and stepped away. “Can’t. Void energy contamination. I would burn,” she refused, sounding almost shaken. Vezkig couldn’t lift him, that was for sure, and he didn’t want to risk crushing Red-eye with Amalgam’s hands or put the Marksman in danger. There was no other choice. “I’ll have to do it myself,” he broadcasted to the rover’s main radio.
There was a silence, and then a response came through. “What if it takes hours to get you plugged back in again? Can’t risk it. Leave him here,” the Word-bearer’s voice echoed from the other side.
“There is no immediate danger,” Armless argued, and received no counterargument. He was right. The closest thing to a direct threat was in a pool of their own blood, either dead or very close to it. He willed the walker to go down on one knee, as cautiously as he could, then commanded the VI itself with “Amalgam, status report. If possible, disengage dataplugs and open cockpit hatch.”
Amalgam’s voice sounded in his head after a few seconds as the machine took some time to perform the necessary checks. “Affirmative. Status report: Pilot structural integrity at sixty-four percent. Assimilation subsystem fully functional. Full integration of third-party upper limb module ‘Aegis’ successful. Full integration of prototype upper limb module ‘Apeiron’ in progress. Disembark protocol engaged. End of status report.”
The hissing of escaping gasses and the clanging of thick, metal plugs against the cockpit’s floor filled his ears as his vision faded from Amalgam’s nearly omnidirectional sensor suite and focused hololens back into his own eyes, the dim orange glow of hot dataplugs and the lilac of his own body the only things to illuminate his surroundings before the hatch opened to the light of the outside. Armless stepped out, allowing himself to fall feet-first into the flowers, his fall briefly slowed by the resistance that a final dataplug put up before his weight ripped it out of the socket between where his shoulder blades would be, had he any. It didn’t seem to have properly ejected, even after it had been disconnected. Amalgam said sixty-four percent, but he didn’t feel like that. In fact, he’d not felt this good since he woke up. Rika looked at him, and froze in place, taken aback by what she saw. “You look... Different.” she stated, bewilderment evident in her voice, followed up by a holler of “Vezkig, come out!”
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The tinkerer hovered out of the rover seemingly ready to butt heads, yelling “Wh-what is it now? Don’t th-think I’ll just let y-”
She interrupted by nudging the slate, causing it to turn just far enough that Armless came into his line of sight.
“By the archdrakes, what happened to you in there?” he questioned as his gaze ran from Armless’s faceplate, which seemed to be unchanged, across his chest, and then down his left arm. Vezkig saw that the bare strands of synthetic musculature with modules visibly embedded amongst them and cables winding in and out were gone. The synthetic musculature seemed to have entirely taken over, the exposed cables and modules absorbed further inwards while the outer layers of muscle stiffened to form a sort of flexible exoskeleton. It looked as though ribs were bulging underneath, and the exoskeleton transitioned into a smooth, shiny black “skin” on the lower half of his torso. Beneath the waist, the original armor plates were still in place.
The thing that truly disturbed Vezkig, however, was the state of his precious original, the left arm he had named the “Archdrake’s Aegis”. He hadn’t seen the havoc that Red-eye’s weapon had wreaked on the hand-etched dragonhead sigil that he’d spent weeks painstakingly creating, and now he had no way to learn of this act, as the shoulder-plate had become malformed, as though its constituent livingmetal was growing into a different form. He couldn’t discern what it was growing into, only that the plate now hugged the arm more closely, and the etchings on the remainder of its plating were also gone.
Vezkig was snapped out of his analytical stupor by the sound of Armless’s voice responding to his exclamation.“If the walker’s analytics are correct, general repairs and integration of new parts.”
Vezkig huffed, then nodded. Every fiber of his being was screaming at him to spend the next several days gathering data from Armless’s body and trying to figure out what exactly happened, but they didn’t have the time for that right now. “Figured as much,” he murmured to himself, ready to turn and return to the rover. Armless looked down at Red-eye’s collapsed body, considered his sheer mass, and made Vezkig stop in his tracks with “Hold on, we’ll need your hoverslate to lift him.”
Vez let out a resigned sigh and without any wait or hesitation got off his hoverslate, immediately walking towards Red-eye’s left leg while he took the remote out of the pocket it was in and used it to maneuverthe slate underneath the other leg.
Armless followed suit, and walked over to his head. He placed Apeiron’s grippers around the right arm and tightened them until he was confident it wouldn’t slip out, then wrapped his left arm around Red-eye’s left.
He looked at Vezkig, his diminutive stature entirely uncharacteristic of his confidence in his ability to lift a quarter of the warrior’s body mass, and nodded.
“Alright, lift on three. One, two...”
The hoverslate whined, but rose a solid meter off the ground. Vez struggled and steam vented from his back, but somehow, he managed to lift Red-eye’s leg onto his shoulder, as though he were a lumberjack hauling a tree.
Armless didn’t struggle to lift his share of the weight at all, but he had an easier time with the left side than the right. It wasn’t particularly noticeable, but when he lifted, it felt like Apeiron’s lifting strength was inferior to its counterpart.
Slowly and cautiously, they hauled the unconscious warrior into the rover. With each step, Armless noticed the iridescent crystal that his left forearm seemed to have transformed into was beginning to crumble, pieces falling away. Thud.
They dropped him on the floor of the rover, and the shock of his hand impacting it caused the remainder of the crystalline casing to shatter into pieces. Underneath, his forearm was intact, only… Without scales. A bare, rough skin, what looked to be the beginnings of new scales already beginning to grow, a more pronounced lilac in colour.
Rika wasn’t happy about having him in “her” rover. She made it abundantly clear with her posture and the death-stares she gave Red-eye’s unconscious body while she walked back to the rover, as though that could somehow cause him to not wake up. However, that was where her animosity seemed to end, for now.
“Eh, he’ll be fine. Just needs some stimmix is all,” Vezkig pondered, gesturing at the Word-bearer to “go on, get me a whole pack. He’s out of the walker, might as well set up camp for the night and have something to drink ourselves.”
Armless nodded in agreement, and took a seat in the rover’s open door. He gazed out over the nearly endless flower field that was a desert only days prior, and found it… Calming, in a way. A bottle filled with pink liquid flew at his head from the left - the opposite direction to where both Vez and the Word-bearer were. He caught it, and when he looked over, he saw that Rika had leaned over the driver’s seat to throw it. She let out a grumpy huff, raising her own bottle of green. “We drink,” she rumbled.
He responded in kind, “We drink,” bit off the cap of his bottle, and took a long sip. Sweetness along with the flavor of a dozen different berries filled his mouth as the viscous liquid slid into his stomach, thicker and richer than the stimmix he’d had before. Not watered down.
He had to admit, he hadn’t had anything to drink in days, and though he didn’t feel thirst, he very much could use some stimmix.
“So that’s yellow for you,” the Word-bearer croaked as he handed Vezkig a bottle of faintly yellowish, foggy mixture, while he himself had a bottle of dark blue. He looked over to Armless, ready to ask what colour he preferred, only to stop himself, nod, and take a seat on the floor, next to Red-eye. “...And I see that skull-face already has a drink. ‘Least I don’t have to go rooting around in back again, swear the scars would go pop if I had to climb up there again,” he droned on as he opened up a bottle of green stimmix and began to slowly pour it into Red-eye’s gaping mouth.
For now, they had peace.