A few minutes passed. The three comrades sat, they drank, and they remained silent, content to enjoy the short-lived peace they had been given.
The split mountain loomed in the distance, less than a day’s travel away. Armless took another sip of his drink, thinking to himself, “If what we’ve encountered so far is representative of the Ecclesiarch’s power, what sort of defenses will the canyon have?”
He found no answer within, and so echoed the question out loud. Red-eye thought for a moment, and answered with “You have seen the way we fight. Extrapolate.”
“Head-on battles wherein the opposing forces are blunt instruments?” Armless mused. The answer he received was the sound of the Word-bearer trying to speak up, having woken up. All that came out was “Yghe-” before he hacked up a congealed hunk of blue blood and spat it out the window. His head already being out of the window, he looked around briefly before he froze and went on to hurriedly get out of the passenger seat, his gait becoming somewhat strange as he ran across the rover floor and made strange gestures with his left hand. The panic faded once he clambered into the storage space, and he came to his senses, looking at his hand with a mixture of puzzlement and disappointment, like it was a bad habit he’d failed to break.
He reached down, picking up a bottle of green stimmix, popping it open and taking a long swig of the runny gel within before he finally said what he had failed to previously. “Yes, it’s tradition, has been for as long as I can remember. Every half-century there’s a wave of revolutionary new tacticians trying to push things like precision strikes and using war machines alongside on-foot warriors, but that never works. You either get with the way things are done, or you get dishonored and shunned. Social death sentence for a warrior-caste,” the old man explained, eliciting nods of agreement from Red-eye, who added onto the train of thought with “Part of it has to do with the goal of combat. Direct contests of sheer power and endurance allow our social hierarchy to stay in place, and reduce the lethality of most engagements. The losing side rarely loses more than one sixth of its warriors, and the survivors can be captured by the winners.”
“We don’t have the luxury of honorably measuring our numbers against theirs,” Vezkig piped up, “we’ll hafta… Somehow...”
He trailed off, unable to dredge up the words. The answer came from Armless, a vocalization equally as quiet and foggy as the memory-echo that spurred it on.
“B͜͢ŕ̕e҉̛ak̴̀ ̵th͘r̀ou̧g͟͜h̢́͢ th͜͢e̢i̢͟͞r ̵̢͢d̨́͠ef̧͘͘e҉͢͟n̡s̷̶͜e..̴̀͠.̧ ͞͝W͜ŕ̨ę̴͞a̵̷k h̀́a̴v̴͟o̧c҉ ̶̧b́eh͢҉̵iņ̸d̶́͜ ̸͜͟t̨̛̕h̵͘͢e li̸̴̡n̷̡͞ę͘͜s͟..͜. ̢͜͢F̶̴ind҉́ à͞ ͝w̶e̛͞a̶͟kn͜e̢s̸͠s̡͟͝ ͟a͞ǹ͢d͜ é̡͏xp̛lơi̷t̶̴̕ ̕҉̛i͜͞͏t̛ ͘҉̨u̴ntiļ̨ thȩ̵̛y b̕͝҉re͠ą̧́k͠,” came the distorted noise, the closest thing to a mutter he could manage. All their eyes were now on him, and Vez was the first to speak, asking “Say that again?”
Armless perked up, the question having stopped him from sliding into an introspective stupor. He looked around, his gaze stopping on the source of the question. “We find a weakness in their defense, break through it, and wreak havoc behind their lines. Break their morale and make it seem like we’re invincible. Exploit my being an idol.”
“That’s… Dishonorable, and our only chance,” Red-eye admitted, clearly still struggling somewhat to internalize the concept.
“Their ideals of honor run deep,” Armless thought to himself, turning away so as not to stare.“Perhaps too deep.”
Indeed, the only one that didn’t seem to have any hold-ups with fighting “dishonorably” was the Marksman, considering the way the youngster exploited stealth and crowd control to effectively stall the dishonored Truthseekers. Thinking of the hotblooded builder-caste, Armless realized he hadn’t seen him come down from his perch atop Amalgam’s head. He also realized he had left his mask inside the walker, and with it, his radio, and so he got up and walked over to the rover’s radio unit. He tuned it to the appropriate frequency, and spoke: “Skull-4, come in. I repeat, Skull-4, come in.”
A startled squawk-hiss sounded from from the other side, followed up with “Skull-4, here! Enemies approaching?” accompanied by the sing-song metallic tones of the Marksman’s rifle being readied to fire. Red-eye’s rumbling laugh echoed through the rover, intercut with a comment of “High-strung, far too high-strung.” from the Word-bearer.
Armless couldn’t help but laugh as well, if only briefly and away from the microphone. “We are safe, for now. Come down if you want any stimmix,” Armless continued, and received a simple “Understood.”
Satisfied, he returned to his seat in the rover’s doorway.
A minute and a half later, the Marksman was seated inside the rover and downing his third bottle of stimmix with gusto. This surprised precisely no-one, after they gave it some thought and realized he’d been perched atop the walker’s head for days.
Just as quickly as he’d climbed down, the Marksman slipped away, a half-dozen bottles in tow.
It was as though his coming and going reminded Rika of something, as after a few more minutes passed, the reason for the Word-bearer’s hasty retreat rather audibly approached the rover and got in the driver’s seat. “We should get going. The sun will come up soon,” she rumbled.
The three nodded, and began moving to get out of the doorway - Armless and Red-eye to leave the rover, and Vezkig to return to his seat. Before Armless could get on the way, he felt two more bottles flying in his direction through the rover’s doorway, on a trajectory that perfectly lined up so he could catch them both with one hand.
They were both the pinkish stimmix he had before, superior to the stocks they had taken from the depot. When glanced from them towards Rika, Armless realized they were from the town elder’s stash. She gave him an off-handed thumbs-up, which he reciprocated with a nod and a “Thank you.” before he moved on and began walking back to Amalgam, where he would spend the next half-hour plugging back in and getting the machine to obey him as though it was his own body all over again.
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The others went on to go through their own preparatory rituals for the final stretch of their trek to the canyon.
Red-eye took up a perch atop Amalgam’s shoulder once again, the scales on his left hand already halfway regrown by the time they headed out.
Vezkig spent their remaining time at a standstill the same way he would the rest of the
journey, plugged into his cyberdeck and trying to figure out what by the seven archdrakes any of the data meant.
The Word-bearer continued to sleep and drink in an attempt to recover from his wounds as completely as possible, but aware of how unlikely he was to be combat-capable by the time they arrived.
And Orsha… He walked.
He walked towards the mountain, making sure to avoid the plotted path that the dishonourable abomination and its accomplices would take. He walked faster and for longer than he should’ve been able to, thinking himself fuelled by the righteous indignation that burned inside him, when in reality it was the sliver of singing steel and the un-worldly light that fuelled it that kept him going, slowly eating away at his blessing as it did so. The hours his former comrades had spent resting gave him a signficant head start.
He walked until the canyon-fortress’s gates were in sight, until he could see the pre-fabbed, mostly cuboid buildings that made up the bulk of it, lining the walls, stacked atop each-other and attached to the stone with polymer scaffolding and massive beams, sunk deep into the rock. He walked until he couldn’t walk anymore, and he collapsed amongst the flowers.
Then, a knight in shining armor found him.
One of the Ecclesiarch’s greatest warriors, great plates of shining armor, carved in the form of a human dragon, one of the arch-drakes, encasing him. Only the faintest whine of servomotors betrayed the powered nature of his armor. One of the High Chaplains.
He was saved.
Or so he thought.
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Karzon of the Dishonored Ones awoke from prayer, his whole body wracked with terrible pain. He remembered the haze of being sent to reclaim his honour, and the great machine they were meant to destroy. It made no sense to him, why would they want to destroy a creation of the many-limbed ones? Surely, he and his compatriots were meant to die at the hands of the god-machine.
He stood up, and gazed upon the carnage all around him. He was stood in congealed blood up to his ankles, in a canal deep enough to run a river through it. All at once, the memories came back to him, hit him just as hard as that which had caused all this.
The great machine had swept them away in a vortex of un-worldly light, the light which blinded all senses and burned away the blessings of the arch-drakes. They were smitten, deemed unworthy of their blessings. He was in pain, his body covered in bizzarre, spiraling wounds, and his blessed markings were burnt-out… But he was alive. Where the ecclesiarch’s blessing had once muddled his mind to protect from doubt and fuelled his faith, there now burned a raging light of curiosity, of doubt, of desire for freedom.
He had no more than flashes from his state of prayer to remember the face of who he had to find, the face of the one who had told him to find a certain supply depot, a face that almost perfectly matched a chaplain that was supposed to be dead, struck down at the hands of heretical townspeople.
Karzon felt a cocktail of emotions bubble up inside him, having been unable to release it even once in the years prior, not since his induction into the Truthseeker hierarchy. An earth-shaking roar consumed his everything, and the light which was now burning within him was fanned into a flame. The wounds which the Distortion Cannon’s onslaught had inflicted upon him filled with a lilac glow, spreading out from his chest and down his limbs. He began to bleed exotic particles alongside the blue ichor of life that fuelled him, and they began to whip around his limbs like violent cyclones, ripping away all that which was left of his past, the burnt-out scales that once made up his blessed markings. A spherical, iridescent gemstone emerged from his forehead, as if a third eye.
His roar died down into a rumble, and then was snuffed out as he released all the rage and sorrow and fear that had pent up within him over the course of years. He felt… A desire to awaken his brethren. All it would take was a nudge, a spark to light their fire, he thought. And so, Karzon the Liberated waded through the blood and dirt and bone, summoning up his fire to set alight those who had been sent to die alongside him. Those who had not survived the trial, he gathered at the edge of the canal, so that they could be given the traditional burial of honored warriors, wherein the leader of a battle-band consumed the largest scale from their head before the body would be buried underneath rainbloom flowers.
Mere hours after their subject of prayer had left them, those who had once been the Dishonored Ones were gone, for they had gotten up and walked away, trailing blood and unstable void energy wherever they would tread.
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Left. Right. Left. Right.
A steady pace. The walker moved smoothly, with no resistance. Armless could feel the stimmix coursing through him and aiding the self-repair process. It felt as though he was gaining greater clarity of mind the further the process progressed, and it made perfect sense - his body had suffered severe damage in the crash. Of course his mental faculties would’ve been impaired the same way his physical ones were.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Even blacktech seemed to obey more readily, now that he was mostly in control of his own actions in the first place. “Amalgam, self-repair status report. Secondary cognition modules,” he commanded.
The walker’s voice rumbled in his head as before, only it sounded smoother. Less stilted. Like his mind had an easier time interpreting and dumbing down the data into language. “Secondary cognition modules six through nine irreparable. Modules one through five at eighty-six percent cognitive capacity.”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The mouth of the canyon-fortress was in sight, now. The pre-fabbed buildings, stacked atop each other and hanging from the canyon walls. The uneven walls, a little taller than Amalgam, built from what looked to be tremendous plates of armor that were at some point cut apart and welded back together. He thought they’d have been assailed by more Truthseekers well before they could reach the gate, but it seemed Red-eye’s and the Word-bearer’s experiences didn’t betray them. The Truthseekers truly would allow them to reach the main gate, fully expecting them to attempt a formal siege the way the Word-bearer’s force did. This was only further confirmed by the innumerable guns and shining suits of armor that bristled over the walls, far too numerous to be the usual guards.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
In preparation for the assault, which would begin immediately when they got in range, both Red-eye and the Marksman made the choice to trail Amalgam on-foot, using the rainbloom overgrowth for cover, as the flowers had grown to a solid meter in height. Another day or two until their reproductive cycle was complete and the flowers would die, if the Word-bearer was correct. Red-eye insisted it would be at least two, if not three days.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
“Nothing left to do but walk,” he thought.
Something in the back of his head made him dredge up a specific sound-file fragment. It was a single sentence, spoken by a calm, male voice. An old voice. “Into the mouth of hell we march,” the nameless sage spoke in his mind.