“It tracked every shot fired and associated them with the vitals trackers of my subordinated. Every comrade slain was counted, and with each milestone, the high command added more etchings and inlays to that instrument of fratricide. I...”
The trembling stopped, and his voice returned back to a quiet rasp.
“I was the only one to ever run out of space for more etchings. She,” he weakly gestured to Rika, “was right to call me Gilded Butcher.”
Nesgon raised and examined his gauntleted hands. Tilting his head made the blood run down his chin and drip onto his palms. He blinked a few times at the sight before he realized it was real, rather than his own guilt haunting him, then put them back down. He was clearly shaken, but confessing his guilt and self-loathing seemed to have helped ease the pain, if only slightly.
“The things I’ve done can never be forgiven,” he said, “and I will remain chained by my so-called achievements until the end of my days.”
A crooked smile twisted his features. “At least it will come soon. I will not live to see punishment for aiding you.”
“You want to kill yourself? An elder? Good luck,” Rika scoffed. A chuckle rumbled from Nesgon’s throat. “I need not do such a thing,” he said, then took a deep breath, looking over the others before he spoke again. “Please, if you wouldn’t mind. I will need help with this,” he requested. Vezkig was the first to respond, having already deducted that he was most likely going to remove his armor. He got up, unceremoniously walked across the table, and towards the chair. He looked up at Nesgon, awaiting further instruction or clues as to what it was that his help was needed with.
Nesgon simply nodded at him and spoke, “Casement, off.”
A series of hissing and clicking noises there resounded, the plates of his armor loosening and splitting apart at barely-visible seams, but staying put around him. The pauldrons went first, falling to the ground with a loud thud and exposing the backup joint servo underneath, bleached synthfiber musculature winding around and under it. Next came the armor on his arms and his legs, and the chestplate. He beckoned Vezkig, gesturing at the top of his chestplate. “Pull it off. The suit should swing open,” he said.
Vezkig gave a nod, and jumped up onto Nesgon’s lap. Even from there, he just barely managed to reach the top of the dragon’s chestplate, his body stretching beyond its natural shape to do so. Nesgon, having noticed this, let out a pained grunt as he leaned forward through his own strength to make it a little easier for the diminutive engineer.
When Vezkig finally had a good grip on the plate, he dug his feet into Nesgon’s thigh-plates and pulled. He pulled with all the strength his body could muster, and when that wasn’t enough, he called on the explosively potent strength of his cybernetics. Gouts of steam venting out of his back and soaking his overalls, he pulled and pulled. The Marksman and Armless both began moving to walk over and help, but the mechanism finally gave with a loud clank.
The sudden lack of resistance caused Vezkig to be thrown back, landing on his rear on the ground in front of Nesgon. As he looked up, he could only see the entire front of Nesgon’s armor opening towards him, and in his peripheral vision, he saw Rika going wide-eyed, only barely concealing her astonishment at what the old man’s armour had concealed up until now. He scrambled to get back up on the sofa so he could see, and what he was was equal parts fascinating and horrifying.
His sentiment was shared by the Word-bearer and the Marksman, whereas Armless felt… Pity. Nesgon’s armor folded out and exposed the layer of milky-white synthfiber musculature and exoskeletal structures underneath, which resembled a bulging ribcage made from overlapping plates, whose sternum connected to additional skeletal structures over the stomach. The synthfiber was anchored to it at distinct points, which released and caused the bundles to snap into “root” slots on other parts of the exoskeleton. The exoskeleton’s “ribs” proceeded to unlock from the central structure, snapping open. The sternum then proceeded to fold forward much like the chestplate that it supported, exposing what lay underneath. After it, the armor covering his arms split open entirely, exposing his arms as well.
Under the armor, he was… Visibly more machine than man.
The only remaining part of his original body seemed to be his upper left torso, as though he’d been bisected from just above the right shoulder to just above the left leg.
Armless saw thick cables and tubes winding in and out of his body, bulging out under his scales near the join, a sickly white light glowing faintly from within the split with each of his breaths. His cybernetics were covered in beautifully carved plating which strongly resembled the plating of the Armless’ own left arm, but inlays and plating couldn’t fool his eyes, and they couldn’t fool Vezkig’s either.
The engineer’s left eye twitched at the sight of Nesgon’s right arm, and Armless understood why. It looked like a perfect match for his left arm. It had the same stylings, the same type of plating, the same quality construction that completely clashed with the rest of Nesgon’s cybernetics. It was humanlike, spindly and thin in comparison to the rest of the old man’s body. It had a much more compact shoulder plate, and its forearm plating was carved into the shape of a dragon head, with the hand coming out of the dragon’s mouth. Despite this, it fit perfectly into its place within the exoskeleton, which had clearly been modified for this purpose with extra padding and synthfiber anchor points.
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A crooked, pained grin split the old dragon’s face once more as he shot Rika a sideways glance. “I should’ve died decades ago,” he said, his markings flickering with light as he channeled his blessing to supplement his own waning voice. “But they rebuilt me, even with my lazarus organ gone. They “fixed” me with salvaged blacktech from that crashed voidship down there,” he said, pointing his thumb backwards, in the direction of the tunnel’s lowest point, “without fully understanding how it all worked together, or what the effects would be on my body.”
He looked into Armless’ eye-lights, his own eyes empty and tired. “Once, I could move mountains with my voice. Now I can barely kick up some sand, and even that takes a toll. I am certain that the fading of my blessing heralds my impending death,” he said, his gaze moving to Vezkig. “And once I keel over, you’ll get this back,” he said, raising his right arm.
The grin faded from his face, and he lowered his hand. “Now, beyond answering your questions, I do have a reason for having met you here. The one you know as the Ecclesiarch is unaware of my state, and believes that I am at the peak of my strength. We can use this to turn tradition against him. You,” he pointed at Armless, “will be decried as a homunculus, a fake messiah. I will challenge you to an honorable duel under the false pretense of simply disposing of you and further cementing the Ecclesiarch’s position. He will either concede, or be dishonored.”
Armless diverted a small amount of void energy to his cognitive modules, allowing him to mull over what was said within the span of a few seconds. The brightening of his eye-lights and the expulsion of exotic particles would unsettle, but that wasn’t of concern for the time being. It seemed to him that Nesgon sought death in battle as a means of exonerating himself from his past. Were he anyone else, Armless might’ve judged him for it, but he wasn’t in the position to do so. “He might live, if I just burn out the remainder of his blessing,” he thought. For the time being, however, all he could do was give the old man a glimmer of hope. He nodded, simply stating “I think I can fulfill what you ask of me.”
He expected Rika to explode, or at least say something, but she didn’t. She just stood there, staring. Like she was disappointed that Nesgon hadn’t lived up to the monstrous image of him she’d built within her own mind. Armless continued with “However, what do we do until then? You said the Ecclesiarch would return in two to three days, and I doubt I could walk the streets as I am.”
The response he received was a nod of agreement, followed by “That is true. You may use my printer to fashion yourself whatever disguise you might need.”
Armless got up, walked over to the 3D-printer, and reached for its control panel. It only took a moment to respond to his mental command, the bench flickering to life. A row of old hololenses that had been attached at the back also came alive, projecting a mosaic screen much like Vezkig’s own cyberdeck.
“In the meantime, may I ask for aid once more? The musculature of my suit needs replacing, and I can’t do it in my state,” he said, looking towards Vezkig once again. The engineer sprung into action, more than happy to do work on a piece of archeotech such as this. Armless knew he’d need the fibers that were hung above the printer, and so he reached up to grab a handful before Vez even reached him to ask for them, already holding out his hand by the time the lizard would’ve asked for them. Afterwards, he reached for one of the dataplugs, plugged it into one of the printer’s exposed dataports, and the other end into a port on the back of his neck. It earned him a strange look from the old dragon, but it didn’t seem to phase his companions in the slightest. The printer’s software was mostly intact, and its VI chimed in his head with a soft feminine voice. “Administrator detected. Access granted,” it said. Its design storage was unfortunately corrupted, and only contained a small number of designs. Fortunately, one of these designs was polymer fabric, which Armless could sculpt into workable clothing using the printer’s integrated software. Within minutes, he was orchestrating the printer’s creation of a large poncho, outside sensation dulled by his focus on the task.
Meanwhile, Vezkig had begun unceremoniously ripping the old synthfiber bundles from their anchor points and replacing them with “new” grayish ones, white strands quickly piling up next to him. Nesgon looked to the Word-bearer, the Marksman, and even gave Rika a sideways glance. “What of you? You must be thirsty from the journey. Hungry, perhaps?” he questioned, nodding his head towards the fridge and stimmix synthesizer behind him.
The Word-bearer eagerly took up his offer, jumping off the sofa and walking over to the fridge. When he reached it, he realized he couldn’t reach the handle, and let out a frustrated huff. “Young one, come here,” he told the Marksman. He didn’t move, and the frog-man huffed again, “please.”
Satisfied, the lanky builder-caste walked over and opened the fridge, only to freeze in place at the sight of the cornucopia within. Various alien meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, bottles of preserved high-grade stimmix. The Marksman reached in and grabbed a plate with a fish, which resembled some sort of deep-sea prey animal, covered in luminescent markings, its organs visible through its transparent flesh. The Word-bearer did the same, reaching for what looked to be a high-quality cut of dark purple meat.
They hesitated, if briefly, before closing the fridge and returning to the sofa. For the next half-hour, they ate and they drank. Vezkig opted for some sort of violently sweet and fruity greenish paste once he was done working on Nesgon’s suit, and even Rika partook of the purple meat. They didn’t seem to have any reservations to eating food that had been cooked hours before and preserved in a fridge, which Armless found strange.
Then again, he wasn’t exactly the norm here. If he was, he wouldn’t have been printing what amounted to a large, hooded cape to hide his features.