Armless felt anger rise. Disbelief. Guilt. Grief. The world slowed to an utter crawl, yet he felt a tremendous pressure and heat rise within his chest. What little self-control he could muster, he channeled towards using the wall behind him as a jumping-off point to rocket himself towards Nesgon, whilst charging his left arm with as much void energy as he could in that short span of time. Lilac sparks crackled across its bandage-covered plating, partially searing it away.
The stone cracked under the force. A cloud of sand was kicked up in his flight path. The Supreme Chaplain grabbed at him, but he was faster. He thrust his arm into the dent of Nesgon’s chestplate, hoping it would go through. The plating caved under the force of his entire bodyweight. He saw milky-white synthfiber underneath. The plating was relatively thin, not the unassailable slabs that he’d seen when Vezkig did maintenance on the suit. The old man had sabotaged his own armor before the fight. He felt the fingers of his left arm ripping into the gap between the old dragon’s organic and synthetic halves, pushing all the way through due to his sheer velocity. He instinctively grabbed what felt like a thick enough tube, and let loose the torrent of unworldly light through his arm.
The pulse traveled all throughout the elder’s body, burning his flesh and blessing equally, tongues of lilac lightning arcing around the wound, simultaneously supercharging and damaging his cybernetics. The old dragon convulsed, his right hand melted open and spewed plasma into the sand. He began screaming, white light flashing from within his helmet as the fire of the great empty expunged the last remains of a power that once moved mountains and commanded armies from his broken body, and took the Ecclesiarch’s grasp over his mind with it. Armless stopped when the light died down and pulled his hand from Nesgon’s chest, viscous blue dripping from his fingers. The old man fell to all fours, pulling off his helmet and puking blue blood onto the sand. Armless gazed up to meet the Ecclesiarch’s stunned gaze.
“Get him out of the pit,” he growled.
Appalled gasps and enraged hollering echoed through the audience again, but this time the Ecclesiarch did nothing to stop. If anything, he mentally stoked the flame, unable to strike out against Armless personally until he got into the pit.
Compelled by rage over the old dragon’s defeat and possible death, the High Chaplains broke from their positions and ran to the edge of the pit, glaring down at Armless, wishing they could just riddle him with bullets then and there. But they couldn’t. He stepped away, returning to his side of the pit, seething with a cold, building rage, fighting to keep his own emotions in check.
One jumped into the pit and began helping Nesgon stand up, supporting him on his shoulder, whilst the other one waited at the top of the ladder to pull him up. As Nesgon struggled to his feet, blood still running down his chin, the elder’s gaze briefly crossed his. He struggled up the ladder for a solid twenty seconds, and the High Chaplains had to hold him up or he’d collapse under his own weight. Somehow, the fact Nesgon had survived the ordeal made the Ecclesiarch even more indignant, as though Armless had insulted the old dragon’s honor by not finishing him off.
“Very well, filth. I will end this myself,” the noble spat. He smacked the thigh-plate of his right leg, and it split open, a substantial guarded handle popping out. The guard looked to be attached somewhat loosely, as if it was meant to move. Sing-song tones resounded when he pulled the livingmetal blade from its sheath. It was a relatively short chunk of solid livingmetal, grown into the shape of a curved cleaver and covered in etched nonsense-words from guard to tip. Its spine was thick and bulky, and there was a rectangular box near the handle. A salvaged graviton accelerator, mounted to a blade. The muzzle was situated behind the weapon’s tip, ensuring it could still he used to stab.
The Ecclesiarch was sure Armless had severely damaged himself and spent all his void energy crippling Nesgon, that was why he wasn’t moving. Yes, that was the reason they’d come here in the first place. To weaken his forces so the other heretics could lead a greater offensive against the canyon-town later on.
With a flourish of his blade, the noble leapt into the pit, mockingly pointing it at Armless. He scoffed at Armless’s stone-still, straight-backed stance. The words the Ecclesiarch spoke, he did with the vitriol of an annoyed child whose favorite toy had been broken. “You are a living heresy, a travesty against the legacy of man. I now see why the will of mankind has led you here. It was so I may erase you and yours from this world, you treacherous serpent!”
He looked immensely satisfied that he could bad-mouth what he perceived to be no more than a particularly well-made automaton. Armless couldn’t hold it in anymore. He was holding onto restraint with broken fingertips, and the Ecclesiarch had just stomped on his hand. His vision blurred, filled with lilac, then with magenta. Every fibre of his being, every fragmentary memory and suppressed emotion bubbled up in his throat. He had no tear canals to cry with, and so, the more he slipped, the more exotic particles escaped through his eye sockets. At first, all this meant his eye-lights glowed a little brighter, became a little bigger...
The Ecclesiarch lunged at him, mirroring how the way he ended the fight against Nesgon, his left arm behind his back. Armless had no more reason to hide his identity, no reason to avoid killing. He directed power towards the thrusters on his legs. A shift in his posture, still concealed by his clothing, to move out of the way of the first strike. He ducked under a left-handed grab and dodged a downward swing by firing the thrusters on his calves, kicking sand into the Ecclesiarch’s face as he passed under his armpit. The many layers of fabric he had wrapped around his shins fell to the ground, burnt to smithereens. He spun around and delivered an immensely forceful roundhouse kick to the lizard’s back, his shin-blade wedging itself into the armor. Armless decoupled the segment, firing his thrusters downward with his legs out in front of him as he fell to throw himself across the arena and create some distance.
The Ecclesiarch turned and shot Vezkig a glare, his sneer audible in his voice. “Is this the best you can do? Is this your strongest machine?!” he mocked. The noble lowered himself into a well-practiced low stance, his left arm outstretched and his right above his head. “Shield!” he proclaimed, and the ornament on his left gauntlet snapped open, expanding into a segmented heater shield. It sand as it formed. More livingmetal.
Armless felt the Ecclesiarch’s filthy blessing trying to grab at his mind again, only arousing yet greater spite and anger at the theocrat. The monotone voice of his machine-self echoed in his head.
“Alert: Cognitive pressure at unsafe levels.”
“Emotional suppression module: At risk.”
“Cognitive filtration module: At risk.”
“Emotional suppression priority: High.”
“Attempting emotional suppre-”
It cut off, and went silent for a few moments. When the voice came back, its monotone sounded just as angry and sorrowful as Armless felt.
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“Error: The emotional suppression module has been destroyed.”
“Physical limiter override: Active.”
“Power output limiter override: Active.”
He felt fury rise. Apeiron woke up in response to his emergency limiter overrides, its unfettered power output flooding his system. He felt his musculature bulging and straining against the plating still on his lower body. The pressure in his power distribution system was so great, his voicebox burst when he tried to speak. His voice resounded like a rugged synthesizer run through a distortion pedal, and he exhaled a magenta-colored miasma when he opened his mouth.
“You… How dare you claim you know humans?! I’ve forgotten more than you will ever remember. I feel homesick for a world I am not even sure exists!
With each word, more exotic particles vented from his mouth and eye sockets. With each word, the crack in his emotional dam became wider, more anger and sorrow and disgust spilled forth. He pushed his self-repair system to fix his voicebox, incorporating a direct void energy vent into the mechanism so it wouldn’t break again. The Ecclesiarch lunged once again, cackling into his helmet, his armor’s musculature blasting him forward at a velocity that easily equaled the fastest reaction speed Armless had exhibited up until this point.
“Apeiron, ready firing mode. Unstable. Low-power. Melee. Concussive.”
The gun’s female voice sang in his head like an angelic choir, “Firing mode recognized: Blast Impact. Ready to fire.”
Straps strained. Knots came undone. Fabric ripped. Shreds flew into the air. A tremendous mass swung from Armless’s back. Metal clashed with metal. The impact sent a cloud of sand flying. A flash of magenta flashed through it. Armless had used Apeiron to block the strike, its grippers crossed in front of the muzzle. He opened the grippers. A high-pitched howl echoed for a split-second as a shotgun-burst of crystal shrapnel, void energy, and concussive force exploded from the weapon. Perfectly synchronized to the opening of its grippers, the force helped push them open even more forcefully, knocking the Ecclesiarch’s weapon back. The noble shielded the seam between his helmet and chestplate using his left arm, used the momentum imparted to point his blade at Armless’s head, and squeezed the guard like a trigger.
Clang.
A sonic crack.
A quill of livingmetal penetrated Armless’s mask and shallowly embedded itself in his forehead, failing to detonate. Cracks spread across the mask’s surface. It split apart, and fell to the ground. The Ecclesiarch was ready to take a swing at the human’s neck, but the sight of Armless’s face in its entirety made the lizard hesitate only for a split-second, but that was more than enough time.
The remains of Armless’s mental dam washed away in a deluge of screaming, weeping fury.
The Ecclesiarch swung his blade. Armless caught it again, trapped it with Apeiron’s grippers. He spoke again, and the tremendous pressure within him flowed freely through his partially-repaired voicebox. With each word spoken, a gust of raw, unstable void energy burst from his mouth, like fire from the maw of a dragon. With each word spoken, more particles spilled from his eye sockets, floating up over his head and forming into bent-back horns. As his breath washed over the Ecclesiarch’s armor, the noble somehow didn’t recoil, didn’t burn.
“You are a tyrant, a sycophantic narcissist, unfit to lead, drunk on power you stole or inherited! Your rule ends here, filthy pretender!”
Armless willed his remaining plating to decouple all at once and let go of any restraint he had left. The violent energy flowing within him caused the plating to explode off him like oversized shrapnel, battering the Ecclesiarch with enough force to make him step back and tearing off the remainder of Armless’s disguise. His other shin-blade got stuck in the lizard’s chest-plate and effectively stapled a mass of fabric to him, forcing him to rip it out and toss it aside. The blast was accompanied by a concussive blast from Apeiron, which threw the Ecclesiarch’s arm backwards violently enough that his armor’s musculature struggled to cope, joint servos whining as the lizard recovered his stance.
The carapace over Armless’s upper body was even more pronounced, and the surge he’d put through his left arm had galvanized its plating into a new shape. The shoulder-plate had reformed into a dragon skull that nearly perfectly mirrored the skull on Nesgon’s right arm. An infernal glow suffused the gaps of his anatomy and the eyes of the skull on his left shoulder.
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Like a cornered animal, the Ecclesiarch chose fight over flight. His technique became even more aggressive, he began moving more erratically. Armless met him with equally overwhelming violence, grabbing at the seams in his armor with both his left hand and Apeiron’s grippers, delivering strikes and kicks forceful enough to blast sand out of the pit. The irradiated sand contaminated those in the audience enough to loosen the Ecclesiarch’s grip on their minds, just enough that the true allegiances of the strong-willed came through in the form of shouts and cheers. They were only one eighth of the entire audience, and most of them were Thinkers, but Armless could pick out the hope and desire for freedom in their voices. He could clearly hear Auntie calling out, he voice hoarse, he caught glimpses of her straining to overpower the jeers and shouts of her indoctrinated neighbors. A hopeful, strained smile even crossed Nesgon’s face, whilst. These people wanted more than just a stranger from out of town, come to strike down a warlord for his crimes. They wanted a hero.
Slash after slash, shot after shot, block after block, Armless equaled and outpaced the Ecclesiarch. Even if his armor was insulated against void energy, it still seeped through the holes Armless made, through the tiniest gap. When the Ecclesiarch put his entire body into a diagonally downward swing in an attempt to break his guard, he with his left hand. He exploited its Herculean grip strength to stop the blade before its edge could touch the inside of the palm. At the same time, he finally managed to get a clean shot on the Ecclesiarch’s upper arm, and he clamped Apeiron’s grippers around it with an unflinching mechanical strength, even as the lizard struck the weapon’s hull and tried to smash its power source with his shield.
The Ecclesiarch was the ruler, and he was the challenger. To death or incapacitation. No less.
“Apeiron, switch firing mode: Pilebunker.”
“Ready to fire,” it echoed in his head. A glow rose in the barrel as the stake formed. The lizard appeared to understand the gravity of the situation, or perhaps he was simply bargaining. “What do you want?! Are you here to test my faith? Deliver divine punishment? Penance, is that what you want?!” he screamed through his helmet, and for the first time, the larger-than-life mask slipped away completely.
“Riches? Worship? Your people’s technology?! Anything! I am the inheritor of a noble line, anything this world has to offer I can give you!” the tyrant yelled and begged.
The gun whined and fired. The stake drilled through his arm with a horrible screeching noise of crystal on metal, and the Ecclesiarch screamed. His blessing burned, and the pain paralyzed him.
“They are not yours to parade around as puppets. The right to self-determination, to free will, is not yours to revoke on a whim.”
Even facing his possible death, the noble’s ego came through. “There are those who rule and those who are ruled, so it has been and always will be! God or devil, whatever you may be, you can never go against the laws of nature!” he screamed, indignation and arrogance sounding through the pleading.
Armless willed his gun to let go of the stake, leaving it behind in the Ecclesiarch’s limp left arm as he let go and slammed Apeiron against the lizard’s stomach, grippers struggling as they dug into plating, its muzzle positioned over the same hole his shin-blade had made earlier.
He stared into the helmet, into the Ecclesiarch’s eyes.
“Humans have stood in defiance of nature for millennia. Whilst this body of mine moves and the fire in me burns, there is no tyranny that will stand. I am man, and I spit upon nature’s cruel law.”
“Apeiron, switch firing mode. High-power. Short-range. Single pulse,” he commanded, and Apeiron obeyed.
The gun whined. A torrential pulse of destructive void energy erupted from it, ripping through meat and bone and sinew, burning body and blessing as it went, frying the Ecclesiarch in his armor. The noble’s eyes glazed over, and he went limp.
A wave of silence swept through the hall the very moment he did.