“Feel free to use the fast lift, one of the mercs loyal neither to the Ecclesiarch nor to us tripped the trap so it should be safe. Don’t mind the smell,” the old man rasped as the secret door was sliding open. Armless acknowledged with a simple thumbs-up before crossing the precipice.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

“We’ll take a detour at the armory, I need to fix my gun,” Red-eye said. “If that’s alright with you, I mean.”

Armless hadn’t been made aware of an armory, but he supposed it only made sense for such a place to be far underground. He nodded as they walked through the labyrinthine tunnels. Red-eye seemed to know them by heart, and Armless had built a rudimentary spatial map he could call on for pathfinding.

“Yeah. My mask needs fixing,” he agreed.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

“Mind if I look ya over once we’re down there? The printer will take a few minutes to fix you up a new mask anyway,” Vezkig piped up.

“I don’t see why not.”

Left. Right. Left. Right.

When they reached and boarded the lift, the aftermath of Nesgon’s trap was nowhere to be seen… Until they’d already been descending for a solid minute. They passed one floor where the top half of a truthseeker in full casement lay, the plating bent and deformed in a way that made clear what had happened to him. Bisected by the lift while he was trying to get off.

They didn’t pay it much mind, or rather, they couldn’t pay it much mind due to the lift’s velocity.

The lift came to an abrupt stop at the bottom, sudden enough for Vezkig to stumble to his knees. Armless gestured for Red-eye to take the lead, as he didn’t know the way to the armory.

Vezkig’s gaze kept flitting across his body, from the faint glow between individual muscle groups to the hardened carapace over his torso, and especially both his arms. He especially took interest in the shape of his left arm’s dragon-skull pauldron.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The gunman led them to a side tunnel on the right of the greater cavern, quite close to the cargo lift. Strangely enough, the Truthseekers that had taken up guard posts around the tunnel earlier were nowhere to be seen. “Guess they really left,” Armless thought.

The tunnel was well-lit, relatively short, and well maintained. At the end, there was a high-security door in a surprisingly good state, still mounted in a chunk of wall that had itself been anchored into the surrounding stone. At least the Truthseekers knew how to secure their armory.

Red-eye raised a hand to the hololens, and it buzzed an angry tone at him. An annoyed rumble of “Expired security ID.”

“Now what?” Vezkig questioned. “Wait, Armless. Don’t you have-”

“-Administrator privileges, yes. I’ll see if it works,” he responded, and walked up to the door. The tunnel was easily spacious enough for three Warriors to fit shoulder to shoulder, let alone a tall human with a big gun.

He simply stood before the hololens and directed a mental command to open the door towards it. It came alive, scanned him, and chimed “Skull-plate ID: Not found. Administrator privileges detected. Forming temporary ID… Error: System connection not found. Welcome, anonymous.” in a robotic, female voice. The thunking sound of deadbolts releasing began drumming from the other side, and they waited.

Red-eye raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Didn’t sound like that last time. Is that what you hear in your head?” he questioned, jokingly.

“The gun sounds a little like that,” the human admitted, and received a furrowed brow and “Oh.” in return.

“Do different machines have different voices?” Vezkig asked curiously.

“Yes. The walker’s is deep, mechanical and rumbling. The gun is distinctly female, smooth, and almost natural. More natural than mine, really.”

“Interesting… Perhaps something to do with the machine-intelligences in blacktech…”

“Virtual Intelligences.”

“What?”

“That’s what they’re called. At least that’s what I remember them being called.”

“Huh. Interestin’.”

For another minute or so, they waited for the tremendous slab of metal to unlock and move out of the way, the motors whining in a pitch so high they clearly couldn’t move it. And yet, it moved, and it even had a functional holoshroud.

When they crossed the precipice, it became clear why - the Truthseekers had a huge motor on the ground to the left of the door, hooked up to a mechanism that moved the whole thing. “Talk about wasteland engineering,” Armless muttered as he looked the abomination over.

His gaze swept rightward and across the rest of the armory, and something inside him almost felt at home. To call the room large was an understatement, it was suited to contain the equipment for a small army, a couple hundred men at the least. Servo-suits on racks entirely covered one wall, a few full casement exosuits were stood off to the side. Most of the room was rows and rows of lockers, some open, some closed, all far too well-made to be of lizardman make. Salvaged from the wreck, no doubt.

Red-eye seemed to have noticed, as he chimed in with a smile. “I could recognize that twinkle in the eye anywhere. Maybe you were a soldier, before all this,” he said.

Vezkig was far more enamored with what he saw, however, darting through the armory like a kid in a candy shop, muttering about how he could build at least two full-scale battle walkers just with what was there.

There was a row of 3D-printers along the wall to the right of the door, and Armless immediately walked over to the nearest one when it came within sight. Red-eye followed suit, but he skipped the one right next to Armless. It did look particularly beat up.

He roused the printer to life with a thought, while Red-eye swiped his hand over the hololens of his. It chimed, and came alive. “No sec ID, at least the chip still works,” he muttered, half-heartedly tapping away at the old-world style QWERTY keyboard that had been rigged up over the original console, plugged in through a single cable. An amalgamated screen flashed to life above Red-eye’s printer, and he grumbled in contemplation as his fingers performed an elaborate dance across the archaic keyboard to goad the arcane machine into printing the desired revolver parts.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“You printed the frame?” Armless queried as he watched his printer slowly forming the scaffold for a mask out of polymers.

“Found an old revolver in the depot, modified it with some parts I dug out of the supply crates. Saved some crystallized scales to use as ammo,” the gunman explained. He reached into the pocket of his duster and pulled out a handful of iridescent crystal fragments, holding them out for Armless to see before he put them in a neat little pile atop the printer.

“Funny how some things just click into place and you get it,” he remarked, and allowed silence to fall over their work. The only sounds to keep them company were Vezkig’s muttering, his fiddling with the gear in the armory, the occasional click-clack of mechanical keys, and printer noises.

He piped up again after a few minutes.

“They’ll come after us, you know. His clan. Maybe not tomorrow, or next week, next month, or even next year, but one day we’ll build too tall. Live too easily for their liking. And they’ll use his death to justify wiping us out.”

Armless thought as he continued to watch the printer work, tiny drops of molten polymer flying from the machine and burning up. He echoed a phrase he had said time and time again.

“Then they’ll burn.”

“Sure, maybe they will. How many? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand, maybe? The Truthseekers were a spoiled noble’s pet cult, but his clan… They fought in the war, the same one Nesgon did, on the same side as he did. Even if you can fight for a hundred men’s worth, you can’t beat them alone. Not even with the walker’s destructive power,” he rambled on, laboriously removing the deformed parts out of his gun whilst their replacements were being printed.

Armless looked up from the printer. An infernal light flashed in his eyes. The echoes of a man who has fought things far worse than an army of mortal men, and whose body still remembered even though his mind had forgotten.

“Then it’s a good thing there’s a whole army of walkers locked away down here, isn’t it?”

“There is?” Red-eye asked quizzically.

“There is?!” Vezkig’s voice screeched from within one of the rows of lockers.

“The Word-bearer said the wreck spits out walkers every once in a while, and the working ones get locked away in a vault.”

“...We always thought that was code speak for scrapping or sending them off to the clan. If the “Vault of Truth” is an actual vault somewhere down here, that would certainly change some things. Still, there can’t be enough walkers for everyone, and many don’t have what it takes to pilot one even with machine assistance.”

“We put them in power armor, give them guns. A full armory is useless when your soldiers have no guns to fight with.”

“Power armor?”

“Servo-suits, full casements, whatever you call them. No reason to have them sitting around if we have able men wearing scraps.”

“But one must earn-” Red-eye recited, but stopped himself midway through the sentence. “Sorry. I’m still getting used to functioning outside the old ways,” he muttered apologetically.

“Then let’s say we have the entire population of Canyontown to work with, all of them in servo-suits or better, all of them fully armed and willing to fight. A solid three thousand on-foot fighters, plus let’s say… A hundred walkers, each half as capable as yours. Then what? The clan still has the superior force.”

“I’ve noticed your people are fond of using armed forces as blunt-force instruments in a fair fight of skill, power, and endurance. Like a duel, just scaled up.”

“Mhrrm. Always been that way. Part of the reason is to minimize casualties so that normal life can continue as quickly as possible after the victors are decided.”

Armless diverted a small pulse of energy to his combat processors, just enough to get them going above baseline for a little bit. Just enough to quickly come up with a few strategies. To him, doing this was effectively the same thing as focusing on a subject for a normal human.

Echoes of memory floated to the surface of his mind. Tactics and stratagems from ages long past, stripped of context and color like a faded polaroid.

“In that case, we could just… Not fight them head-on? We could exploit the town as a home turf advantage, rig up traps, set up ambushes, even pretend to enter into a direct battle only to encircle the enemy forces and annihilate them in a single stroke.”

Red-eye simply rumbled in agreement as he ruminated on the options proposed. One more option came to mind.

“If worst comes to worst, we could evacuate our remaining allies down here, lure the enemy into the canyon, and use explosives to collapse it on top of them.”

Confusion flashed across Red-eye’s face. He looked up from the printer. “What would that achieve? They would’ve already taken the town, why not just leave and try to retake it later?”

“We wouldn’t be able to build up a large enough force quickly enough to retake the town before they fortify it. Better to destroy them along with it and then rebuild atop the ruins.”

Vezkig finally popped out from among the rows and rows of lockers, carrying a heavily ornamented slug-thrower pistol and wearing a helmet that was just barely too large for him. “So it’s true. Humans really don’t stop fightin’ if they’ve got a good reason to,” he remarked, an excitable twitchiness to his steps.

“...I suppose so, yes.” Armless admitted. The top half of the mask was done, and he removed it from the printer so it could more easily work on the lower half. The lower piece was much less bulky, and so took less time. It was little more than a covering for his jaw. He slid the radio module into the mask, and put it on. As expected, it clicked into place perfectly.

“Ready?” he asked, turning to Red-eye. The gunman looked up, held up the half-gutted remnants of his gun, and shook his head.

It took another half-hour for him to finish repairing his gun. Vezkig passed the time by printing extra ammo rings whose designs he’d copied by eye, and loading them with the crystal fragments Red-eye had left atop the printer.

When presented with them, Red-eye rumbled a thank-you and slid them onto his right wrist like bracelets.

----------------------------------------

They left the armory only slightly less full than it was when they entered, and made their way through the greater tunnel to the airlock at the bottom. Amalgam was still standing there, imposing as ever, looming over them as they passed. It hailed Armless with a simple acknowledging ping. The rover was still there as well, and they decided to take half a dozen bottles of stimmix just in case they would need to stay down there for an extended period of time.

The airlock was massive, easily large enough for Amalgam in its entirety to pass through, and clearly opened sideways considering the split down its middle. He wondered where the hololens was, and his answer was a scanning pulse blasted from both sides of the frame. A booming voice, even deeper than Amalgam’s but less robotic, echoed through the tunnel.

“Skull-plate ID: Not found. Administrator privileges detected. Forming temporary ID… Secondary identifier found… Shell model: Custom. Set current shell as System ID?” it rumbled, its sensors poking and prodding at Armless’s mind like a curious child. It felt different from the machines he’d connected to in the past. It was a little like Apeiron, only even less mechanical.

He responded with “Confirm.”

“Please choose a designation based on current shell model. Current shell model: Type-3511-Custom “Ouroboros”.”

“What’s Ooroboro mean?” Vezkig queried. Armless remembered only faintly. Something about a great serpent that symbolizes eternity and perpetually bites its own tail. He also remembered something about an ouroboros that encircled a planet and was destined to devour the gods when it let go of its tail. He decided to answer based on what he remembered.

“Confirm designation: Ouroboros.”

“Designation confirmed. Temporary System ID generated. Welcome, Ouroboros.”

The great door rumbled, and began to open. “What’s it mean? Please tell me you remember,” the tinkerer almost begged.

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, just a codename,” Red-eye pondered.

Armless finally piped up.

“No, it does mean something, I just can’t quite remember the details. It was a secondary name given to a great serpent that encircled an entire planet, perpetually eating itself and regenerating. It would eat the gods if it was ever disturbed enough to stop eating itself.”

“Let’s hope the name is accurate, then,” Red-eye said jokingly. The great door finally opened wide enough for them to pass, and they walked through.