“Outstanding. I’ve been going through the initial stages of forming a proper militia and gathering potential walker pilots, most of whom you see here before you,” the old dragon began, gesturing around himself. At a closer look, Armless did notice that those stood closest to the old man all shared some common traits.
First, very few of them were Warriors, with an approximately two to three split of Thinkers and Builders.
Second, all of them had a pristine, clearly freshly printed patch somewhere on their clothing. A profile view of a human-like skull with a trail of lilac light stemming from its single visible eye socket. His skull.
Third, they either had very minor markings, or had the usual pale void exposure-induced burn scars where markings once had been.
As he looked them over Nesgon continued, asking “Shall we bring a small group to the Vault to test the waters?”
Armless nodded. “Of course… But I can’t come with you. I had no choice but to reignite the walkers through my own strength, and the act has strained my body enough that I’ve had to interr myself in Amalgam’s cockpit to accelerate my recovery.”
He was really playing up the seriousness of his demeanor, doing everything in his power to give off a powerful, stoic aura, even amplifying the impact of his voice with additional distortion and bass. This wasn’t exactly necessary, considering his situation, his appearance, or the thunderous fury that still simmered beneath his surface, waiting to be unleashed in the coming conflict.
Still, such a powerful presence only served to inspire those among the crowd. If awakening the great war machines exhausted a living demigod this much, surely even the lesser of them ,would be wondrous engines of destruction on the battlefield.
“What do you suggest, then?” Nesgon questioned.
“I will stand in the town square for the duration of my recovery so as not to block the main street. We can handle the remainder of the plan over more secure channels than speaking in public in front of a crowd,” he stated, saying the last few words with a sense of levity even though he meant it completely seriously. Still, it elicited a few laughs from those present.
Even the old dragon let out a rumbling chuckle as he nodded in affirmation.
His attention refocused to dispersing the crowd, which was achieved quite readily with the expertise of the Deserter Chaplains and looming presence of the walker.
In the span of the next few minutes, Armless walked his great machine to the center of the town square, making sure to scrape away at the unfinished etchings praising the Ecclesiarch with its feet as he did so. The townsfolk hadn’t had the time to remove them just yet, so “Might as well help that along.”
He made the walker kneel down, so it wouldn’t tower as much.
Once the time came, Red-eye took a little longer to disembark than the Word-bearer as he helped open the case of restoratives, place it within reach of his comrade’s good arm, and open the first one for him to drink.
“That’s awfully nice of you mother,” Armless poked, and to his satisfaction received a small chuckle and a “I’ll let you bite the top off and swallow it next time.” before the gunman got his foot in the loop on the metal cable.
“How’d you know about the bottle top?”
“Rika told me. I wonder, maybe in a different world you’d be called the Great Bottle-muncher.”
As bad as that joke was, something made Armless let out a genuine laugh. Red-eye had finally situated himself on the wire securely enough to safely disembark, and bid the human adieu before he did so with the simple phrase “Get some rest.”
And that’s precisely what he did. Armless downed three of the six restorative solution canisters, then sent his body into sleep mode with a secondary waking condition of structural integrity reaching sixty percent, so that he could consume the remainder of the serum and go back to “sleep” for the rest of his recovery.
Minutes passed, and he felt himself fade into the ocean of his mind. He found himself walking great highways in the middle of a lilac ocean, the sky draped over by a shimmering ceiling of matte-black stone. In this world, in the heavens there flew and in the waters there swam strange, formless creatures of shining crystal and black stone, numerous in limb and united in purpose. They resembled some sort of otherworldly sealife. Two kinds there were, only distinguishable by subtle differences in the shapes of the limbs and crystalline cores. One was familiar, whilst the other was foreign, with the latter being far more numerous than the former.
In the distance, he saw great monoliths of black stone that towered into the ceiling, some rooted in the water whilst others floated in mid-air, as though weightless. Their outer shells were cracked open, the cracks shining red like dying embers. They were clustered together into a titanic city, which was somehow both familiar and alien at the same time. He walked and he walked, and before he knew it, he found himself in the middle of a metropolis whose buildings were so gigantic, their floors contained smaller buildings instead of rooms - a megacity. This place too was cracked and illuminated by an ember-like glow, even the road beneath his feet was covered in great cracks. Yet, with each step he took, the cracks receded and the red glow faded, as though the world itself realigned. After a few minutes of walking, a building that looked entirely pristine came into view, sticking out like a sore thumb in this deserted cityscape.
With but a thought and a step, he found himself transported into this heaven-piercing monolith. A street of faux-concrete, lit by ghastly plasma lights in hues of pink and blue. He was flanked on one side by a café and on the other by a clinic, yet nobody was there. There was no traffic, no distant sounds of commotion. There was no creaking of the superstructure or even wind. There was only the steady pulsing of void energy through everything around him, even the air - his void energy.
Another step. He was in the clinic, sitting across the table from a strangely-dressed woman with pink hair and horns, her eyes similarly burning and unmoving to his own - only hers were actual eyes rather than just eye-lights in empty sockets, of course.
Something about that egotistical, self-assured face felt familiar, beyond just the fact he recalled the Word-bearer mentioning her appearing in a recording at some point.
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
He knew she was somehow important, and he also knew he hadn’t ever met or known her personally. A question sprang to his mind, he wanted to ask who she was, but no words came out when he tried. Something felt wrong, and then he realized it - this wasn’t his body. He looked around, and saw that his body was an androgynous shape, draped in milky-white skin, no gun for an arm, no exposed metal, no sinewy synth-musculature.
He thought to question where he was, what was happening, and still no voice came out.
Still, the pink-haired woman seemed to have heard his queries. She reached for a cup that was sitting in front of her, filled with luminescent orange liquid, and took a sip. Like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils, steam escaped hers after she drank, and finally she spoke in a synthesized voice not entirely unlike his own.
“I am… A sliver of the woman who built that gun on your arm there,” she said, and with a gesture of her hand Apeiron materialized around his right arm. She continued with “You’re currently secluded in your Consciousness Containment Unit, a little void crystal gem in your skull that holds everything you are. I’d explain how it works, but… This sliver of myself doesn’t hold that knowledge. What’s happening is quite simple. When you generated that energy burst, it temporarily re-activated certain vital systems within the AISS Viriditas, including the ship’s Dimensional Anchor. Fearing the local strain of nanites might’ve already gone grey-goo, I used the signal to actualize the local nanite firmware, and in that data package, I sent a sliver of myself to help mitigate potential damage and then disappear.”
A grin stretched across her face, revealing a mouth full of far too pointy teeth. Armless didn’t quite know how to process all this information, especially how it pertained to him, and so simply thought another question. “Beyond the gun, what does this have to do with me?” he thought.
She took another sip and exhaled another puff of steam. “Lucky you, that sliver of me ended up in your system. Taking into consideration your state as the local Administrator, the lack of a local government to fuck me up the tailpipe for breaking their rules, and the fact you’d be a smoldering pile of black sand if I didn’t…”
The woman snapped her fingers. A black miasma began to spread up his right arm and over his entire body, consuming it in a slick sheet of dark ichor that roiled and shifted like a thousand snakes made of pitch.
“I’ve rewritten your nanite firmware with a sub-strain of my own rather than the consumer-grade strain you had before. It’s honestly a miracle you even survived firing that fuckin’ thing once, now you should be able to use it properly.”
“Thank you, whoever you are.”
“You can thank me once we meet in person, old man. Seems you have visitors.”
The world faded, and he woke up. The cockpit faded into view, and he saw before him Rika’s huge arm holding onto the bottom of the open cockpit hatch. With a mighty flex and a loud huff, she pulled herself up into the cockpit, and he saw that she was holding two plastic containers of what looked to be sandswimmer noodles under her left arm, alongside a six-pack of stimmix bottles in her left hand.
She hadn’t noticed he was awake just yet, as his eye-lights were still off. As she approached he saw a shallow wound on her stomach, and blue blood on the tip of the Gun-cleaver.
She placed the food and drink she had brought next to him, and sat down on the cockpit’s floor - somewhat cramped due to her prodigious size, but she still managed to find a sitting position.
For a few minutes she sat there in silence, and then finally spoke in a weak voice.
“Please don’t die. Not you too.”
----------------------------------------
The rover’s jury-rigged engine howled and his seat shuddered beneath him as Karzon did all in his power to retain control of the vehicle’s explosive acceleration across the desert. It had taken them longer than expected to repair the rovers they needed, but the Glass Spire and its surrounding ruins were now far behind them, past the horizon.
Despite their dark usage, he was thankful for the rock-solid build of these vehicles. If they had been built as cheaply as most combat rovers, there was no doubt they wouldn’t have been able to fix them, and even if they did, any cargo would’ve just fallen out the back. But no, not these. These vehicles far outlived their crews and only served to further impress - the Exiles must’ve held some truly impressive anti-armor capabilities to take down an entire assault force of these, even if they fell in the process.
Upon reaching the supply depot, they replenished their supplies and immediately returned to the road, despite the sun having set. Exhaustion was taken into consideration however, and some of the drivers chose to switch out so they could sleep. Karzon was not among them.
Time passed, the landscape rushed past them, and a great cloud of sand trailed behind them. They used built-in radios to communicate across vehicles and coordinate their travel, but eventually, when Karzon reached for the radio’s microphone, its cable gave under the strain and ripped out of the socket entirely - it had been hanging on by a thread.
“Radio’s busted, what now…” he pondered. If he couldn’t effectively communicate a stop order to the other rovers, it would be well over a day before they reached their destination. It wasn’t much of a cause for concern, but nevertheless, one of the older-sounding voices in his head warned “We should be cautious. It’s unwise to ever travel blind, deaf, or mute.”
The voice wasn’t wrong, but another still rebutted with its own wisdom of “Quit it with the metaphors. Radio’s fucked, maybe try other comms? Hand signals? Just fuckin’ yell outta the window?”
“The engines of these war-beasts are too thunderous, they kick up too much sand,” the Elder Voice argued.
Karzon pondered it, and as he did, he felt something in the back of his mind. Something unlike the voices told him the Armored One was wondering why he hasn’t spoken on the radio for some time. Then, all of a sudden, her voice resounded through his radio, clear as a bell.
“Libera-1, this is Libera-3. If your radio microphone has ceased functioning, please begin decelerating. If your microphone is functional, please come in.”
He wasn’t sure how she figured it out, but he did as asked, and a few seconds later, the Armored One sent out a transmission on the shared frequency, stating “Libera-1’s radio needs repairs, decelerate and come to a halt wherever he does.”
Between the far from ideal state of their vehicles and the blistering velocities at which they were traveling, it took a few minutes for them all to decelerate sufficiently and finally come to a halt the same vicinity.
Those of them most well-versed in this type of repair spent a short while retrieving the appropriate supplies and repairing the microphone, even double-checking the radio’s internals to make sure it wouldn’t go bust again. While they worked, Karzon took the time to pull the Armored One aside to ask how she knew his radio was damaged.
Her face - hard to read as it was - went completely blank at the question.
“I… Thought I heard you mention it,” she said.
“Like an echo in the back of your head?”
“...Guess so. Do you think it might be some sort of void-induced men-”
Before she could finish, something made her stop and stare off towards the horizon. Karzon felt it too, as did all those present. A few seconds later, it came. An all-consuming howl of rage and sorrow, and though they couldn’t see it, they all felt the tremendous burst of void energy that accompanied it.
A call for vengeance carried on the cosmic winds, one all too familiar to those who had once been the Dishonored Ones. The very same cosmic wind that once swept away the blessing which clouded their minds and ignited within them a flame much like itself.
Without so much as another moment of hesitation, the Liberated sprang into action to continue their journey in hopes of meeting with their liberator, or even just witnessing his true visage.