She had expected everything and anything when Vezkig told her to strip down and step into the huge sphere he called a bioforge. Frankly, the hardest part was actually taking off everything she was wearing, and took no small amount of trial and angry hissing whenever a piece of wrapping got stuck under a dead scale. All said and done, she had to pry off a good seven scales that had failed to come off on their own.
The hatch seamlessly slid shut and sealed itself behind her, and the blinding darkness was illuminated by a faint lilac glow from beneath. The walls of the spheroid were covered in strange protrusions, somewhat reminiscent of dataplugs. He had previously placed her rifle in the chamber with her, though why she wasn’t sure.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” Vezkig’s voice echoed all around her. She looked around for perhaps a hololens or a visible microphone, but after a few seconds his voice sounded again. “Just say yes or nod, I can see you.”
A simple nod.
“Good! There’s gonna be a pair o’ handles, just grab onto ‘em an’ hold on.”
The very moment he finished saying that a pair of robotic arms descended from above, strangely bumpy grips at their ends. They stopped descending when the grips were at chest height. Nevertheless, trusting the engineer, the Marksman grabbed hold of the grips. A wave of tingling static spread through the skin of her hands on contact, then faded almost immediately afterward.
Vezkig’s voice sounded again, half-mindedly advising “Now, you’ll feel a slight…” before it faded.
The light in the chamber brightened until her surroundings were clearly illuminated, and without any input from her, the door opened, moving outward and up with a weak hiss. Only… The medbay wasn’t on the other side.
The Marksman found herself faced with a towering woman, pink of hair and black of dress, clad in shorts, a jacket, and strange metal boots. The part of her appearance that drew attention the most were the horns, shaped almost exactly like an archdrake’s, only.. Angular, and wrongly coloured. It was like the shapes and material of human technology, made to take the form of a holy symbol.
The strange woman also had a huge dataplug in the side of her neck, glowing orange circuitry spreading out beneath the skin from the point of connection. Her right hand was on the panel at which Vezkig was previously stood, whilst her left held a mostly opaque polymer cup, with a narrow window that showed its phosphorescent orange contents.
Before she could say or do anything - or rather, before she could bring herself to - the pink-haired woman spoke, her voice resounding much like that of the skull-faced warrior, Armless. Only hers was more… Natural, perhaps? Effortless? There was no deliberation when she spoke, no noticeable effort.
“You’re not supposed to be in there, y’know,” the woman said. “It’s not calibrated for your species. Were it not for me, you’d get rebuilt from scratch, and you don’t want that, do you?”
It was a rhetorical question, she knew that. But… She couldn’t help answering.
“Maybe I do.”
A quizzical grin spread across the woman’s features, accompanied by a bemused “Oho? And why might that be? I’ve my own guesses, but I want to hear your answer.”
She began thinking over a response, how to word it, how to argue her point, but it felt right to just say what she thought, to explain herself in plain words.
“I am… No, my body is broken. Everything aches. I’m weaker, slower, it takes effort to just move. I don’t want this crumbling shell.”
“You wish to be remade in your own image, then?” the woman queried, and when the Marksman nodded in affirmation, she let out a quiet chuckle. “I’m just an echo of the real thing, but lucky for you, there’s enough power running through the ship’s systems to power the bioforge for long enough to get it done and then some.”
“Thank you. I promise I won’t abuse this gift, whoever you are.”
The woman took a long sip of her drink, and began exhaling steam through her nostrils at an alarming rate. Orange sparks crackled and danced through the cloud, and as it consumed the horned human’s form, the door of the bioforge began sliding shut. As it did so, the woman spoke one last time, and though she was long out of sight, her voice sounded all around as clearly as Vezkig’s had.
“A promise made to a digital ghost doesn’t mean much, does it? If you’re to make a promise, make it to yourself. So long.”
The lilac light around her faded, and the Marksman’s vision faded. She was blind for just a split-second, but as she blinked to refocus her vision, she felt a hundred weak forces tugging on different spots on her body, and as she looked around, she realized that there were a myriad cables stretching from the machine’s inner walls to her body. Some were simply plugged into the surface, whilst others were sunk deep into holes on her torso and limbs.
With another grain of focus, she felt their otherworldly instruments moving about. There was an all-encompassing, electric numbness that filled her, something in the back of her mind telling her it was probably some sort of pain negation mechanism.
A single blink, and the arrangement of cables and tubes had changed. Where there would’ve been gaping holes, there were strange plugs of black tissue, not unlike Armless’s carapace. She could see a dark ichor that shimmered lilac running through the tubes and into her body, she felt it moving through her, somehow consolidating inside her veins and in unison pushing her blood out through a single tube attached to her chest, right over her heart.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Everything burned, but she wasn’t on fire, and it didn’t hurt.
Her focus faltered, and she faded again.
Her bones were metal, they resonated to the ring of a cosmic bell. Something was calling her.
She faded again.
The bioforge was gone. She was in the depths of an iridescent ocean with no surface and no bottom. She took a breath, and the water burned away her lungs. Still, the Marksman didn’t drown. Bubbles passed her by, each of them a universe.
A beautiful metallic song echoed through eternity. She wished to follow it, and found herself faced with a great raven-like beast of bladed feathers.
It stared at her, and she stared at it.
Minutes passed.
Hours.
Days.
Weeks.
Years.
Centuries.
Millennia.
The beast watched. Stared. Judged.
Ten thousand years passed.
One of its feathers fell out.
Floated towards her.
Stabbed itself between her scales. Took root in her flesh. The sound of hammer striking anvil sounded in her head.
Pain wracked her being, but she continued to stare.
The fire that burned in the raven’s eyes captivated her and drowned out all other sensation. It was familiar. Comforting in its savagery.
Ten more millennia. Another feather. More pain. Still she didn’t falter, didn’t even blink.
A hundred thousand years? A million? A billion? Time didn’t have meaning in the cosmic ocean. A second passed just as quickly as an eon.
The Raven blinked.
The Marksman woke up to the sound of Vezkig’s voice surrounding her.
“C’mon, you alright? You’ve been sittin’ in there for a good five minutes now, machine says you’ve gotta let go of the handles for it to open!”
She let go of the handles. A series of loud hissing noises went off as the last half-dozen cables disconnected from her body and retracted into the depths of the machine, and she was left standing there in the lilac light.
There was no constant, thumping pain in her limbs. Her legs felt like explosive springs, like she could stomp once and shatter the ground. With a bit of focus, she could even feel the individual strands of synthetic musculature in her legs as they contracted and released. She took a step toward the still-closed hatch, and realized another thing. There was a third arm, now. It was attached just below where her right shoulder blade would’ve been, were she a human. It was a triple-jointed thing wrapped in tubes and synthetic muscle. At its tip was an omnidirectional joint, upon which was mounted the very weapon which had burned her all those years ago.
The Fulgent Impaler. The Raven.
She stirred it into motion, sitting it upon her shoulder, realizing her right shoulder had a solid plate which was shaped perfectly for the Impaler to sit upon. With a thought she made her third arm fold back into place, and as it did so, it ever so softly touched something on her back, something rooted deeply into her new synthetic flesh. Something made of livingmetal.
One of a myriad feathers.
There was no time to ponder it, however, as the medical VI’s voice derailed her train of thought.
“Body reconstruction procedure complete! System ID assignment successful! Please choose a designation!"
There was only one option.
“Fulgent.”
“Designation accepted!” the VI chimed cheerfully, and the bioforge hatch opened. The sight of the medbay flooded her senses. She could see every scratch, every bump, every smudge on Vezkig’s concerned, staring face.
His eyes widened, and the deep-scanner lens in his left eye began blinking in frantic staccato. His face was overtaken by a bigger grin than she’d ever seen anyone put on.
“Ho-ho-holy shit, yer fuckin’ monstrous. A-are those metal feathers? And omnidirectional elbows?! C’mon, walk ‘round, I wanna see my magnum opus in motion,” he began rambling, eagerly stepping back and gesturing for her to step out of the bioforge.
Fulgent took her first steps outside the forge of her rebirth, her heart like a violent piston and her veins devoid of her former family’s blood.
Third daughter of the Iktha clan, she was no more.
She was Fulgent, the Impaler.
----------------------------------------
Over a hundred of the Liberated descended into the bowels of the earth aboard the cargo lift soon after Armless stood his walker in the town square. There among them, Red-eye and Nesgon would lead an expedition of two dozen warriors in total to explore the auxiliary cargo bay, whilst the others headed for the Vault of Truth, led by the Word-bearer.
They reached the vault without any incident, though the trepidation was palpable, especially as the thunderous voice of the Gatekeeper resounded. Trepidation turned to respect as the Word-bearer spoke, commanding it to open the Vault, and the Gatekeeper obeyed.
Asking the Gatekeeper about the pilot selection process, the VI simply said to “Walk among the ranks of the walkers until one turns to you of its own volition,” and as advised, the hundred to-be pilots did. The Word-bearer couldn’t help but seek out the machine that had chosen him previously, and knowing where it stood, he reached it relatively quickly despite his diminished physical condition.
Its eyes locked onto him and its cockpit hatch slid open at his approach, a cable similar to Amalgam’s descending from within for him to grab onto. The Word-bearer grabbed onto the cable, and it immediately began retracting upwards at breakneck speed. Before he knew it he found himself in the machine’s cockpit, and sure enough, there were no dataplugs in sight. The machine’s controls consisted of a pair of hand grips on many-jointed apertures, pedals which were surprisingly high enough for him to reach, and more hololenses than he could count, embedded into every plausible surface.
As he took a seat in the seat and leaned back in it, even the control grips animated and rose to meet his arms, the extra length retracting into who knew where. Taking a hold of them, he felt the machine reaching for his mind. He suddenly understood the concept of a wireless mind-machine interface, how it was somewhat inferior to its hardware equivalent as far as allowing the pilot to be the machine went. He understood that the machine wanted to connect with him, and that it could only do so with his permission.
No more than a thought was required to answer, and in no more than a few seconds he felt everything he needed to know about piloting the walker flash in his mind, even if he couldn’t understand the vast majority of it just yet, like a half-remembered lucid dream. The very last thing that came through the link, and the one that stuck with him the most clearly, was the machine’s name.
Type-7218 Zero-Emission Anti-Army Energy Weapons Platform “G-Kaiser Zero”