The Word-bearer couldn’t help but grin. For decades he had to participate in the Ecclesiarch’s hoarding of these sacred machines, and now, one of them had chosen him. With but a thought and a motion of his control handles he made the cockpit close, made the walker stand. There was an input delay noticeable to his trained senses, sure, but it couldn’t have been more than perhaps a few dozen milliseconds. He’d learn to compensate, he’d adjust, as he always had.
There were strange noises with each of the machine’s movements, unlike any servo he had heard before, but even these he would get used to. He mentally questioned how this connection was possible, and why it wasn’t used more often instead of datacables.
He received an answer in the form of more information directly projected into his mind. It seemed that this wireless alternative was more complex, took up more space, and required a higher “cognitive pressure” to function, whatever that meant.
Once more he questioned, this time why it didn’t speak like Amalgam did. What he expected turned out to be the case - no voice synthesizer. It let him know that it did have a full communications suite however, and as such the lack of a voice synthesizer wouldn’t cripple its comms capabilities. Willing the cockpit hatch to open so he would be visible to the others, the Word-bearer began to walk down the same path he had walked only hours prior alongside Red-eye and Armless. As he walked and gazed out of the cockpit down onto the ground, he realized how short his G-Kaiser was compared to Amalgam, barely standing at two thirds its height.
Despite the awe-inspiring image of a fully functional battle walker, only a small minority of the to-be pilots turned to look, and even they soon returned to their task of seeking out a walker that would choose them. Many simply walked down the rows in sequence, whilst others repeatedly beelined to a machine that caught their eye, looked around, then repeated the process.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The Word-bearer soon reached the cargo bay door, turning to the right and beginning to walk a clockwise lap around the walker legion. He was about two thirds through his lap when he received a comms ping with a walker ID. When he requested his machine to turn towards the walker in question, sure enough, he saw that one of the pilots had found a machine of his own.
It was taller than the G-Kaiser, with a cyclopean eye for a head. Its torso was bulky and heavily armored as if cast from a single piece of metal, whilst its limbs were wrapped in great cords of synthetic musculature, lacking plating of their own. A flaw that would have to be rectified, but a minor one at that. When he recalled its ID from his machine’s memory and it flashed before his mind’s eye, it was entirely within the previously demonstrated naming convention for human technology.
Type-4625 Zero-Emission High-Velocity Semi-Organic Deep Striker “Dygenguar”
He made his walker give the new pilot a nod of acknowledgement, and continued walking. Minutes passed, then an hour. Two hours. Three. Once every couple of minutes, a walker chose its pilot. Each time, it was one of the least defective machines, and the Word-bearer knew his prediction had come to pass. It had been wise of him to select those most likely to be capable walker pilots based on their previous experience.
The hundred would be further subdivided into no fewer than five companies of twenty according to the specializations of their machines, numbered one through five. Each company would further be divided into four squads, each with at least one specialized walker.
Over the coming hours, the Skull Battalion came into being, and its pilots were given designations consisting of the word Skull and two numbers. One for the team they were in, and one for their numeric designation within the team itself.
The first to find his walker, for example, was designated Skull-1-1.
It would be a lot of work, managing even just a hundred pilots - but the Word-bearer had decades of experience, and without the Ecclesiarch breathing down his neck, he could utilize tactics beyond “smash into the enemy head-on and see who gives up first”.
Soon, hundreds more would be brought to the Vault. The maintenance bays would be put to the test in retrofitting the walkers who lacked armaments of their own, and if time constraints allowed for it, rectifying some of the flaws on others.
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As dire as the situation was believed to be, life in the Oasis City continued as normal. Its people seemed unmoved by the prospect of war, if anything they were steadfast in their belief that the Igrons would quell any threat before it even reached the city’s walls.
Being the new Sixth, Orsha couldn’t just walk the streets on his own, but he had quickly learned who the ex-Truthseekers were most loyal to. As far as they were concerned he was the Ecclesiarch’s one and only successor, and for whatever reason, they held a certain dislike for the other Igrons.
He argued with two facts to convince the others to give him total command of the Truthseekers. The first was that he had already established a rapport with the soldiers, whilst the second was that the other nobles surely had their own, much larger forces to manage, and so should not waste their time and effort trying to wrangle what remained of the Truthseekers.
The former appealed most to the more reason-oriented of his peers, the Machinist chief among them, whilst the latter helped convince the self-absorbed among them, especially the Thin One.
So it was that he was assigned one of the forts hidden all across the city, and so it was that he gathered those he remembered the Ecclesiarch mentioning as the most loyal, those whose belief in his command remained unshaken even when his blessing broke.
He wished to quell the incoming storm just as much as the other Igrons did, that much was true, but he had his own plans, things to do and learn in this great city. Among the thousands of men still at his command, there were more than enough capable of fitting into the general populous and garnering information.
Loyalties, however, were not the only reason why he hadn’t simply given the task of gathering information among the populous to any other servant, any other soldier. As bound by tradition as the Ecclesiarch had been, he wasn’t an idiot. He knew there was the possibility of his death. In the time between Armless’s invocation of the Right of Heresy and the duel itself, the Ecclesiarch had revealed something he believed would be a sort of “silver lining” in the case of his death. If the bearer of a Ruler’s Blessing is ever killed, all those under their blessing’s effect at the time of their death will be rendered totally and utterly immune to the Ruler’s Blessing of anyone but their direct descendants.
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He was no traitor, no rebel, but he was not a simpleton either. He knew not to blindly trust anyone, let alone those of high birth. Among the Igrons, the only one who came across as trustworthy was the Machinist, and even he likely had more than a few of his own schemes going on at any given time.
So it was that Orsha assigned some half a dozen ex-Truthseekers the long-term task of blending into the general populace of the city and gathering intel, in doing so granting each of them a reasonable sum of credit chits. The very next day, he found himself being called to another war council meeting, this time involving not only the Igrons themselves, but also their most trusted immediate subordinates, all great commanders in their own right.
The council quickly agreed to a preliminary strike of no fewer than twenty thousand warriors, a quarter of which were to be in full casement. They would be transported and during battle supported by hundreds of assault and cargo rovers, while the massive size of the force would necessitate it to be led by one of the Igrons themselves.
The task would be left to the youngest, the Seventh. Orsha didn’t like how eager the silent giant seemed at the prospect. He didn’t like that grin, or the horribly pleased guttural gurgle the Seventh let out when he learned of his task.
The beasts of war would soon assemble.
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Red-eye and Nesgon split off from the main group along with the two dozen warriors who would be supporting them in this exploration. The lilac-armed gunman, though not entirely familiar with the PDA’s mode of operation beyond controlling the map, had a somewhat easy time guiding them through the great ship’s intestines. After all, he could keep one eye on the map, and the other on his surroundings.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
As they approached the designated point, one of the warriors pointed out a sign on the wall pointing in the direction of their travel. “Cargo bay 4B-7C. Is that it?” he queried in a raspy voice.
“S’pose so…” Red-eye muttered as he took a closer look at the map. The sense of foreboding was tangible, for the deeper into the ship they went, the more pristine it became, the lights no longer flickered, the walls were no longer scrapped for panels and wire - this far inward, it didn’t even feel like their world anymore. Some among them expected a human to simply walk out of one of the myriad doors lining the corridors.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The door corresponding to the map marker was in sight, now. Just a few steps past the bend, the console at its side alight and alive as though in anticipation of visitors. It chirped to life at Red-eye’s approach, startling some of the warriors into raising their rifles. Only Nesgon and a few at the very front remained entirely composed.
“Key device ID detected. Please hold key device up to console!” a security sub-VI’s high-pitched voice sounded from the console, but something was off. It sounded eager, but… For the wrong reason. Like a predator, eager to strike.
“Please hold key device up to console!” it reiterated, less friendly and more demanding this time.
“Step back,” Red-eye stated as he reached for his revolver, and all present obliged, readying their weapons. Nesgon raised his right hand and a piece of plating slid away, exposing the muzzle of a graviton accelerator rifle where a plasma projector had once been.
Gun in hand, Red-eye charged two crystals into the weapon before raising the PDA towards the console. Despite the mechanism’s age and the door’s bulk it slid open with a surprising speed. He noticed no fewer than three pairs of homunculus legs behind it by the time it was a third of the way up, and so loaded a third crystal, just in case. Arcs of lilac leapt between his newly-repaired weapon’s two-pronged accelerator barrel.
As the door raised halfway up he squeezed of the trigger, setting loose a screeching ray of lilac death, tilting his weapon’s muzzle in synchronicity with the bulwark door’s rise.
The ray came ripping and evaporating everything it touched, scything a path into the floor panels, and in the coming fractions of a second, bisecting three feral homunculi down the middle as they lunged to attack through the doorway.
Three pairs of halves flew through that doorway, passing Red-eye. Nesgon easily tossed all three headed towards him aside with a mighty swipe of his left arm, but the warriors to the right were not so fortunate, and their armor was splattered by the pitch-black lifeblood of these machine-things. Red-eye felt a crystalline casing spreading up his fingers from the grip, but it only took a moment of focus to make it recede.
“More coming up. Go, go!” he barked as he charged in, loading two more crystals and dropping the PDA into his pocket so he could ready himself to load another ring of crystals. There were crates to his left, as well as a small nook up against the wall ahead, likely due to the presence of a larger wall-mounted console that couldn’t be covered up. It was split off from the rest of the bay by a large crate which was easily wider and taller than even Nesgon, and so served as a supreme tactical position for Red-eye to take up cover in and survey the situation. He did so for as much as an entire two seconds before he determine the number of hostiles by the sound of frantic footsteps and chose to load the other two crystals as well, totaling four.
Nesgon followed in his charge, utilizing his tremendous bulk to run down the rabid homunculi. They had significant strength and even plasma throwers on strange shoulder-mounted third arms, but they couldn’t penetrate the bulwark of steel that was Nesgon’s armor.
The old man’s charge motivated the other warriors, but before they could enter the fray, Red-eye had already swept his left arm out from cover and squeezed the trigger, yelling out “Duck!” as he did so. Nesgon did as told, and just in time. A violent ray of lilac as thick as his arm swept past, ripping through the frontmost homunculi it was met with and significantly damaging those behind, but only causing superficial damage to the third of its targets.
This shot was enough to make his fingers get encased fully, a familiar icy-hot pain shooting through his digits, forcing Red-eye to let go of his weapon and reach into a pocket to retrieve one of the restorative serum ampoules. The warriors charged into the cargo bay at last in the wake of the destructive attack, not slowing even when faced with the true scale of the battle before them.
Dozens of homunculi, all either stumbling over their dead compatriots or scrambling in unsettling manners over the crates. The exposed wall paneling had been seriously damaged by Red-eye’s weapon, but somehow, the cargo crates remained unscathed, as though the void beam had just harmlessly dissipated against their surfaces.
The warriors charged into the rows of boxes, and Nesgon fought three homunculi in a struggle on the ground. Three homunculi, three shots of his arm-cannon.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Three bursts of livingmetal shrapnel that superheated and disintegrated only seconds after being fired, ripping apart the half-metal half-synthfiber bodies of the defective drones that sought to destroy him.
Red-eye downed the canister like a shot and felt the pain fade from his fingers.
He loaded another ammo ring and stepped out of cover.
His lilac eye darted across the bay wildly as he memorized his allies and his enemies.
Nay, his battle-brothers and the pests he would exterminate.
These things didn’t deserve to be called opponents.
They were no more than malfunctioning machinery.