In contrast, Red-eye was an organic weapons platform with a supreme target acquisition array. Golden or lilac, his left eye had been tested upon hundreds, its unerring aim tempered by decades of use and abuse.
A swarm of nanites coursing through his veins and seeping into his tissues, he dashed across rows and rows of smaller cargo containers, through narrow gaps between larger ones, firing off shot after shot as he went, never charging less than two crystals. One would down even a grown warrior if he got lucky, but these weren’t living things. They wouldn’t stop short of catastrophic bodily failure.
Lilac spears of cursed fire ripped through the air, like the raging screams of damned souls howling for redemption through relentless violence. Two crystals, then two more, then three. When held on target and allowed to re-focus, even the weaker beams were enough to lance through one homunculus and harm another behind it. It required extraordinary aim, but… He wasn’t any ordinary man.
Screech. Screech. Scream. Nine homunculi down. An ammo ring discharged. Pain thumping in his fingers, fading with each second as the nanites did their work.
He had plunged himself deeper into the cargo bay than any of his compatriots, and the homunculi now surrounded him, but this was his intention.
To charge a full seven and wipe out every homunculus in sight. Only, now that he looked around… He couldn’t. The others were too embroiled in combating the man-shaped machines, they wouldn’t be able to get out of the way in the short timeframe he had between charging a full seven and unleashing the beam. Only, he couldn’t. The numb pain had returned to his fingers, ever so faint. The serum was exhausted. If he fired a sevenfold beam, the recoil would knock him out. Plus, even if he took another dose of restorative serum… He couldn’t risk that sort of contamination, not with people who still had their blessings around.
“No, no more unnecessary sacrifices,” he huffed under his breath as he continued to look around, loading another ring into his gun and sliding the discharged one onto his wrist like a bracelet. His lilac eye briefly crossed the labeling on a cargo container he was ducked behind.
Generalized Nanite-based Performance Enhancer Type-56-9d Prototype
There was a security lock atop it, but when he reached into his pocket and held the PDA to it, the lock clicked open. The top of the container slid open and folded away to the sides, exposing a number of medical cases within. He hooked the handle of one with his second thumb and quickly yanked it out of the container without exposing himself.
It required the PDA to open as well, but its contents were different from those of the one Armless had given him. This one contained three large, cylindrical autoinjectors, entirely devoid of any cosmetic detail beyond a strange logo etched into the polymer casing.
He wanted to toss one to the nearest warrior, but he was in too deep. In the few seconds he had taken, the homunculi had advanced and now threatened to overwhelm his comrades, all of whom were busy with at least one homunculus each. Another dose of serum. Stab the injector into his upper left arm. A thick needle penetrated his muscle, and a black ichor flooded forth from it. More nanites, saturating his musculature. Veins began bulging out from his skin around the injection site, turned black by the machine-ichor they carried.
Red-eye felt his focus sharpen, his muscles contract with explosive power. Something in the back of his head told him to will it, and his skin would turn to a black-stone fortress.
Stand up.
Point the gun.
Load two crystals.
A screech resounded. A lilac beam lanced out. Two homunculi fell. There was no pain. A blackened casing surfaced around the roots of his left hand’s scales, if only briefly. Two more crystals. Another screech. One homunculus fell, the other lost an arm only to be set upon by a warrior with a cleaver.
Three crystals.
He found a group of approaching homunculi, leapt to the top of a nearby cargo container, and scythed them in twain in a diagonal downward swipe. There was no pain. Instead, a blackened shell manifested around his left forearm just as the shot rang out, and disintegrated into black sand when the energy recoil hit.
Red-eye loaded another ring. As he jumped from container to container in his intention to keep moving and pick off opportune targets as appropriate, he was struck by a glob of plasma from behind. He’d overestimated one of the warriors, who fell back instead of continuing to fight one of the creatures. As a result, the thing got a shot off on him before it could be cut down or blasted apart. The heat it gave off as it flew alerted the gunman to the approaching projectile, but he couldn’t dodge it for two reasons. First, his rather significant bulk made it impossible for him to stop on a dime when he was moving at full speed. Second, the homunculus took this into account and led its shot.
However, the defensive mental impulse didn’t go ignored. The plasma bolt seared through his duster, but before it could scorch his scaly skin, a blackened shell formed at the point of impact, once more disintegrating as it absorbed the hit. He felt the jolt, a slight electric sensation, the black sand falling, but there was no pain. Turning just enough for his lilac eye to see, he saw the homunculus in question having already been shredded to scrap and dead meat by Nesgon’s arm-cannon.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Two crystals.
A screech. A beam.
Two homunculi fell.
The more of them were struck down, the more confident the warriors became. Nesgon especially seemed to be becoming more and more bold with each one he struck down. At first he had been cautious, heavily exploiting his arm-cannon’s raw stopping power in concert with his massive bulk to control the enemies before him and minimize the risk he was in. Now, however, the old dragon began rushing headlong through the pathways between the containers, slamming into groups of homunculi like a battering ram on legs. Lilac light flashed from the seams in his armor as he grabbed at them and tore them limb from limb. Supercharging his suit’s musculature for brief moments of truly herculean strength, the Old Dragon ripped and tore a bloody path deeper into the cargo bay, tossing aside the mangled remains of the homunculi he went through with little regard.
In his bloody wake, one third of the party followed, whilst the other two thirds worked on penetrating into the cargo bay through a different path, advancing in something vaguely resembling a firing line as they methodically focused fire on larger groups and picked them apart, despite the significant resistance to conventional slug-throwers that the man-things displayed.
Two crystals. Another beam. More dead homunculi.
The voice of the same VI that demanded he open the door sounded through the cargo bay, now seething with anger so genuine he could believe it to be an actual person, had it not sounded as it did.
“Fffuckin’ piece ‘o shit proxies, you lizards are lucky I can’t fire up the real security units! And you, with the Admin authorized PDA. Yeah you, with the pressure suit shorts and the hackneyed gun. You’d be fuckin’ dead were it not for that PDA. Fuck all of you, take your stupid fuckin’ drugs.”
The voice faded. The remaining homunculi stopped dead in their tracks, falling limp where they stood. It was as if the VI was an angry child who had just gotten bored of playing with its toys.
Red-eye huffed a sigh of relief. Though there was the possibility of the machine simply trying to trick them, something made him feel it wasn’t sane enough to consider such advanced tactics. Perhaps this entire battle had just been a tantruming machine-child, unwilling to let go of its toys.
Hopping off the cargo container he was standing on, the shock of the landing - or rather, how little he felt it - made him keenly aware of just how major an effect the performance enhancers had. The entire battle had only lasted a minute, perhaps two, but it had felt far from hectic. He hadn’t been running on pure instinct. It reminded him of the moments where the world seemed to slow to a crawl, such as when he faced off against Orsha in the pit, only… He had managed to hold that level of absolute focus the entire time.
With a brief smile, the lilac-armed gunman rejoined his compatriots. He would spend the coming minutes speaking with Nesgon about the potential impact of these enhancers, while the coming hours before Armless’s recovery would be spent bringing a larger force down here to to recover as many containers as possible.
They couldn’t risk leaving even a scrap of useful material in the care of that psychotic VI.
----------------------------------------
“You were the one who set us ablaze?” Karzon questioned, taking a sip of his stimmix. It was egregiously saccharine, fruity, viscous enough that he had to swallow it in mouthfuls. He would’ve hated it, before all this. Something about this variety seemed to click with him now, though. It took effect more quickly.
The skull-faced man sitting across the table nodded, sipping from a bottle of his own. Karzon wanted to question how he drank without the liquid leaking out, but he was given a nonverbal answer when he glimpsed the inside of the man’s maw. He had strange ridges of dark purple flesh that sealed shut when his mouth closed, with two prominent ones behind his front teeth to mimic the function of lips. “Fucked up how he doesn’t have teeth on the inside,” one of the voices in his head commented.
“Your group was approaching our convoy with clear hostile intent, and you didn’t stop even after our marksman fired a warning shot. My walker happened to have a ranged weapon, so I used it.”
Though as calm as any elder, even apologetic, the man’s voice resounded like the rumbling of a sleeping volcano, ready to erupt at any moment. He clearly had a deep, deep anger burning in his heart, it just so happened that it wasn’t toward anyone present. They were sat in the back room of Canyontown’s biggest bar, one which Karzon himself had heard about during his time as a Truthseeker, but never visited before now. It...
“The… Distortion Cannon, you called it?” the Armored One interjected. She seemed lost in the goings-on as a whole, between the existence of a mythical creature, the fact they had been “blessed” by him, and the fact he was planning on openly challenging the Igron’s rule over this region over the destruction of Exile-town. They’d gotten away with doing far worse things for centuries, of course they wouldn’t anticipate the destruction of a minor settlement populated by exiles to have any major repercussions.
The skull-faced man turned to face her, giving another slight nod. “I believe the walker called it the Oscillating Distortion Projector, but I simply call it the Distortion Cannon, yes. Simpler that way.”
“So just firing it was enough to not only burn the blessings from us, but set us ablaze?” Karzon questioned once more, briefly manifesting a distortion field around one of his fingers to emphasize his point.
Armless nodded again. “It’s happened in the past, twice excluding your group. One was a chaplain, whilst the other was the current Elder of this town, Nesgon. I’ve also burned the blessings from a Word-bearer, but he hasn’t shown any signs of void energy manifestation. It seems certain individuals have greater affinity for void energy than others.”
¨Th… The Old Dragon? You burned the Voice of Nithor from him?!” one of the others blurted out in disbelief, only for Armless to shut him down with “I saved his life, yes. His blessing combined with the Ecclesiarch’s Blessing was reacting to the void energy that powers his cybernetics, effectively causing both his life and what was left of his power to wither away. When we fought, he wasn’t even fighting seriously until the Ecclesiarch forced him to. I could’ve either burned his blessing, or killed him outright.”