Armless had led Karzon and his group into the desert surrounding Canyontown, though not very far out. He himself used his walker to travel, while Karzon’s group once more used their assault rovers. He had asked the three-eyed warrior what his group called themselves, to which he received the dissatisfactory answer of “the Liberated”. “We’re all Liberated, that’s too wide a term,” the Skull-faced man remarked as he thought of possible names to differentiate them. “How about… The Distorted? As far as I know you and yours are the only to survive the Distortion Cannon.”
His radio hissed as another voice butted in, stating “A name by which to mark the moment of our rebirth, truly fitting.” before Karzon could say his piece. A few other voices went on to butt in with their own affirmations of agreement, and so it was decided by popular opinion. They were the Distorted.
After leading them to a seemingly arbitrary spot and disembarking from his walker, Armless repeatedly focused a massive amount of energy into the strange weapon that was his arm, only for it to simply pop out a crystal rod as thick and long as a grown man’s arm without any sort of real force. They landed in the sand with dull, crystalline thuds, piling up into a neat little pyramid.
“What are those?” Karzon asked.
His answer was “Explosive stakes. If all goes well, we’ll blow up most of their force before battle can start.” He reached out, pointing the weapon at Karzon’s chest as he formed another rod. It popped out just as those before, and Karzon caught it. “I can’t set enough of them on my own, and you’re some of the few who can handle void condensate. Make sure they’re not deeper than a finger’s length under the ground.”
Karzon simply nodded and walked off to the side to begin burying the rod. He dug a hole with his distortion field and simply dropped the rod in, then covered it over with a small amount of sand. The Armored One stepped forward next, bending down to pick up one of the rods as she asked a question of her own. “How d’you want ‘em spaced? Memory’s not so clear, but I’ve got some trainin’ far as dealin’ with minefields goes.”
“Make a grid of rectangles with fifteen to twenty meters between each rod, that should be sufficient coverage. As long as the entire field covers their frontline, my plan should work. We’ll give it a second pass once we’re done, fill in any gaps,” Armless explained as he continued forming and piling up more rods.
“Y’sure huge explosions like that are gonna be good for dealin’ with the frontline infantry?” she asked as she heaved the hunk of lilac gemstone into position, having glanced in Karzon’s direction and determined a good spot for her rod was nearby. It was heavier than it looked. “They’re not mines. I’ll set them off myself,” Armless explained.
One after the other, the Distorted stepped forward and took one rod each, then dispersed and buried the rods in a nearly perfect geometric pattern, using variations of Karzon’s method.
Over the coming hours, they put down a grid of shallowly buried rods to form a “wall” around Canyontown’s gates, breaking up the process into several sectors whose size was simply determined by what was within immediate walking distance. Each time a “sector” was filled out, they would simply return to their respective vehicles and move to the next sector. This was all coordinated by Armless, as he had simply drawn a grid overtop his existing mental map.
He couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the Distorted were somehow communicating without words. It felt as though miniscule pulses of void energy traveled between them every once in a while. It wasn’t a concern for fear of betrayal, but rather a simple curiosity for how such an ability might be useful in the coming conflict.
The Distorted would certainly be a valuable asset, mental communication or not.
Once the task was done and he had walked the grid’s length to make sure it was complete, they returned to Canyontown. The sun was high up in the sky by the time they did.
As Amalgam lumbered to the gate, Armless found himself faced with a buzzing hive of activity, far too crowded for his titanic vehicle to pass through without either stepping on someone or entirely stopping the preparations. He chose to disembark, parking Amalgam at the town gate, using his radio to prompt the Distorted to follow suit.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Followed closely by a sizeable group of those touched by his power, the skull-faced man walked into Canyontown’s crowded main street, expecting neither praise nor worship, simply desiring to meet with his comrades one last time before the storm. There were no armies on the horizon, the sound of rovers didn’t resound from the distance, but he felt it. Despite the hustle and bustle that surrounded him, there was a colossal silence that hung over it all, the same silence that preceded the battle at Exile-town’s southern gate.
They crowded around him as he walked into town, but they didn’t stop to stare. Even those of them still addicted to the rituals of worship simply uttered prayers and made hand gestures whilst throwing him wide-eyed glances, then carried on with whatever they were doing.
Up through the walkways and into the Bar whose back room had become his home away from home, Armless weaved his way through the swarming mass of individuals with an ease not entirely rooted in the townsfolk’s unwillingness to stand in his way. The Distorted, lacking the unnatural grace granted by Armless’s custom body, had a harder time keeping up, but Karzon in particular demonstrated a nearly prescient ability to predict people’s movements in order to weave past them himself. The other Distorted, on the other hand, coordinated in a way that made them seem almost like they could see through one another’s eyes, arranging themselves on the tight walkways in ways that left room for the townsfolk to pass.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Reaching the Bar in the span of a few minutes, the Distorted spread across the establishment and took up seats around a total of two tables, clearly having come here during their time as Truthseekers. Even in this state of emergency, the Bars remained active. If anything, they were more active than before - the difference being that while far more people came in, they cycled far more rapidly as well, simply taking one or two drinks each to refresh themselves between stretches of heavy labor. The whole place was filled with the stench of printer resin and mechanical lubricant, the resultant mix of fragrances being surprisingly bearable.
Karzon was the only one to deviate, following Armless into the back room under the assumption that he would serve to represent the Distorted in what he anticipated to be tactical deliberations. Understanding this assumption, the skull-faced man made no effort to stop him. The door slid open, and they stepped past the precipice, to be faced by a group of three… No, four individuals. Three sat around the table, drinking stimmix, with the fourth splayed out across it, unconscious.
From his perspective, going left to right, it was Red-eye, the Accursed Bartender, and the Marksman. Only… When his eyes fell upon her hooded form, just as wrapped up as she always was, she was clearly marked by an ID tag that stated her name to be “Fulgent”. Moreover, his system didn’t recognize her as one of the lizard-men, or as a homunculus. As far as his system was concerned, she was “Closer to a human than anything else. Body model… Unknown,” as it stated when he posed the mental query.
This didn’t particularly impact him as he walked up to the table and took a seat for himself. What did strike him as different was the relaxed gesture of greeting, accompanied by the piercing lights that now shone from the pupils of her eyes. “So that’s what mine look like, huh?” he thought, reaching out for a bottle before he noticed none of the bottles in his immediate reach were the variety he preferred. Blue, green, yellow, but no pink. Those in front of Fulgent, on the other hand…
“Can you toss me one?” he asked, reaching out toward her instead. A simple nod as she leaned forward and did as asked, then smoothly kicked her feet back up on the table. All too smoothly.
Karzon, as before, took the bizarre theatre of techno-arcane monstrosities that unfolded before him in stride, seating himself between Armless and Red-eye and simply taking the opportunity to drink some free stimmix for himself. Even faced with impending war, free stuff was the greatest gift of all.
The unconscious form splayed out on the table was, of course, Vezkig. He had wondered how long it would take for the engineer to pass out, apparently two strenuous operations were the limit.
Armless took a long, long sip of his drink before he spoke. “Seems I missed you coming back up. What of the cargo bay?”
Red-eye gave a simple nod, putting down his drink and going on to explain that “We found the supplies you directed us to. There was a small army of homunculi guarding it, but they were… Poorly coordinated. It was like the bay’s security VI was just playing, more than actually trying to kill us. The cargo was a shipment of these.”
With the final sentence, he took out one of the performance-enhancer autoinjectors he had taken during the battle and tossed it over the pile of bottles so it landed in front of armless. Despite its relatively small size, it landed with an audible thud. Before Armless could say anything, the world slowed to a crawl as his auxiliary processors kicked into high gear and his system chimed in his head. “High-priority assimilation target detected,” it said, highlighting the fluid that was visible through the injector’s viewport in his field of view. This, however, wasn’t the reason for his body’s reaction. Even as the speed of his mental processes skyrocketed to a point where a single second could equal minutes of mental monologue if necessary, he felt a sudden malice. Amalgam had sent an emergency comms pulse, containing a series of snapshots from its sensor suite, chiefly the main hololens.
It was something over the horizon, a void-fueled intelligence in a mechanical chassis. It was a VI, just like Amalgam. One of the six living walkers. Only, it was… Mindless. It didn’t think, it had no will of its own, but was instead caught in an endless cycle of artificially induced pain and pleasure responses. Whoever was piloting the far-off walker had technologically lobotomized its VI to a point where it was in a perpetual state of either pained or rapturous mental screaming, broadcast to any receiver that would listen over zero-latency comms. Worst of all, the pilot was likely entirely unaware that whatever they had done to make the walker usable was this sort of barbaric cruelty, if the lizard-men’s previously demonstrated nigh-nonexistent understanding of Novahuman technology was anything to go by.
The signature seemed to have appeared very suddenly, as it was not present in the sensor snapshots preceding this one. Instead, Amalgam had detected a massive burst of exotic radiation from just over the horizon, as though reality itself had been ripped open for a brief moment. These sensor array snapshots were sent alongside an actual message, that of Amalgam’s voice saying three words. Three words, within which was more disgust and hatred than Armless had ever heard from any other machine.
“They are here.”
He didn’t respond, of course, as his body lacked the equipment to perform zero-latency transmissions even at this relatively short range. He willed his perception of time to return to normal, and before he could say anything, Fulgent piped up with “Something happened. What is it?”
She could feel it as well, though perhaps not as clearly. “Amalgam just sent me emergency comms,” Armless said, reaching for the autoinjector as he stood up. “Apparently the Igron force appeared just behind the horizon in a burst of exotic radiation. Do your people have a method of instant travel?”
The color drained from both Red-eye’s and the Bartender’s faces at the mention of the Igrons appearing seemingly instantaneously, and they froze up at the implication of instant travel. Standing up, the muscles just below his left eye twitching, Red-eye nodded sharply and growled an angry answer. “I knew they were scum, but this… Yes, we do, but it requires either highly advanced machinery that the Igrons don’t have, or…”
“Or what?” Armless asked, already anticipating the answer.
“Sacrifices. Many of them, depending on how big the transit area and distance. If it’s even a remotely sizable force, it… Would’ve taken thousands.”