Seven scars, seven archdrakes, seven charges as the limit of his strength. Why did it always have to be seven? Would he never surpass this? Would this forever be his limit? What if this wouldn’t be enough to penetrate the walker’s plating? All these thoughts rushed through his head in the span of a fraction of a second. It was as though the world had come to a crawl, everything he saw tinged a faint lilac, and then he realized his living eye was closed. He was seeing through his lilac eye, and he saw two revelations. First, a weak point in the Machinist’s walker, a defect in the impervious livingmetal that was its skin. Invisible to any eye, but resonant to void energy.
Something in the back of his head told him seven charges wouldn’t be enough to punch through. He needed one more. One more… He let go of the ammo ring, and instead reached up to his face. Sinking his claws into his left eye-socket, he took a breath and let go the crystalline orb which had replaced his original, golden eye. Vibrating in his grip, the spheroid traced a path of ephemeral lilac between itself and the bug-like array of organic sensors that coated the inside of its socket. Still able to see through it, Red-eye loaded it into the firing chamber. It would serve as a catalyst for the other seven.
His vision now entirely consumed by lilac, his perspective very literally inside the barrel, he adjusted his aim one last time. “I might very well die from this,” he thought, deciding that if he were to die, he would die with a battlecry on his lips. An old proverb, twisted in defiance of its original message. The fire which had been up until now building within his chest raged out of control, his mouth twisting into a wide smile as he readied himself for the recoil. Seven knocked him out the last time. Even so, not a single thought of stopping here crossed his mind.
A deep breath as he began to squeeze the trigger, aiming at the walker’s weak point. A thunderous proclamation, spoken in words that reverberated across the fabric of reality itself, to be understood even by those who wouldn’t listen.
“Seven stars of calamity shine in the heavens!” the one-eyed gunman proclaimed, a bright glow spiraling inward through the half-crystallized scar in his chest as he did.
“My eye is the eighth, and no evil can hide from its light!” he continued, the glow reaching the center and rising to a shine as arcs of lilac lightning leapt across his chest in increasingly rapid succession. At last, a great tendril-like arc of lilac leapt from his chest and to his arm and into his weapon. A violent torrent of unworldly fire flowed out of Red-eye’s arm and through his eye, atomizing his gun as it gathered into the crystalline orb. The light died down, and for but a few seconds, he was left standing there with a crystalline sphere floating in front of his arm. A spark leapt across its surface. Then another, and another.
The world screamed with an incomprehensible noise, simultaneously coming from everywhere and nowhere, as though reality itself was being ripped apart. The orb that had been his left eye disgorged a beam of lilac no greater in diameter than itself, yet upon impact with Asura’s back plating, it refocused and punched a small hole through the metal. No more than a few milliseconds later, a third of its back seemingly just exploded outward along with a burst of lilac lightning, the blast carrying fragments of livingmetal plating alongside massive amounts of shredded synthfiber musculature. The path which the beam traces was soon followed by the chittering noise and flashing lights of momentary ball lightning, which dissipated soon after.
Asura’s lower pair of arms stiffened and twitched, then fell limp. A loud crack followed as the ground beneath it shook, accompanied by an ear-shattering howl from the six-armed beast’s buried head, reverberating through the ground for hundreds of meters on end, even reaching Canyontown itself. It began to thrash about with a renewed strength sufficient to break Amalgam’s grip, who didn’t resist. Armless had grappled Asura to facilitate precisely what Red-eye had just done, and it was enough.
Red-eye, meanwhile, found himself watching his eye fall inert into his palm. He re-inserted it into its socket, finding the lack of immediate recoil to be utterly bizarre, but not unwelcome. His vision was back to normal, if a little dim. Perhaps he had some dust in his eyes… He blinked, only to collapse right then and there, falling off the edge of the rover. Karzon reacted quickly, opening the door and pulling his limp form into the vehicle, then immediately driving away, taken by a sudden burst of survival instinct incited by Asura’s berserked howl.
----------------------------------------
Armless saw Red-eye get up on that rover, he saw him loading all seven crystals, and even his eye. He clearly heard the gunman recite that strange incantation in the same tongue which Apeiron’s name had been written in, and he saw the thin beam of lilac erupt from the orb. Then, his vision of the scene went white.
Amalgam’s sensor array had been automatically tuned for an environment extremely low in ambient void energy, and so much like emerging from a dark cave into the seething sun, it took some time to adjust its sensitivity before Armless could see Amalgam’s surroundings once more. It took no more than one twentieth of a second, but even that was too long. The beam had impacted, and its chaotic energies were now ripping at Asura’s locomotive and energy infrastructure from within, only to burst outward along with a substantial piece of plating soon after.
While he was glad his trust in Red-eye’s abilities wasn’t misplaced, Armless had more pressing issues at hand - most importantly, a berserking beast of a walker. Robbed of its lower pair of arms and with a gaping weak point on its back, the energy which would’ve otherwise powered them now helped fuel its chaotic, jittery thrashing.
Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!
Between the flood of data and his temporarily blinded state, he chose to play it safe and simply let go. As many times before, Amalgam instantly responded to the command. This time, however, a series of statements flashed in Armless’s head in the span of an instant. They were accompanied by a large volume of sensor data which would otherwise get filtered out of his thought-stream, the speed of transfer only limited by how quickly he could process the data.
Affirmative.
System alerts pending:
Minor structural damage sustained.
Asura has begun generating cognitive pressure.
The Igrons must have removed its cognitive pressure limiters.
“The VI is taking control?”
Most likely.
Outer sensor array is hard-wired.
The cockpit sensor array is only partly secured.
Request permission for admin override.
“Granted,” Armless thought, and just as he did, another tab popped up in his mind. A direct feed of the inside of Asura’s cockpit. It was much like amalgam’s had been when he first entered it, filled with third-party hardware intended to let a non-human pilot the machine. A myriad of screens, keyboards, pedals and joysticks surrounded an armored warrior-caste, his face like an uninformed artist’s attempt at copying Nesgon’s noble visage. The Machinist had horns like Nesgon, sure, but his pair was all wrong, like they had been forcefully twisted into shape. His reptilian eyes darted wildly from screen to screen as he typed in commands with his left hand and hammered a red button with his right, much in the same way one would press an enter key on an analog keyboard.
This button being pressed, however, perfectly lined up to the rhythm of Asura’s wild thrashing. Upon closer inspection, there was a label above it that clearly read “Compliance Switch - Emergency Use Only” in handwriting that was eerily familiar. Haphazard and jagged, but clearly legible. Just like Vezkig’s.
Whilst Asura thrashed about it managed to free its head of its sandy shallow grave, exposing the cracked-open masque that had once covered its actual face. Its meticulously sculpted black-stone mouth was now a jagged, tooth maw from which a miasma of void-saturated vapor spilled forth, its eyes shining from beyond the top part of its face like shimmering, malicious beacons. It no longer screamed on the transmission wavelengths, it no longer transmitted signals of alternating pain and rapture, but it still twitched.
It stood there, eyeing Amalgam like a predator, twitching in place. Even so, its stance was entirely different, relaxed. It wasn’t struggling against its pilot’s control, even as he panicked inside the cockpit and continuously input emergency command after emergency command. It was twitching because a substantial portion of the infrastructure that helped it move had been ripped out, and its backup systems internalized the twitching as part of its normal mode of locomotion.
Amalgam received a walker-to-walker zero-latency live comms request. Not from the Machinist, but from Asura itself. Its voice was much like Armless’s during his battle against the Ecclesiarch. Consumed by anger, hatred, pain, and a boundless, unbreakable determination. Like the sound of heavy-duty mining equipment put through a speech synthesizer.
“The ͏̜̯f̮̪iḽt̢͇͈h̗̼y ̴liz͉̦ͅard͢ in my cockpit looks to be one of their so-called nobles, and wouldya look at that… There’s ten thousand mi͏̲̦͔nd͖̼ͅ-s͖̠͘l̙͈̪av̙͍e̛s̵ in assault rovers lined up right behind you. What do you say, ̢͔̤ͅAd̳m̀i̠̩̤̕n̦͡i͜s͖tṛ̥͉a͈͔͇t͘or̦͙̬? Y’think the so-called R͚̫͞u͢l͏er’̯͙͇s ̲̲B͟l̹̰e͟ss͕̼͡iṇ̲g̘̜̥ in this i̢̭̬̹n͝b̴r͇͈̘éd͓͕ ̞̹ál͔ie̱̹n͔͝ will burn up before I can use it to drive his soldiers berserk? Break them like their id̥̝i̝͙oti̥̙c̷̦ ̱͎͓t̻̬̲ín͎k҉͉̺̝ere͉̺r̤͔ș̮̜ almost broke me?!”
As the maddened VI went on with its rant, Armless watched the sensor feed from within Asura’s cockpit. He watched as the limp datacables that hung from the ceiling came to life, and like a swarm of serpents, enveloped the Machinist. He hissed, bit, and screamed, he even pushed his exoskeleton’s strength to the rather impressive feat of ripping one or two of the cables in half. Nevertheless, even the exertion of screaming made him sputter and spit blue blood onto one of the screens, and within seconds, he succumbed to Asura’s savage strength.
The cables ripped his armor from him, snaking their way into gaps between the plates. Some forced their way into his ears, his mouth and nose, and presumably into orifices yet unseen, whilst most simply punctured his scaled skin and slithered in, wrapping themselves around his limbs and threading themselves into his veins and between his muscles like some sort of mechanical parasite.
Asura went on to flood the Machinist’s form with its self-repair nanites, suffusing his tissues within mere seconds and performing violent modifications whose horror could only be perceived by the sudden bulging of synthetic modules from beneath the lizardman’s skin. Finally, a datacable as thick as a human arm descended from the cockpit’s ceiling, its plug wide and long enough to sever a human neck altogether. Its razor-sharp rings allowed it to plunge into the Machinist’s back with little to no resistance, blue blood and black ichor bursting out as it did so, accompanied by the sickening crunch of breaking ribs. Pulses of lilac entered the machinist’s limp form through the cables, and he reanimated as a perverse puppet of the very machine he was in control of mere moments later. The mad walker spread its four functioning arms, and it proclaimed out loud as it forced the Ruler’s Blessing from the Machinist’s body, much in the same way Armless had forced what was left of the old dragon’s blessing out of Nesgon. Armless saw that the Machinist mirrored Asura’s movements inside the cockpit to the best of his ability, his limbs puppeteered by the cables that entwined them from within and without, twitching with each motion.
Indeed, Asura proclaimed, sending out a transmission to every single assault rover in range, and when it did, it spoke with the same authority as one of the Igrons, if only for a brief moment. “Go forth and destroy. Wipe this fetid̝ h̳̺̖͠i͉ve from the face of this ̞̖̲go̤̥d̶̬̺f͎̘o͓rsa̡k̬̫͢en̴̲̝̭ ̩̞̻p̫̤͔l̯͔͔͟an̹͖ȩ̗̟̤t,” Asura roared, its upper left arm bending backwards to point at Canyontown, exposing a gap in the bolted-on armor, near the shoulder.
Three clangs there sounded from the dunes.