There was no consideration in his mind, only a desire to fight, and an anger at himself for lacking the skill to do battle beyond reacting to attack like some wild beast. It was enough for Dygenguar’s systems to count it as an affirmative ping.
The world around him screeched to a halt as billions of Dygenguar’s self-repair nanites flooded his body through the dataplug, taking to the task of repairing Surzed’s cybernetics. Machinery that was built from scrap, held together with scrap, and implanted in a state that no mechanic would even consider acceptable.
The pain faded into a warm buzzing. Like the refreshing winds that herald the coming of rain, suddenly everything became clear and serene. The battlefield wasn’t chaos, he wasn’t surrounded by death and threats, with alien machinery as the only thing to stand between him and death.
Indeed, it was all clear and serene.
Interfacing operation successful.
Dygenguar’s musculature flexed all at once. It let go of the wrecked rover and reached up for its other cleaver, and when it next took a step it didn’t stomp. Like a violent river of silver and black, the cyclopean walker flowed through the rovers before it, cleaving and smashing its way through rovers with an eerie elegance that not even smaller walkers could achieve.
It lacked the sheer god-like might of the living walkers, and it didn’t have the unassailable single-strike capacity of the G-Kaiser with its Monolith Sword, but Dygenguar still managed to keep up with both of them in battle, carving a path through the Igron army in a manner not unlike a violent dance.
Each step and each cleave of its blades was no more than the transition from one pose to another.
The wrecked rovers and dead drivers in between were just part of the song that was Surzed’s existence at this very moment.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Clear and serene.
The scraping of metal, the screaming on a dozen different radio frequencies, the barking of orders of half a dozen others.
It was all an orchestra of death, and Dygenguar was but one more instrument.
Pushing deeper into the enemy force with each step, each cleave, each contraction of its colossal muscles, the cyclopean machine was still just one of many. Indeed, it was just one of many forces pushing down on the amorphous, uncoordinated mass of rovers.
From four directions, the Igron force was being pressured.
From the front, by the defenders.
From behind, by Fulgent’s strategic elimination and creation of obstacles.
From the rearward left and right respectively, by Amalgam and G-Kaiser, both less fighting and more annihilating with impunity, having fully settled into the rhythm of avoiding the occasional plasma bolt.
It was…
Easy.
Too easy.
----------------------------------------
“All too easy,” Nesgon rumbled as he looked down upon the battlefield, watching the tide of walkers flood forth through the gate and rip into the enemy line. Even though their printed firearms quickly ran out of ammunition or simply malfunctioned, Skull Battalion still didn’t struggle against their enemy.
Any assault almost entirely made up of rovers, though not optimal, wasn’t unheard of as an intimidation tactic. “Perhaps they wanted to use the rovers to set up a siege before performing an on-foot invasion? They couldn’t have expected us to have more than one or two walkers, given how jealously the Ecclesiarch guarded any knowledge of Vault’s contents…”
Just as one of the smaller walkers ripped open a driverless rover’s roof with the intent of going after the passengers, Nesgon’s eye fell upon it, and he saw that the passenger compartment was empty.
Sweeping his sight to the field of wrecks before the gates, he took note of every corpse in sight, trying to either confirm or dispel a suspicion.
One of the deserter chaplains “Is something wrong, sir?”
“How many passengers can a transport-type assault rover carry?”
“Eight warriors in full casement, sir.”
“How many corpses do you see in the wreckage of that rover over there?” the old man rumbled, pointing towards the rover which he had noticed previously - its cabin crushed, the driver’s upper body hanging out the front window. Its passenger compartment wrenched wide open, empty. “Go on, take your time.”
The chaplain raised his left hand, taking control of his helmet’s built-in magnification lens through a gauntlet-integrated PDA. He leaned forward out of habit, as though leaning into an eyepiece. Blinking to clear his eyes, unsure as to what he was looking at, the chaplain reset the calibration of his lenses and tried again, this time inputting an analysis setting into the primitive VI that operated his suit’s systems.
Among the flurry of datapoints that scrolled down his hub was “NO PASSENGERS”, and it finally hit him.
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There weren’t enough corpses among the wreckage.
In fact, save for the drivers themselves and the occasional mechanic, there weren’t any corpses among the wreckage.
“But… Why use transport rovers if they’re all empty?” the chaplain questioned, puzzlement echoing through the slight distortion of his helmet.
“I have my suspicions, but I’ll need to consult someone better versed in the Old Magic to confirm it. In the meantime…” Nesgon trailed off, reaching for one of the storage compartments on his armor’s lower back. He imprinted a short-term honorary commander ID into the PDA within and willed it to open with a small hiss, before handing it off to the chaplain. “I trust you know how to command a firing line,” he said, waiting only for a small nod of confirmation before turning and walking off into the walkways.
Everyone able and willing among Canyontown’s populous was up on the walls, contributing to the defense.
Everyone able and willing.
A certain Accursed Bartender was neither, and Nesgon knew where he had hidden to wait out the battle. The old man had questions that only one attuned to the Old Magic could answer, no matter how knowledgeable in its rituals Nesgon himself was.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
As he passed through the network of walkways, the old man took mental notes of which ones had been damaged by stray plasma bolts.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The bar was empty.
The back room wasn’t.
The thorny bartender, and the sleeping engineer - soundly unconscious even amidst the tremendous noise that reached this tucked-away place. The thorned one lazily raised a bottle of orange stimmix, his face twisted into a grin as streaks of blue ran down his face and into a bucket below.
“What’re you doing here, old man? Thought you’d be orchestrating the gun symphony up on the walls,” he cackled, droplets of blue ichor issuing forth from his mouth with every other word. He didn’t give Nesgon the time to rebut, taking a quick sip of stimmix before continuing on with “No need to answer, I saw you coming. I saw them coming as well, but then so did the three-armed colossus, and faster than I did at that.”
His eyes briefly became unfocused as he stared off into the middle distance next to Nesgon, his mind taken to a place far away. “It’s kinda sad, isn’t it? Even the ancient magic of our forebears can be replaced by their arcane machinery. It’s like they’ve figured out how to print rituals on a circuit board,” the Accursed Bartender pondered, before his gaze snapped back to the old dragon’s helmeted face.
“I know you’ve got a question, but the smoke from that fire in your gut obscures what it is. Ask away.”
Nesgon nodded, choosing not to question the bartender’s mental state. The Accursed tended to be seized by fey moods, almost always just before their unique abilities would manifest themselves.
“There are no passengers aboard the attacking rovers, and as far as we know, the rovers were the only method of attack employed. Was this attack some sort of bizarre gambit, or was the rest of the Igron force-”
The Accursed one cut him off, spitting some blood into the bucket beneath his feet alongside a single word.
“...Lost?”
The old dragon nodded in affirmation.
The thorned man took a long, long swig of stimmix, emptying the rest of his bottle. He took a deep breath. A pattern of bulging veins flickered gold across his head, shimmering exotic particles rising from them. The light died soon after as he was seized by a gut-wrenching, bloody coughing fit, doubling over face-first into the bucket.
He began to speak between bouts of bloody coughing, his voice strange and distorted. Despite this, he was clearly speaking of his own volition, rather than being seized by some otherworldly force. To the contrary - he was actively fighting to channel whatever force fuelled his prophetic abilities, and the strain reflected itself upon his body as his markings continued to flicker with each word and the veins underneath them bulged from his skin, the whites of his eyes turning blue as the veins inside them burst.
“Ten ͝th͜ous҉ąn̸d͠ w̸arriors҉, hurle͟d pa҉s̡t͏ the͠ wo̷rld ͡wall by ̸a ha̡lf-f͡o̡rg͜ott̢en͢ rite, se͟ven-hun͢d̨r̶ed ̢a͡nd s̨eve͘nty̛ se̸v҉én͞ a̛t ͝a t́i̷m͞e. ̶The si̛x̸-ar͠med war ̵g̴od̶ ̡and ̸th͟e ̷ro̸ve̡rs ̶we̶re͜ ͞m̵oved f͝ir̀s͡t, followed b̷y t҉h̴e̕ w̧ąrr̡iors th̸ems̕el͞ves, the p͜ŕic͢e̡ of sevent̛y-séven li̡ves ̸p҉ai̸d̵ ea̡c͡h͞ ҉tim̴e. I͟ se͜ȩ no͏ ̛fewer̵ ͜th͜an ha͝lf́ of the̢m̨ to th̡e n̢o͞rth, scattered to the w͢inds by͏ t͜h̸e old͟ mag̵ic’̡s͠ tempe͠rament͜a͟l̕ w͏a̢ys. That’s…”
He shook his head as his markings ceased glowing and let out a final horrible, gut-wrenching cough, hacking up a branch-shaped hunk of congealed blood into the bucket.
“Pretty much all I can see, honestly,” he wheezed, struggling for breath as he raised an arm to lean on the table just to look up at the old man. “Don’t look at me like tgh- that. I chose this. I’ll get better. Eventgh- gheck- tually.”
Nesgon sighed at the young man’s willingness to destroy himself for the sake of others, willing one of the compartments on his armor to open and reaching into it to retrieve three autoinjectors. Three doses of restorative serum. “It won’t fix you all the way, but it’ll help,” he said as he walked over to the youngster and placed them on the table by his side. Gesturing to Vezkig with his right hand, he continued with “If you need more just wake him up and ask.”
“I don’t need your pity, old man,” the Accursed Bartender coughed as he watched Nesgon turn to walk out.
The Old Dragon rebutted with a simple statement of “You’re useless to me dead, you suicidal idiot.”
Though the old man couldn’t see, a weak smile cracked the thorned one’s bloodied grimace of a face, and he reached for one of the injectors. Jabbing it into his leg without hesitation, a brief flash of gold sparked through his markings as the nanites that flooded his system began their work.
As the door opened and Nesgon took the first step past its precipice, the thorned one’s voice resounded from behind, still gurgling with blood in his throat. “Ygh̴-̀ ̕your̵ r͝ight ͢arm.”
Stopping dead in his tracks, the old man turned to look at the Accursed Bartender once more. He knew well to listen when one of them suddenly spoke in that strange tone.
“It’s not a replica, is it? It really is one of the Karuta-clan’s dragon-heads, just like the skull-faced man’s left arm. Auntie told me about the Great Theft, how six of seven went missing.”
Nesgon chose to neither confirm nor deny, as he himself didn’t know what was the case. He suspected the Ecclesiarch may have obtained one of the legendary arms, but he wouldn’t have put it past the madman to have a fake one made. Instead, he simply filled in the gaps in the thorned one’s statement.
“...The thief was said to be an honored craftsman whose name was purged from the records as punishment, yes. As for Armless’s left arm, I don’t think it’s one of the six, despite its capabilities. Though perhaps...”
Nesgon’s gaze briefly leapt to Vezkig’s unconscious body, still splayed out on the table. The Accursed Bartender couldn’t see this thanks to his helmet. “It doesn’t matter. It’s a good arm, whether one of the six or not,” he said, immediately turning and going on his way. He had things to do now other than unraveling a centuries-old scandal.