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Sand and Legends
54 - Aftershocks.

54 - Aftershocks.

After what seemed to have only been some half a minute, Amalgam’s voice sounded in Armless’s head, despite his having clearly commanded the VI to use instantaneous non-verbal comms. “Distortion Cannon charging sequence complete,” it stated flatly. Calmly. Though clear, there was the slightest bit of distortion to its tone. Wishing to confirm or dispel what he suspected to be the case, Armless chose to continue smashing through the army of rovers using Amalgam’s legs for a little longer while he questioned it, drawing on his own combat processing centers to save on time without further stressing the walker.

“Why not use non-verbal? Has your comms array been damaged?”

“Affirmative. Combat damage diagnostics suggest significant aftershock damage to energy infrastructure. Firing the Distortion Cannon to purge the energy buildup is required for further diagnostics.”

It wasn’t a surprise. Considering the earth-shattering force behind the six-armed war god’s punches, Armless had been entirely prepared to somehow continue fighting Asura himself if Amalgam had become non-functional during their battle. With a thought, he maneuvered the walker from its wild jet-powered dance of death into a spinning slide, smashing through half a dozen rovers before it slowed into a low kneeling position, facing in the G-Kaiser’s general direction after it had cut a line nearly straight through the assaulting force towards Canyontown.

He couldn’t fire in that direction, there were friendly walkers pushing through in his line of fire, and so he turned Amalgam’s torso nearly ninety degrees to the left, continuing to deter any approaching rovers by slamming its left arm to the ground and repeatedly firing its pilebunker, causing localized tremors strong enough to flip a rover.

Meanwhile, aiming the Distortion Cannon proved to be somewhat difficult. The elbow joint of Amalgam’s third arm moved in a somewhat jittery fashion, having been damaged in the fighting. Finally managing to wrest the disobeying limb into position after some effort, Armless willed the Oscillating Distortion Projector to begin its firing sequence.

Its jaw-like grippers snapped open, tongues of lilac lightning already leaping between them as they did so.

The drill-like projector emerged from within the limb, light already near the top of its spiraling groove as it began to spin, whipping up a drill-shaped distortion field around itself.

“What million fireflies flashed…” the skull-faced man thought, and so it was.

Fully charged, a serpentine maelstrom of shearing void energy ripped forth, shredding all in its path whether it be metal, flesh, or soil alike.

A thousand-thousand intangible blades, blending and mincing to shreds without quarter, polluting the soil beneath and air around with unstable void energy for days to come, carving a riverbed across the battlefield and even beyond it - reaching several dozen meters past the very rear of the attacking force.

In its wake, there followed uncounted flickers of short-lived ball lightning, a momentary show of lights in the wake of the all-consuming, snake-like distortion field.

The lights inside Amalgam’s cockpit faded and its third arm fell to its side, limp.

The whine of the graviton accelerator that powered the pilebunker on its left arm fell silent much the same, the stake immobile inside its housing after retracting.

Armless willed the three-armed titan to stand, and it did - slowly. Ponderously. Struggling against its own weight, its Graviton Manipulation Engine without power.

The small number of rovers that were near enough to notice but far enough to not be either knocked over by the tremors or caught in the maelstrom took notice, a good dozen of them moving in and beginning to focus fire on what they perceived to be Amalgam’s weak points. The globs of plasma splashed and fizzled harmlessly against its plating and even against the miniscule spots of exposed superstructure that could be found - even barely able to move, the unstoppable force could be an immovable object.

Left.

Right.

Left.

Right.

Amalgam’s voice bubbled up into Armless’s mind through the cables that connected him to the great machine. It was clear, but… Robotic. Lifeless. Even more dull than the very first time it spoke.

“Post-battle diagnostics complete. Strain-induced energy infrastructure burnout detected. Auxiliary processing centers have been disabled to minimize further strain as per Self-preservation Protocol. This unit will enter self-repair mode upon reaching a safe location.”

Left.

Right.

Left.

Right.

The wreckage of destroyed rovers crunched and cracked underneath the titan’s hoof-like feet as Armless guided it through the battlefield and towards the defensive line at the gates. The flow of advancing walkers continued still as they flowed out of the earth, through Canyontown, and out the gates. Noticing the struggling sluggishness of Amalgam’s walk, the Deserter Chaplain that was currently in command of the defenders sent a radio transmission, querying “Are you retreating?”

Armless responded simply, stating “Walker’s busted, need to stand it somewhere and disembark.”

“A-affirmative,” the chaplain stuttered into his radio before barking orders across other frequencies, prompting the line to open up further, allowing Armless to enter the proportionally small area between the defensive line of walkers and the walls of Canyontown proper.

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Facing toward the battlefield, he willed Amalgam to take a knee, finally stopping in one place. Its voice resounded in his mind again, stating “Safe location reached. Entering self-repair mode now. Beginning preparations for pilot disconnect, please wait…”

Armless felt two request pings. The first, a minor firmware update. The second, a direct access request to his self-repair infrastructure.

He approved both, trusting in Amalgam’s VI.

The firmware update took only a few seconds to install. The only data that came through was an encrypted data package and the mental image of a grasshopper, overlaid over an image of his lower stomach. He couldn’t tell what had changed - as far as he could tell, nothing. As this was happening, he felt a small amount of his own self-repair nanites being extracted, whilst a significant influx of Amalgam’s self-repair nanites flooded into his system in exchange.

He felt the cables that connected him to Amalgam coming undone, popping out of their sockets one by one, accompanied by the hissing of released gas and clattering of glowing-hot metal against the cockpit’s floor. The cockpit faded into view as he lost connection to the walker’s sensor suite, and he saw that a thick, black ichor was seeping into the cockpit through the seams, dripping from the ceiling and the freely-hanging datacables, pooling around his feet.

The only cable that still connected him to the walker, the largest of all, embedded in the base of his neck, unlocked and began to slide out of its socket, escaping gas hissing all along. Before it fully disconnected, however, he felt a small pulse of power draining from him. Amalgam’s VI came online for a brief split-second, only to send a short nonverbal message.

Metamorphosis Protocol transfer sequence successful.

Entering self-repair mode...

Ejecting pilot...

The cockpit ejection mechanism engaged, and before he could do anything, Armless found himself hurtling towards the ground and landing in the sand on his feet, breaking the ground in a small crater as Apeiron’s tremendous bulk slammed down.

Looking up at the walkers that made up the line, he finally realized just how tiny he was in comparison to a walker. From his perspective, he could still see over the field of wreckage, into the battlefield, and he saw that… They didn’t need him. The warriors of Skull Battalion were doing just fine. It didn’t surprise him in the slightest - he was glad the plan was working out, but… Something felt a little off. Two things, in fact.

As he stood there, re-orienting himself in space over the course of a couple seconds, the skull-faced man wondered - why did Amalgam not show signs of severe damage until he fired the Distortion Cannon? “The self-repair system would’ve been able to delay the decrease in performance,” his system’s deadpan voice suggested, completing the thought with “Overriding the safety limiters may have also caused issues with the diagnostic systems.”

The second thing was the lack of corpses amongst the wreckage of the enemy rovers. Though he couldn’t quite notice it while his mind was focused entirely on controlling Amalgam and destroying as many rovers as possible, it was now obvious - even from ground level, he could tell that there was an average of two corpses per wrecked rover, perhaps three if he took into account the inevitability of bodies too mangled to recognize. Armless took the first step to begin walking towards Canyontown’s gate to meet with Nesgon and decide on a further course of action, but as he did, a fist-sized glob of black ichor splashed on his right shoulder, crusting up into a strange pauldron-like shape near instantly. Focusing on his upward-facing sensors, he saw that the ichorous nanite slurry was beginning to ooze out of the cockpit even around the closed hatch.

Not only that, it was also beginning to ooze out of effectively every seam on the walker’s body - from its joints and the exposed musculature on its inner thighs, to the substantial crack on its domed head. He moved to get out of the way, but before he could, a torrential downpour of ichor burst forth from the cockpit, covering him in a tar-like crust and freezing him in place where he stood. The statue-like form of Armless stood there, motionless, for a solid three minutes as the man inside marshaled his strength to strain against the shell, and bit by bit, caused cracks to appear in its surface.

Stepping forward, he broke out and managed to shatter the rest of the shell, save for the crust that had formed around Apeiron’s greater mass. It was cracked all over, segmented from his attempts to break it off by moving the massive limb, but it still held on, nanites seeping into his right arm in a misguided effort to “repair” it to a form that had never existed.

He could feel them working, removing superficial damage from his right arm’s plating and recalibrating its surface-level power conduits, and as he began to walk towards Canyontown’s gates, he decided it would be easier to simply ignore the shell until it fell off on its own. The nanites would run out of power on their own, soon enough.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

A few minutes passed. His radio hissed to life as he made his way along the monolithic wall. It was Nesgon, this time. “Meet me at the top of the wall, I’ve some bad news,” the old man’s voice rumbled through the PDA’s rickety microphone. Armless felt like he was being watched, and sure enough, a glimpse toward his upward-facing sensors made it clear that the old dragon was up on the wall looking down at him.

Without getting in the way of the advancing tide of Skull Battalion’s walkers, the skull-faced man slipped through the gate and made his way across the walkways, scaling stairways at a brisk pace as he made his way toward the old dragon at the top of the left side of Canyontown’s walls.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

It was somewhat strange, how light yet voluminous the crusted nanite slurry covering his right arm was. In a way, it looked like the shiny-black shell of a beetle, having formed a smooth shell over the outer side whilst being segmented and heavily cracked on the inner side, whilst also not impeding the motion of Apeiron’s pincers.

As he walked, he felt the gazes of the townsfolk upon him, still filled with that strange mixture of apprehension of reverence. He wondered if he felt different because of them, or from the aftershocks of any burnout he might’ve suffered when he used the Aegis Shesha system to stop Asura’s punch.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

As he finally reached the top and approached Nesgon, he found himself entirely focusing on the old man’s helmeted visage, on the void energy that burned in his chest, on the dragon-head right arm that lay exposed with a livingmetal stake protruding from the accelerator at the bottom of its palm.

“I presume you’ve noticed the lack of enemy infantry inside the passenger compartments of the enemy rovers,” the old man said, and Armless gave a simple nod. He felt his vision strangely fading as both his and Amalgam’s self-repair nanites ebbed and flowed inside his body, taking to the task of analyzing and repairing what internal damage they could find. Nesgon continued on, explaining that “It has come to my knowledge that what could potentially be the majority of the enemy’s force was separated from the rest during the Igron’s attempt at a long-range transport ritual. We suspect they’ve been displaced to the North of our position, and have likely made camp around one of the nearby supply depots. While I have my own planned course of action, I still wish to consult you, considering you’re… Far more familiar with much of the arsenal available to us than I am.”

As Armless stood there, watching the old man speak, he found his senses fading more and more, becoming more and more unfocused as his self-repair nanites performed analytics, discovering more and more clusters of burned-out infrastructure and error message after error message began to pile up inside his head.

“...I think-” he began, only to collapse where he stood.