With an inner sigh, he took another sip of his drink. As it went down a warm numbness spread through his chest, quelled the burning pain that constantly tried to consume his existence. “Very well,” he said. “I will send one of my chaplains to handle the transfer of administrative rights for one sixth of his district. If that’s everything, I have urgent business to attend to.”
The Thin One’s insufferable voice piped up. “There is still the matter of the Canyontown Reclamation Force, but you have already been briefed on the subject,” he said.
Orsha took another sip, this time to silence a rising growl from escaping his throat. “Yes, I’ve been briefed,” he rumbled through the torrent of steam escaping his nostrils. He’d been “briefed” on the matter in the same way an angered priest would brief an angry mob about a heretic. Some solid four hours of nothing but slander and blatant lies about the Machinist and the forces he had been assigned, directly from the very nobles that the Ecclesiarch wanted him to consider as siblings. Poison coated in a candy shell of concern, all pointless, for unbeknownst to the other Igrons, Orsha had been in close contact with the Machinist since the execution incident.
The stiff-faced, soft-spoken man that he was, the Machinist told him all about his district of the city, all about the underground tunnels to the other districts, the hidden bunkers, the sheer number of triple agents hiding all over it. The Machinist told him all about how valuable the loyalties of those immune to the Ruler’s Blessing were. He told him all about the perpetual state of tension Oasis City was under due to its multiple rulers and their ambitions, about the necessity of an outside foe to direct their scheming towards. Bound by the old codes of honor as they were, the siblings found more than enough gaps and technicalities to exploit for the sake of outdoing their political rivals - whether those rivals be their own siblings or nobles from other clans.
Orsha got up and walked out of the meeting, drawing a stone-faced gaze from the Seventh. He’d never seen their face or heard them speak out loud. When questioned, even the Machinist said the Seventh never showed his face, never spoke directly.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
He wished to do something, to help stabilize the situation in the city that he now had a part in ruling over. Nevertheless, he couldn’t. Not yet. He had started to set in roots, to build upon the Ecclesiarch’s work toward undermining the others, but he didn’t have nearly enough leverage. Whether the Machinist returned at all, Orsha would work as if he was dead. He’d seen the Twins acting in a quietly antagonistic manner toward the Thin One and the Big Sister, and their agents had even contacted his with outright offers of aid.
He couldn’t trust the reclusive Twins, not yet. Still, this great city could be reshaped to the ideals of the Archdrakes yet. If it didn’t…
It would burn.
Regardless of whether the flames came from inner conflicts or the so-called Serpent of the South.
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The assault rover continued to push its way through the arid sand, its patchwork plating impervious to even the most vicious sandstorm, its walker escort always following close by, spread out around the vehicle. Its passengers, antsy as they were, remained calm throughout the journey… At least, until the eyes of Armless’s still form came alive and began lazily shifting side to side. Sleepily, almost. His voice resounded in the same monotone as before, making it clear that it was his machine-self speaking.
“Emergency self-repair complete. Baseline functionality successfully restored.”
“Performing further diagnostics…”
“Attempting boot sequence...”
“Boot sequence successf-”
An unpleasant scraping noise sounded as Armless moved his head as if to shake it, causing a stream of black sand to fall from his neck. His form shuddered as he struggled against the casing.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Small cracks spidered across the surface near his knees, but it didn’t seem to budge.
“It seems baseline functionality doesn’t include enough strength to break this shell off,” the stone-skinned man remarked. “Why am I inside a rover, by the way?”
“We’re on our way to deal with the remaining Igron forces. If Vezkig hadn’t convinced the old man, you’d have woken up to a couple worship-addicted painting on you,” Fulgent quipped between bites of… Who-knew-what. Even she didn’t. It was some sort of preserved crustacean meat she found in a ration pack from who-knew-when. Before Armless could build up the focus to vocalize a reply, the Armored One shot back with a short, but accusatory question.
“Why are you like this?”
Fulgent grinned a grin of shark-like teeth. “The body or the attitude? First one’s thanks to Mr. Statue over there, second one’s ‘cause my family took great care to teach me proper manners.”
“Yet you seem to lack them.”
“Exactly.”
“What do you…”
One of the Deserter Chaplains cut in. “She’s from Clan Iktha. Probably wants to distance herself from the nobility as much as possible.”
Fulgent took another bite, her grin fading into more of a sneer as she confirmed with a “He’s not wrong.”
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A couple seconds passed, and the passenger compartment returned to silence. Rika remained oblivious to the exchange, as this assault rover was equipped with an entirely self-contained driver’s cockpit, likely salvaged from an entirely different machine.
A few minutes passed. He flexed again, this time focusing on his right knee and building up the strength over time, rather than trying to overpower the casing all at once.
Crack.
Crack.
Snap.
The casing broke around his right knee, fragments and black sand falling to the ground.
The thigh joint was next. “Focus…” he thought, drawing on what little power he could divert from repairing himself, channeling it towards his right thigh and the muscles around it. For whatever reason, he wasn’t receiving any energy from Apeiron.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Snap.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he lifted his right leg before putting it back down to maintain balance.
Over the coming half-hour or so, he forced his other limbs free in much the same manner - first his other leg, then his right arm. Or rather, his right shoulder. When he tried to make Apeiron move, it simply… Didn’t. Even trying to draw on it for power output yielded no result, and neither did attempting to override whatever may have been keeping it offline.
It simply didn’t function.
His right arm was no more than a bludgeon.
Replicating a sigh, Armless’s voice finally sounded again. It was just as weak as before, but still clear enough to be heard. “I… Might not be as useful as I would like to be,” he said, taking a deliberate step from the corner where he stood in to lower himself into the empty seat next to him.
Neither the Distorted nor Fulgent had any questions, and none of the Warriors in Full Casement dared to ask a direct question of Armless. So it was that the rest of the trip passed in silence.
----------------------------------------
Though it took a little bit to get a hang of the rover’s controls, Rika was thankful to whatever engineer bashed this thing together. Thanks to its downright sophisticated control systems, she could exploit her blessing to optimize a balance between speed and maneuverability given the environmental conditions.
She even managed to stop on a dime when, instead of the supply depot, over the horizon rose a circle of assault rovers, arranged into a makeshift wall, with sand plows up on their sides and used to cover the gaps. Before she could maneuver the rover out of sight, the in-vehicle radio came alive, a refined - no, downright posh - voice coming through.
“Unidentified vehicle, this is Elder Iorzan of Clan Iktha. We have anti-vehicle artillery trained at your position. Approach our gate no faster than twenty kilometers per hour and make contact or we will be forced to open fire,” he said with a practiced cadence befitting of a noble. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like he was lying - the rovers that made up the wall looked like siege models, equipped with high-powered accelerators designed to break through reinforced walls. Several of them were already pointed at their rover, and so she pressed down the acceleration pedal to begin the drive to the Igron Camp. She had driven ahead of the two walker squads assigned to escort them, and so as she drove ahead, she sent a radio transmission on their respective comms frequencies stating “We are approaching the enemy camp. Stay out of sight and do not approach until we send the order or until sundown.”
Afterward, Rika also activated the one-way PA system, which she expected would normally be used to order the passengers to exit the vehicle and charge. “They have guns pointed at us. I do not think they view us as hostiles. Put on your sandstorm cloaks. Try to cover your faces.”
Sandstorm cloaks were rarely used in these parts, but every rover came equipped with them. The reason was that only a little to the south of where Exile-town had once been, the winds could strip flesh from bone if one was caught in a sandstorm unprotected. Rika’s assumption that this rover also had sandstorm cloaks in its storage compartments was correct - three in total.
There was no argument to be had. “We won’t look suspicious,” the Deserter Chaplain with decorated armor said as he pulled one of the cloaks from an overhead compartment, unceremoniously tossing it over to Karzon. Though it took him a little to find which was the hole for his head, he slipped into the garment.
The Deserter Chaplain tried offering the second one to Armless, but the human refused, looking down at the hunk of nanolith that was his arm and shaking his head. “It wouldn’t work for me anyway,” he stated flatly, “not with this crust on me.” With a slight nod of acknowledgment, the chaplain instead tossed the second cloak to the Armored One. Her plating got caught on the fabric briefly, but she did the same for the other cloak. The third one went to the remaining Distorted. Fulgent didn’t need a sandstorm cloak, as she had printed herself a new cloak and wrappings when she returned to Canyontown after the battle. With her third arm folded away, her hooded cloak made her look like she just had some sort of concealed backpack or perhaps a deformity.
----------------------------------------
Though it was unfortunate that the transportation ritual misfired, Iorzan had three reasons to be relieved. First, they only lost a few dozen clanless mercenaries to the spatial distortion. Second, they found a supply depot relatively quickly, despite the fact they lacked proper long-distance navigation equipment. Third, what looked to be a few of the poor heretics forced to live on the edge of civilization had showed up, and it seemed they not only understood proper speech, but were cooperative.
With a smile on his face, the pale-scaled, lithe Elder strode out of his tent towards the “gate” of the camp’s makeshift wall. The gate was merely a set of three sand plows stacked atop each other and connected to a makeshift raising mechanism, powered by the rovers at either side. He was flanked by six of his most favored High Chaplains, all close friends of the Ikthas. All disfavored by the Igrons. Each of them was clad in heavily decorated Full Casement armor and equipped with the heirlooms of their families. There was no doubt in Iorzan’s mind that should these heretics prove to be hostile, or archdrakes forbid, allies to the accursed Serpent of the South, his bodyguards could subdue them in quick fashion. One of them even had a contingent of battle-slaves wearing Implanted Casement armor at his beck and call, a great status symbol.
Soon enough the bizarre, bashed-together rover drove up to the “gate”, its driver’s cupola having been replaced by what looked like the cockpit from an ancient aircraft, the driver not visible through the polarized polymer. He activated his radio and spoke once more, ordering the rover’s driver and passengers alike to “Disembark and step out of the vehicle. Leave any weapons you may have behind.”
In response, both the driver’s cockpit and the rover’s side doors opened. From the cockpit there stepped a female Warrior, taller than even some of his chaplains, her scales covered in a barbarically beautiful mixture of scars and bright yellow markings. She spoke not, merely taking up a stand in front of the vehicle as she seemingly waited for the passengers to step out. And step out, they did. From the left door of the vehicle there emerged a trio of Warriors in Full Casement. Two of them were unadorned and somewhat stiff in their movements, while one was decorated in what seemed to be the markings of some obscure clan, but natural in the way he moved with the suit on. From the right door, there emerged four individuals clad in sandstorm cloaks. The hooded faces of three of them were heavily covered in void energy exposure scars. The fourth - an exceptionally tall Builder or a very scrawny Warrior, going by his build - pulled his hood down low enough to hide his face. They didn’t seem to be struggling to move, which led him to believe their injuries were old. Nomadic scavengers, perhaps?