The crowd remained silent, with Rika standing behind him, infinitely more tense than the recoil springs in their glorified varmint guns. Armless dug deep into his mind, dredged up a faded visage of what once was. The sound of distant guns, the raging inferno of Terra's core shining beneath his feet. The sensation of the needle penetrating his skull, the flash of searing pain as a ravenous swarm of nanites ripped his nervous system to shreds and replaced it with themselves, neuron by neuron, cell by cell. The centuries spent aboard the Breaker of Dawn as little more than a ghost in the machine. The speech given by the last of the seven just before they made planetfall.
His voicebox hissed and crackled, power output beyond its intended specifications routed to the module. Thus spoke the gun-armed man:
“I burned my body in the furnace of science and industry, my soul as tinder for the flame. My blood to oil the chains, my bones to stoke the embers. In the inferno I forged myself wider shoulders to bear the weight of the world with. The mortal man that I once was has died, but I am still no more than a man who knows he is free. So dig deep within yourselves. These fanatics think of you as weak, as no more than potential servants. How long have you withstood their incessant attacks, and for what purpose? To be snuffed out, made into slaves? No, I refuse. This day, you do not bear the weight of the world alone. This day, we build ourselves wider shoulders from the bones of all those who would seek to encroach upon our freedom! And should the very stars in the sky become our enemy, we will rend the heavens themselves asunder!”
A sudden, thunderous noise erupted before him. The cacophony of nearly two hundred individuals roaring in unison, raising their fists and guns to the sky. The noise was such that he felt the ground under his feet shuddering. Perhaps he'd gone a little over the top, but alas. Might as well live up to their expectations. When the roaring quieted down, Rika thundered from behind him once more.
“NOW, TAKE UP FIRING POSITIONS! THE RAIDING PARTY WILL BE HERE ANY MOMENT. THAT INCLUDES YOU AS WELL, YOUNG ONES. THE TIME FOR TARGET PRACTICE HAS PASSED," she roared. Soon, the crowd dispersed and people distributed across the walkways on the town walls and the roofs of buildings, Rika leaned in and spoke in a low growl, one that bystanders wouldn't hear. “Most of them will be on the walls. Us warriors will fight alongside you. We will stay out of your way, unless you command otherwise. Vezkig put a radio in your mask. Your callsign is Skull-one. Do not make me regret this.”
She didn't wait for him to respond, walking ahead to join the group of warrior-caste individuals which was forming just outside the gate. Armless could see her weapon still in its holster on her right hip - some sort of short, bulky firearm. He followed in her stead, and the nearly four-dozen musclebound titans parted to let him through to the front line. Around a dozen of the warriors formed up into two defensive lines to block off the gate, while the rest scattered into four-man groups outside the gate. Each group consisted of two individuals with slug-throwers, one with a pulsed energy projector, and one with… A shotgun? They looked like shotguns. Short, squat, bulky and mean, with cleaver-like bayonets and various tally marks. As they took formation, Armless saw that those with energy weapons and shotguns had put on sturdy-looking earpieces, somewhat strange in how they sat on the head due to the fact those of the warrior-caste had ear-holes just behind the jawbone.
Rika joined the squad which formed around Armless. Two tattoo-less warriors stepped out from the group, one with a utilitarian magazine-fed shotgun. The other had a truly antique mass-reactive livingmetal graviton accelerator, this one in the form of a long rifle. The thing was so old, its ammo plume had grown out from inside the casing and taken over, altering the simplistic design into a mixture of organic curves and bladed feathers, the muzzle resembling a savage beak. If its owner had any experience with the weapon, he would be a valuable asset.
In the end, they formed into a total of nine four-man squads, arranged in a formation of two rows. The first had five squads, the second three, and at the front was Armless' squad. He could tell there was logic to the layout - the biggest, most heavily tattooed specimens were in the front row, while the smaller individuals made up the defensive line at the gate. The radio in his mask hissed and came to life, a hiss of a voice coming through. “This is Wall-nine, come in Skull-one. What is the battle plan? Over.”
He responded, falling into half-remembered jargon like an old pillow. “This is Skull-one, I hear you loud and clear. Stay on the defensive until we create an opening. Over.” After a few seconds, his radio crackled once more. “Understood,” hissed the same voice from the other end.
They weren't anywhere near a professional level of coordination, but it was better than nothing. Armless was certain he wasn't a professional, at least not as far as radio communications went.
And so they stood there, waiting and preparing. Some, double-checking their guns. Others, simply standing at attention. Rika was entirely calm, serene, not even having bothered to unholster her gun. Armless' other squad members were attentive to a fault, their aim snapping from one bit of shimmering air in the distance to the next. He himself was… Uneasy. He'd sent an energy charging command to Apeiron thrice over by now, but the gun remained dormant. No error code, no notification, nothing.
Twelve minutes in, something began crowning the horizon. Something that kicked up a large dust cloud, something that was approaching… Not as quickly as a vehicle convoy should. It was a solid fifteen more minutes before the convoy became close enough for him to discern the shape of the convoy - a wide wedge of warriors, perhaps three lines thick, followed by an uncertain number of additional lizardmen. At the back of the convoy, he spotted a tall, slow vehicle, draped over with large sheets of light, tan fabric. It was swaying back and forth, and so he deducted it must have been either poorly constructed or simply in a state of disrepair. Apeiron began to glow a little brighter, and he could feel its energy flowing into his body, invigorating his musculature and subsystems. Twenty-three minutes after the initial sighting, the convoy was approximately six kilometers from their position, for whatever reason having slowed down to a crawl. Then… His radio crackled to life. And so did everyone else's, if the synchronized reaction was anything to go by. The barkeep's voice came through, tinged with regret. “This is Elder-one. All attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution have failed. All defenders, engage the raiders at will and stay out of Skull squad's line of fire. May the Archdrakes watch over you.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
With a click, his voice disappeared, and Armless saw all those around him take up battle-stances. Guns raised, backs straightened, steely gazes peering at the approaching enemy force. And approach, they did - only seconds after the town elder made his broadcast, the convoy sped back up, and continued speeding up to more than twice its original speed. Armless estimated them to be approaching at a solid forty kilometers per hour. By the time they breached the single-kilometer range, the first bullet pinged off his mask. At this range, he could easily see more specific details, even without the enhanced performance granted to his sensors by the additional power output from Apeiron. The warriors in the front lines were all clad in rough, heavy plating on their torsos and lower limbs, though it was not visibly bolted into their bodies. He wagered there were seventy, maybe eighty of them, in majority armed with a mix of slug-throwers and rugged, bulky… Katanas? The larger, more powerful-looking individuals were carrying hunks of metal in addition to guns. They looked unceremoniously beaten into a rough approximation of the single-edged sabre, sharpened, and put through haphazard selective heat treatment to replicate a hamon pattern. All the while, he could feel slugs pinging off his mask and torso. If nothing else, at least those underpowered guns were accurate.
One of his comrades was hit, hissing in annoyance more than pain as the slug bounced off his scales, and those in the front line equipped with slug-throwers returned fire. After a few seconds, he expected the ballistic fireworks to let up, for the riflemen to reload, but they didn't. Instead, their tattoos began to slowly light up, an amber glow smoothly flowing down their arms and into their weapons. Barrels cooled, ammo gauges on magazines which had them stopped and reversed, indicating that new ammunition was somehow being created inside the magazine faster than it was being depleted. Their bullets flew straighter, their guns fired more rapidly. From a steady rhythm, to a feverish staccato. Those with energy projectors, on the other hand, raised their free hands. Violet light sparked across their skin, down their arms, between their fingers. The very fabric of the world before them twisted and reshaped, dust and soil pulled from the ground and accelerated forward. Artificial gravity fields - both offensive and defensive simultaneously. They took aim, and their weapons belched globules of superheated, orange plasma, moving relatively slowly in comparison to the bullets.
Soon enough, the convoy came to a complete stop a few hundred meters away, those in the front lines continuing their firefight - instead of reloading, they exchanged empty weapons for full ones with those in the line behind them, who seemed to channel the same amber light to reload the weapons and continue the process. Those armed with energy projectors handed them over for cooling, rather than reloading, their hands and forearms visibly calloused and scarred by burn scars.
More undersized slugs fell to the ground in front of their defensive line. Apeiron continued to glow. From a quiet hum, to a loud whine. From a faint glow, to a shining light within the barrel. His radio hissed and crackled, receiving an unencoded broadcast on multiple frequencies. He could clearly see one of the lizardmen in the convoy speaking into a jury-rigged microphone - a small, weedy looking thinker with bulging eyes, his voice appropriate to his appearance. High-pitched and squeaky, not unlike the noise an angry toad makes, it dripped with an unbearable sense of smug arrogance. He was stood on an elevated platform, connected to that tall vehicle in the back. “Cease hostilities immediately and surrender to us the homunculus, the heretic Vezkig, and no fewer than thirty work-capable individuals. If you meet these conditions, we may yet consider leaving your town unharmed. However, heresy against the legacy of the many-limbed ones shall not be tolerated any longer," he squeaked into the radio. He wore an armored suit too well-made for him, with immaculate interlocking plates of polished silver, richly etched with complex imagery of dragons. His scalp was covered in elaborate, yellow tattoos, superseding even Rika's in complexity.
Armless had just about had enough by the second sentence. He dipped his fingers into the waters of his mind, his left eye blinking out for but a moment as he relayed a more complex command to Apeiron. “Apeiron, switch firing mode. Unstable. Positive polarity. Crystallized. Mass-reactive," he commanded. “Firing mode recognized: Punisher Lance. Ready to fire," chimed his robotic inner voice. The whining noise rippled and fluctuated, turning to a chittering whirr. He raised his arm. The light inside the barrel collapsed into itself. Time slowed to a crawl as the burst of energy supercharged his systems for a split-second. A glimmering, one-and-a-half meter jagged spear of lilac crystal flew through the air, faster than human sight, faster than sound. It shattered the sound-speed barrier four times over, soaring above the heads of those on the front-lines, trailing a path of shimmering lilac energy. A metallic slam. A flash of yellow. The lizard dodged it. Blue blood was leaking out of his nostrils, his ear-holes, from within his armor, he was breathing heavily and struggling to stand. But he dodged it. He turned his head to gaze at the spear, which was now impaled roughly three quarters of its length into the vehicle that his platform was attached to, exactly at his head height.
A spark of blazing fury rose in his eyes, and he raised the microphone in his hand to his mouth, prepared to scream an order. A resonant, crystalline ringing resounded from behind him, a pulse of lilac energy flashed from the lance. His tattoos lit up a much dimmer yellow, and he attempted to leap off the platform. The lance exploded into crystalline shrapnel, showering the entire front line in shards and impaling him in the back, shredding his armor. He became as though a gruesome hedgehog, more blue blood bursting out of his tattoos and the seams in his armor as he struggled to accelerate himself. The world was like molasses, and the Word-bearer's dominion over his own speed meant nothing in the face of that accursed light.