Ouroboros didn’t know, but he didn't need to ask the question. Fulgent took the initiative, stepping forward to command the men who were now subordinate to her by the primordial law of the old magic. She barked commands left and right with a gravelly tone not entirely unlike Ouroboros’, fully expecting the warriors of Clan Iktha to obey - she was, by all rights, the new Elder.
For a moment after she first yelled for the line to reform into five-man squads, there was confusion. Not silence or a refusal to obey, but rather a moment wherein the honorable warriors realized they would need to make use of dishonorable tactics to survive their predicament. A few hissed through their helmets, but all obeyed.
Skull-53 took the hint, transmitting “Allies it is then. Always liked the Ikthas. What now? The other clans’ forces know they can’t stop us, we could just walk out of here.”
“Fulgent has control of the Iktha forces. The Ruler’s Blessing will push the remaining warriors to try returning to the Oasis, even if it dooms them to die in the desert. Burn the blessings from as many as you can and terminate the rest, we can return later to gather the survivors. Rendezvous with us at the gate,” he said over the radio, transmitting on every friendly frequency in his registry.
Ouroboros knew it could be viewed as callous by those not aware of what the golden curse did to those affected, but it mattered not. He and his knew this was mercy, and that was enough. Fulgent turned to him as the warriors of Clan Iktha flowed to form a phalanx around them, and from the sea of bodies, there emerged two of the Distorted. They were battered and covered in a mixture of small wounds and patches of voidburn, but… Alive. Their faces - as non-expressive as the Armored One’s was - made it clear they had seen and heard everything. They clearly had questions to ask, but also knew this was no time for explanations.
Before Ouroboros could begin trying to form a plan of approach, Fulgent took the lead. “Get out of my phalanx,” she barked, “you’re useless behind the lines.”
He could feel the Dragonrider Casement crumbling off his body with each passing second - his legs were completely exposed up to the knees by this point, even the leg-blade on his right had fallen to dust. Still, he felt no weakness, no burnout. Despite what he had done moments prior, not a trace of the colossal strain had been laid on him.
With a nod, he willed his thrusters to ignite and jumped over the mass of warriors that surrounded Fulgent. As he did so, he saw them flooding in to fill the empty space. One of the few surviving Iktha Chaplains offered up his weaponless arms to Fulgent, lifting her up.
Partial functionality restored to “Aegis Shesha” Module.
Projector offline, energy infrastructure functional.
Trailing lilac lightning and black sand, Ouroboros crashed through the roof of a tent and directly into the fireplace in the center, sending embers and ashes flying everywhere. There was a group of six warriors around the fire, frantically slotting new synthfiber bundles into their wide-open suits. Their helmets all lay on the ground, and as Ouroboros swept his surroundings, he saw the golden light flare in their eyes before the men it was puppeting could even know what was happening.
Ouroboros quickly dropped into a low stance, howling “Burn and be liberated!” as he did so. He funneled void energy through his voicebox, producing a smoke-filled gout of voidfire as he spun around on his left heel. Two of them froze up as the miasma engulfed them yet remained standing. One dropped dead from shock where he stood, motes of gold rising from his body as he fell. One had the clarity of mind to pick up his gun and start firing, sending slugs ricocheting off of Ouroboros. The sixth just reached out in a pain-driven rage, trying to grapple him with a gauntleted hand.
Left-handed grab. Squeeze. Crunch. Crack. Metal collapsing, bones cracking. Focus, channel into the hand, release. Lilac sparks. Pained hissing. Gold flashing from the eyes and mouth, purple flashing from the markings as they burn away.
Turn to the gunman. Two steps, grab, squeeze. Focus, channel, release. More sparks. More hissing. More flashing.
Before he could turn to leave the tent, a group of passing-by warriors came flooding in, the ruler’s blessing shining in their eyes so brightly it trailed exotic particles as they moved. They moved with an erratic yet synchronized swiftness, as if the golden curse knew what was happening and this was its form of self-preservation. They opened fire quickly and accurately, focusing fire on center-mass as they had been trained. They would’ve been guaranteed victory, were they faced with one of their own.
Ouroboros didn’t mind the thumb-tip pieces of metal pinging off his skin.
Focus.
Channel energy to the voicebox.
Release.
“Burn and be liberated.”
Voidfire.
Fog.
Screaming and hissing.
Two more dead on the spot, the rest out of commission for the time being.
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Karzon woke up wracked with terrible pain, blood oozing from his scars, mixing with sand and burnt-out flesh to create a thick paste. He was… Inside a cockpit. A surprisingly spacious cockpit, one with a strange harness that hung from the ceiling instead of a seat. From where he was on the floor, the cockpit itself looked to be big enough to fit multiple warrior-caste.
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As he struggled to move his head, he saw a female thinker-caste face poke into the door. Her face was nearly black, so extensive were the burned-out markings. “Bet you had a helluva blessing ‘fore y’got burnt,” he blurted out in his near-death stupor. Her face wrinkled up, and she jabbed him in the neck with an autoinjector. As she did so, he noticed a Skull Team patch, sewed into the breast of her surprisingly clean shirt.
“Think before you speak, dumb fuck,” a voice chimed in his head.
“It was self-inflicted, I was resistant to the Ruler’s Blessing. I’m Skull-9 by the way, you’re welcome for the rescue.”
“Where are we? Wgh- What happened?”
“Inside a sand dune just outside the depot camp. My walker’s a walking sensor array with a cloaking system, so here I sit. You ran out of the camp real weird and collapsed at the foot of the wall.”
“You kept fighting until the strain made you pass out. I carried you out before my spectre dissipated. You’re welcome,” a different, wizened voice sounded.
Karzon took a strained breath and allowed himself to relax. He felt the warmth of the restorative serum spread through his body, though he couldn’t tell how much longer it would be until he could move properly. So it was that he just sat there, watching the screens. Then, it happened. A pillar of light shot up into the sky from the center of the crater, briefly illuminating everything in sight in a kaleidoscope of greens and purples that made the eyes hurt. An alarm sound echoed, and big red letters flashed at the bottom of every visible screen.
HAWKING RADIATION BURST DETECTED
A few seconds passed.
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One-hundred and fifty-seven.
No matter how engrossed in the flow of combat Rika became, she never lost count.
With a blade such as this, one that wouldn’t dull or break upon a full casement’s plating, the only thing limiting her was her own strength and endurance.
And… Unfortunately, that very endurance was very, very close to its limit. Were she fighting on equal footing, she could keep going for hours more. Not here, and not now. Her only way to compensate for the overwhelming numbers - her blessing - was reaching its limits.
She had made heavy use of hit and run tactics, hiding in nooks and crannies to give herself time to recuperate from each burst of speed. Even so, she felt the reserves of her strength waning.
At best, she had enough strength to flash-forward a few dozen meters or cut open a chaplain. Moreover, it didn’t help that wherever Ouroboros stepped, the ground was tainted with void energy for seconds at a time - moments for anyone else, but a significant span within the context of self-acceleration. She didn’t want to find out what would happen were she to step into any of these contaminated areas while accelerated.
As she was now, Rika was hiding inside one of the many rovers making up the camp’s walls. If she peeked out of the one-way glass window, she had a clear sight line to the defensive line around the crater. She reached into a pocket, grabbing around for the metallic cylinder within, pulling it out, and forcefully stabbing it into a soft spot on her forearm. A hard, black crust formed on the skin around the injection site, only to fade moments later.
It wouldn’t help with the exhaustion of her blessing, but she hoped it would serve to protect her from the worst of it when she would inevitably have to leave her hiding spot. A few seconds passed, and those turned to a minute, then two.
Then, there was a pillar of blinding light in unearthly colours that made the eyes hurt. Her pupils contracted just in time for her to see a vaguely man-shaped blip of lilac light fly up over the camp, only to come crashing down towards the crater.
More light, then nothing. A monstrous walker with a shredder for a head and arms for legs came bounding into her field of view, stopping only short of the Iktha line. She recognized it as one of the walkers assigned to escort them here, only covered in considerably more blood and viscera. A few seconds passed. Her radio hissed, and through came the voice of Ouroboros. “Fulgent has control of the Iktha forces. The Ruler’s Blessing will push the remaining warriors to try returning to the Oasis, even if it dooms them to die in the desert. Burn the blessings from as many as you can and terminate the rest, we can return later to gather the survivors. Rendezvous with us at the gate,” he said. The walker bounded away from the line, then it began to stir and reform into a battle formation, beginning a slow firing advance towards the gate.
A humanoid figure in unfamiliar armor flew out of the formation, trailing a familiar shade of lilac. From the glimpse she got, though it lacked the huge arm-cannon and the rest of its body was covered, the figure had Ouroboros’s left arm. It had to be him.
“He will keep them busy,” she thought. She was right.
Soon enough, they would be on their way back to Canyontown.
The only thing in question was the number of corpses left in their wake.
----------------------------------------
In the depths of the desert, a crippled war god crawled on through the sand, its shattered mind too driven with anger and hatred to accept the possibility of its impending death.
Its body on the verge of total system failure, hardware-level self-preservation protocols kicked in. However, even these protocols had been twisted by the ignorant techno-arcane tampering of the Igrons.
Asura rolled over onto its side, and died. The musculature on its chest was stretched open by the cockpit hatch, and from this torturous womb poured forth a deluge of black ichor, carrying with it a cocoon of datacables and congealed nanite solution.
It lay there under the seething sun for days, slowly turning to black sand. Then, one fateful morning, from the shell of black sand there burst a thing as twisted as the war-god that birthed it. Its shape was covered so thoroughly in repurposed datacables and slick nanite solution that it no longer resembled an organic life form, but rather an assemblage of snakes made to walk on two legs.
It took a twitchy step towards the rising sun, then another.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
A pair of terrified eyes stared from behind the coiling cables.
“A passenger in my own skin. No sensation, no control. This is no existence. I long for the peace of endless paiN̢ P̶AI͘N ̢P͞A̕I̵Ń P͞A̡IN P͟A̶͝I̷͘Ņ̨͜ ̛͜PA̶̛I͢N ̴PAÍ̶́N͟͠ ̴PA͝Į͡҉Ņ̸̵ ̸͝P̴̀A̧̨Ì̡Ņ͡ ͢P̷A̵̛IN̶̶̡ P̸̧̨͠͡A͟͝I͢͏̷N̡̢ ͏̸͡P͝҉̀Ą̀́͡I̡̛͝͝Ņ̷̛̛͝ ̷͜͠P̵̴͟͞A͜͜I̕͟͞Ņ̶̡ ̢̡P̴̷̕͘͠A̵̛I̵̧͠Ǹ̡ ̴̴͟͝P̀͝A҉̛̀͜I̶̕͞N̢̢̛͝ -”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Asura walked.