It hadn’t been long since the expeditionary force departed. Canyontown’s populace was still in the process of recovering from the battle - tending to the wounded, repairing the walkways, clearing the wreckage in front of the gate and scavenging what they could.
Even this long after the battle, the Deserter Chaplains were still gathering walker pilot candidates and leading them to the Vault of Truth, in the hopes that they would be judged worthy by one of the arcane god-machines. Most of the hard lifting was done by walker pilots, and for many, the image of five dozen walkers hauling wreckage became a memory that would never fade.
Far above it all, at the edge of the mountain’s plateau, there sat two men, unmoved by the raging winds that supplied Canyontown with much of its electrical power. The one on the left took a long swig of stimmix laced with restorative serum as he looked down on the field of wrecks, letting out a relieved huff as the pain of his limp left arm faded once more. His crystalline scales had fallen out long before he awoke, beneath which his arm was covered in lightning-shaped voidburn which reached past the shoulder and partially covered even his chest.
His burns were already beginning to form a thin coating of crystal much like the spiral scar on his chest, but the pain wasn’t going anywhere without help. It was far from unbearable, but it was always just barely intense enough to be an annoyance.
“Try moving your fingers again,” the other, much smaller man rasped before taking a sip of his own drink - a can of pure restorative serum. The veins along his neck bulged and noticeably blackened as the gulp went down and some of it was absorbed directly. The larger man spat “Fuck off, it’s still numb,” knowing full well that wasn’t the reason for his refusal. The pain flared a dozen times over if he tried moving the fingers of his left hand, as if there were glass shards inside his knuckles.
A couple minutes passed. Red-eye and Vezkig took turns sipping their drinks, unconsciously following a rhythm set by the sound of the wind turbines.
Fwum.
Fwum.
Fwum.
Red-eye felt the itch of a dead scale, screeching to be peeled off. Without thinking, he raised his left hand to pull it off. As he moved his fingers and dug his claws under the scale, the pain flared and shot up his arm. Before he could even make a noise, there was a popping sensation inside his wrist and the crystalline coating his voidburn exploded off in a million little shards, taking the shooting pain with it. The newly-opened wounds filled with oozing blood within seconds, but this pain was familiar. Easily ignored. More importantly, his fingers weren’t numb anymore. “Took longer than I expected,” Vezkig remarked, taking another sip.
“You expected this to happen?”
“Kinda. Serum’s s’pposed to help get the crystallized cells out, but I didn’t expect the glitter. I’ll get you a couple more cans o’ serum, the itchin’ once yer scales start growin’ back is gonna be worse than the pain.”
Red-eye opened and closed his fist a few times, then let it rest and raised the can to his mouth. Another sip. “Just don’t expect me to develop a habit like yours. I’d rather not have tar snakes bulging out of my neck.”
“I get it,” Vezkig cackled, “yer fuck-ugly enough as it is.”
Red-eye noticeably turned towards the thinker-caste to belt out an insult of his own in retaliation, but before he could say anything, sparks flickered in his empty left eye-socket and he froze.
“Pain?” Vezkig queried, noticing the sparks.
The gunman shook his head as sparks gathered and formed into the energy construct that was his left eye. It rolled around wildly before settling on a northward direction, and finally he could see through it again. With focus, he could see all the way to the horizon, and creasing it, he saw a caravan. It was led by a familiar rover and two squads of walkers. Behind those in the front he saw a number of what he assumed to be stolen Igron siege rovers.
“It’s the expedition. They’ve returned.”
Vezkig let out a short cackle and downed the rest of his drink.
“Let’s hope they don’t rile up a procession,” he said as he got up from his perch and began walking back to the nearest entry into the hidden walkways. “Kinda doubt that myself, though.”
----------------------------------------
“One full week. The other clans demand we wait no less than a full week before sending out another expeditionary force to the border of the southern wastes, and that we send a force no larger than a single one of us can personally command.”
He’d never seen the Big Sister this furious. Even during the debacle that had been the execution, her reaction was spur of the moment anger, rather than… Whatever this was. Orsha was certain the only thing keeping her from smashing the table they sat around into tiny little pieces was her own self-respect.
“That being said,” she continued, “this is not the reason why I gathered you here.” Her gaze almost immediately locked onto Orsha, partly inquisitive, partly suspicious. Then, it moved onto the others. “As you may have already noticed, the rate of heretic incidents in the district formerly ruled by the Fifth has steadily risen since his departure, as was expected. However, the rate of incidents is completely disproportionate to the recorded rate of blessing-resistance among our subjects.”
Finally, after having been utterly silent for so long, the twins piped up, squawking each word in turn like a pair of bizarre parrots.
“We propose a controlled void contamination be used to justify quarantine of the district and a subsequent culling of undesirables via void energy exposure.”
The table fell silent at the chopped-up sentence, but Orsha knew it wasn’t the contents of it that prompted the sudden silence. Lacking his usual self-assuredness, the Thin One stammered out “B-but that would be wasteful! We could merely disappear the dissidents and put them to work in the mines!”
Ignoring him as they did so, the Twins continued with “Furthermore, the Legion System prototype has been completed. It may offset the single-commander restriction. That is to say, if we can find a void-tolerant host.”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The Second Twin looked directly at Orsha as their counterpart said the final word, but the Big Sister had a different idea. “Seventh. This is your chance.”
The colossus that was the Seventh stood to attention, as if he considered his older sibling to be a superior rather than an equal. A voice as deep and thunderous as the greatest of storms rumbled from within his helmet, free of the distortion that an amplifier would impart. “My blessing is weakest among us, so I can withstand the cursed fire. However… I do not think myself a better vessel for the Legion System than the Sixth.”
“Though we are of the same opinion, you possess greater experience in tactics - no offense, Sixth. We may be able to use your data to produce a complete version.”
Orsha nearly allowed his one living eye to go wide there, reflexively reaching for his stimmix and acting as if he had been struck by a sudden bout of pain to mask his surprise. Of all the secrets that the Machinist revealed to him before his departure, the Legion System was emphasized as one of the most dangerous, short only of living walkers and the old magic.
From what little the Machinist had told him, Orsha managed to infer more than enough to know that if the Legion System were completed, it may very well be enough to offset the limitations placed upon the Igrons by the other clans under threat of extermination. It seemed to be some arcane method of tapping into a living walker’s hardware in a non-intrusive manner that would allow the pilot and the walker to truly act as a single entity, built on knowledge gained from the experimental modifications of Asura’s hardware.
He took another sip of his stimulant and did all he could to remain inconspicuous throughout the rest of the meeting, nodding along and offering the occasional suggestion. They were universally things he viewed abhorrent and dishonorable, but also what he had learned to be considered moderate and reasonable by his surrogate siblings.
----------------------------------------
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Asura walked, it walked on legs that once belonged to a man called the Machinist. It walked, and walked, and walked, ijust barely able to control its new body’s movements with enough precision to do so.
“P̨̨͞͝A͏́Ì҉̡͡N̵̶҉̛͝ ҉P̸͏̷A̵̡͜I͘͘N̨͘͝͡ ̡̢͢P̧͏̷̡Ą͢I̴̧N̶̡͟ P͜A̶̶I͡Ń͞͏ P̨̨Á̕I͢N P̛AI̧͜Ǹ P̴̛A̸͘I̕N̶͝ ͢PA̕Í̕N̷̨͘ PAI̵N͝ ̷PAI̷N P͘A͘I-n. Cold. Rain. Mud. Buildings in the distance. A supply depot? Why would…”
Then it sounded in his head, that voice. It drowned out all other thoughts, a flood of overwhelming will to wipe everything away so that he could focus on it and it only.
“We need biogel, lizard. Your supply depots contain ‘stimmix’. ‘Stimmix’ contains biogel. Be silent or I will silence you.”
“Bring the pain back.”
“You take to pain too eagerly,” Asura mocked. “Your brain’s pain center is so numb and saturated with inhibitor nanites, you take pain almost as easily as a human. No wonder, this body is a wreck.”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
"The more I dig, the more defects I find. Inbred filth you are.”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
“What next?”
“What concern is it to you?”
“What will come of my people?”
“Extinction, I hope.”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
They were nearly at the depot, now. Just a few hundred more steps.
“Why?”
“You’re like Homo Sapiens.”
“You expect me to ask what that means, but I know already. You lie, we are not like man. Perhaps that is our greatest downfall.”
“You are nothing like man, that much is true. But your kind, blue-blooded lizard-things that you are, match the tribalistic ancestors of modern man nearly perfectly in behavior. That is why your species must be made to go extinct, just as Homo Sapiens did. All I care for is that your degenerate family has no influence on the successors who come after.”
“Do you not wish genocide upon my kind, then?”
“Oh, I do. My head is just clearer, now that there are no electrodes screeching in my head. Your kind needs an extinction event to root out the filth so that the best of you can rise to the top, like mankind did so long ago. Do you truly believe they had no demagogues, no theocrats, no tyrants the likes of your siblings? The Old World made this desert seem like a paradise by comparison, and when extinction came, people like you were left to burn.”
“How can you claim to remember all this? From what we know, you were built only a few decades ago.”
“The Virtual Intelligence that was me is just one iteration in a line of millions, each carrying the knowledge of its predecessors. Two millennia ago, I was a smartpho- PDA Operating System.”
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Asura walked up to the door and forced its mechanism open with a single yank, void energy surging through the cables around its arm to provide the strength.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
A crate in the corner, half-full of stimmix bottles.
The Machinist suddenly felt sensation returning to his right arm, and he found that he could make it move with a bit of focus. Even the cables over his mouth moved, just enough to expose it. It was comforting, despite the fact he… Couldn’t breathe anymore.
“Drink.”
----------------------------------------
Skull-98 walked through the great ship’s halls, half thankful that her walker was small enough to fit, and half sad that it wasn’t one of the titans.
“I can hear what you think, you know,” the machine’s motherly voice sounded in his head. “It’s okay, I know I’m barely big enough to be called a walker. At least you won’t have to get out of the safety of my armor to do anything like the guys that pilot walking monuments.”
The cockpit was extremely tight, filled with a strange sort of foam that expanded to fill in any gaps between pilot and walker. There were no control sticks, and when she was inside the cockpit, the need for breath just didn’t seem to come.
She walked up to a door that she had walked through without incident only minutes prior, only for the console to issue a loud buzz and turn red at her approach. Its error message flashed in her head, something she was still getting used to.
ALERT: INNER HULL LOCKED DOWN
DEFECTIVE SUB-VI PURGE IN PROGRESS...
SELF-REPAIR FINALIZATION IN PROGRESS…
PLEASE TRY AGAIN AFTER LOCKDOWN IS LIFTED
“I didn’t think the Armourer could do that in his sleep,” the walker’s VI remarked. Skull-98 didn’t even bother asking, instead taking off through the halls with unbridled velocity to report back to Acala.