“Drink.”
This was the fifthteenth bottle. Or was it number sixteen? He couldn’t quite tell. A part of him wanted to question, to refuse, just for opposition’s own sake, to assert some fleeting sort of control. He bit the cap off, spat it out, and crumpled the bottle into a disc as he emptied it down his throat. The taste was there, the sensation of the liquid going down, but then there was nothing, as if there were some bottomless abyss in his stomach.
“Drink.”
At least it was a flavor he liked. Another bottle. Before the motone rumble could sound in his head again, he had already started on bottle number seventeen. Another. And another. Bottle after bottle, he slowly consumed every single bottle of stimmix in that crate.
“What now? Next crate?”
“Later. Now we sleep.”
“Wh-”
The world faded, and Asura’s body slumped to the floor, surrounded by dozens of empty stimmix bottles. From its back there hung a bulging sac of nanite-suffused biomass, engorged with stimmix, whose formation he had no way of noticing. Control of his own senses, held hostage by the capricious VI he tormented and enslaved only weeks prior.
No more was he the Machinist, Fifth of the Igrons. He was naught but a Shell of his former self.
Asura’s Shell lay there, the blister on its back slowly solidifying as the stimmix within it was metabolized and processed by arcane processes only known to Asura itself. Slowly, ever so slowly, the cocktail of nanites and biogel consolidated into a nightmarish bud of synthetic flesh.
Then, something startled Asura from its slumbering state.
HAWKING RADIATION BURST DETECTED
Even this far away, it was easily detectable. Asura willed the flesh-bud on its back to blossom. It was in fact four army, covered in black muscle and with an extra elbow each, their fingers tipped with black-stone talons. Most importantly of all, Asura had instinctive control over these arms, without the necessity for Shell’s cooperation or imprecise datacable puppeteering. Asura carried Shell out of the building, walking on its new arms as though some grotesque spider.
By the time Asura managed to reach the next building of the depot, the hawking radiation disappeared, with nothing but a brief flash of light over the horizon as evidence it was ever there. But Asura had managed to take some of its original sensors with it into this tiny Shell, and it saw that the light was no more than just the side product of a truly colossal void energy burst, one that disappeared just as abruptly as the hawking radiation.
“Only one thing in this desert strong enough to withstand the strain of anchoring a singularity,” Asura thought as it turned and walked in the opposite direction of the flash.
It had a different destination in mind, a well-known human ruin whose location it had extracted from Shell’s mind. The scale-skins thought it was thoroughly stripped of all useful salvage. The place had supposedly been a treasure trove of blacktech long ago, but now only held Even the hundreds of statues carved from the same black-stone as everything else, each with a unique design and a nameplate at its base, written in some undeciphered human writing.
Useless for the lizards as it was, Asura had an inkling that it would find what it needed there. And so the mad VI took off, carrying its still sleeping Shell. Those gangly arms carried it through the scorching sands as quickly as any rover, and soon it would find the place it thought to hold its salvation.
----------------------------------------
Skull-98’s walker quite literally bounced off the walls as she made her way through the ship’s corridors, its unnaturally flexible limbs lending its movement a flow that few organics or machines could match.
She soon reached the Vault of Truth, its monolithic doors wide open- As many walkers as had been removed, it still looked mostly full at a glance. Through the Vault, past row after row of walkers, and into the gantry bay. All of the gantries were occupied, with walker pilots milling about both in and out of their machines, some waiting for their turn and others comparing their machines or sharing outlandish ideas about what the fires of the void did to a person. In such short a time, a strange offshoot of Canyontown’s greater society was beginning to take shape, as if those eligible to be walker pilots shared some kinship that transcended clan or caste.
“Skull-98. Your walker says you have a message to deliver,” Acala’s voice hissed over the radio, derailing her train of thought. She could almost hear the machine’s conflict-averse, doting excuses about how it can’t substitute for the pilot in official matters and so on.
“It appears that, ah…” she began, “Well, the inner hull of the ship is on lockdown, sir.”
“Lockdown?”
“Send a copy of the error log.”
Of course.
“Yes, sir. I’ve sent a copy of the error log.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
There was silence for a few seconds. The symbols on G-Kaiser’s sword shifted from one pattern of nonsense to the next, immediately followed by an irritated hiss. “We’ll have to wait for Ouroboros on this, the system needs either a lot of time or a lot of power… Alright, you’re off duty for now.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Why does everyone insist on honorifics? We are not Truthseekers.”
“...Thank you, Acala.”
“Good. Now go, I’m busy.”
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Things had been very, very busy since the Battle for Canyontown. Nearly every able-bodied individual in all of Canyontown had signed up for combat training, and those who hadn’t were already trained. A substantial portion of the Town Hall was currently in the process of being converted into a close-combat training area, whereas the hidden tunnels inside the walls were being used for combat drills. The underground training areas previously used only by Truthseeker warriors were opened to the rest of the populace, and there was finally enough time to completely empty the armories and distribute all of the equipment within them.
Then, there were the weapons brought up from the depths of the ship itself. Upon examination, Nesgon quickly found that the weapons were all voidtech. Most of them were mass-production model graviton accelerators, with minimal void energy emissions - perfectly safe for anyone with an above-average tolerance to void energy.
Some, however… They were different. No ammo plume, no accelerator rails, just dataplug slots and a thrum in the hand wherever he held one, as if the gun wanted him to plug it in and fire it. The Old Dragon took a moment to examine the weapon in his hand, only for his radio to hiss and Vezkig’s voice to come through. “They’ve returned!” he yelled over the clattering of his feet on metal stairs.
He placed the gun back in its crate, turning to one of his Deserter Chaplains. “Do you still have your blessing?” he asked. The Chaplain nodded hesitantly, and Nesgon replied with “Find one of the Distorted and ask them to unload the guns.” before departing for the walkways.
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So it came to pass that the expeditionary force and their captured rovers gathered in the town square, drawing many gazes from both the townsfolk and the walker pilots alike. Among those gathered in the square to greet them were Vezkig, Red-eye, Nesgon, Acala without his walker, and even the Accursed Bartender, still visibly weak, but able to stand under his own strength.
The first to disembark were Fulgent and Ouroboros, trailing black sand with each step. Fulgent’s body was covered in inch-deep crevices of burned-out flesh, whereas Ouroboros looked… Pristine. His right arm was completely different in shape it looked like the plating of his arms had spread to cover a part of his upper body, but besides that, he looked completely unharmed.
Vezkig quickly noticed that it was the strange outer layer’s crumbling that was the source of the sand in Ouroboros’ case, as if all the energy strain and burnout he would’ve suffered had been placed upon this outer layer.
He began to speak to try and question Ouroboros about it, but for once, he stopped himself. “Gotta wait, tech questions gotta wait,” he thought.
“Status update,” Nesgon’s voice thundered from above.
----------------------------------------
It was Ouroboros that the Old Dragon looked to, and he gladly took the prompt. “We’ve captured a number of warriors in various states of voidburn,” he began, “so far they’ve shown the usual change of loyalties after being purged of the Ruler’s Blessing.”
He paused, briefly looking out across the rows of parked siege rovers, their doors opening one by one as Fulgent ordered the Iktha warriors who served as drivers to do so. “A few of the captured seem to…” Ouroboros said, trailing off as he observed.
“...Revere you?” Red-eye finished, utterly unsurprised.
“Unfortunately so. I think I heard them call me “Singularity-eater” a few times over the radio.”
The old man let out a rumbling laugh before gesturing for them to follow. “I’ll have them taken care of, we need all the people we can get,” he said as they walked. Up through the walkways, into a seemingly abandoned building, and into the tunnels inside the walls. Then it was through yet more tunnels and into the now-familiar bar’s back room, though this time, there was no hustle and bustle from the other side of the door.
The room had been cleaned through and through since they were last here, to the point where even many of the polymer floor and wall panels had been replaced with new, far sturdier ones. As they sat down around the table, Vezkig muttered that “Where’s the new bar anyway? Couldn’t find it yesterday.”
“They haven’t put the sign up yet, I can show you later,” Red-eye replied, reaching for one of the stimmix bottles and cracking it open. He was exceedingly cautious with his left hand, the mostly bare flesh underneath so pale it was almost transparent.
“Enough banter,” Nesgon rumbled as his eyes briefly scanned the room before returning to Fulgent, Rika, and Ouroboros. “I suspect the events that transpired at the depot went far beyond a simple search and destroy mission.”
The three nodded in unison. They took turns relaying their perspectives of what happened during the mission, minutes turning to hours and empty stimmix bottles piling up. Vezkig’s fidgeting grew continuously more noticeable, and when Ouroboros reached the part about his anchoring of Iorzan’s singularity, he finally burst. Only… He didn’t yell or exclaim, or leap onto the table. He slipped into his ice-cold, utterly calm state of self, which was far more attention-grabbing.
“How?” he questioned. “Assuming the strain of an anchoring reaction is proportional to the deviation from baseline reality you’re anchoring, negating even a miniature singularity would place more strain that stopping Asura’s punch, which nearly killed you. That can only mean...”
Ouroboros nodded. “The Dragonrider Casement shouldered all the strain and then disintegrated, yes. I believe I should be able to manifest it at any time, given a sufficient supply of nanites.”
Acala piped up with “Do you think the Armorer knew?”
“Must’ve known, he ain’t stupid,” Vezkig answered, then turned back to Ouroboros, a mad glint in his eyes. “‘Member how ye powered up the ship’s systems to get the walkers workin’?”
“For five minutes, yes. I’ll just assume you need me to do it again, and yes, I believe I should be able to withstand the strain of fully re-activating at least the vital systems.”
Vezkig cackled again, and Acala joined him with his croak-like laughter. For the first time, Nesgon exhibited genuine confusion. “Please explain,” he asked, but before either of the two thinkers could stop rejoicing, there was a flash of gold from the Accursed Bartender’s eyes as a brief gout of exotic particles rose from them. He coughed, retched, and reached for an empty stimmix bottle, spitting some blood into it.
His mouth contorted into a bloody smile, the sound of his prophetic voice sounded with more weight than any roar.
“O͟l͘d ͘D͢rag͜on wh͠o͝se̶ ̕v͡o̧i͘ce onc͏e͡ ̡moved m̕o̕un̶t͘ai͘ns̵,̧ ͜so҉on̨ a҉nothèr spi̢ŕe͏ ̵o̕f̢ ͠sto̶ne s͡h̨all ̷move at thy ͜comma͝nd͢.͡”͝