He managed to choke out his final words with his radio transmitter set to all frequencies. “The walk-," squeaked the dying knight. His subordinates let out a deafening roar in perfect unison and charged forward. The defenders on the walls finally opened fire, armed with heavier, bolt-action slug-throwers. They were still quite weak, but they were better suited to the longer ranges at which they engaged the enemy. The frontline shotgunners flashed yellow and burst forward at incredible speeds, slamming into the Truthseekers' frontline. Their shotguns roared a symphony of shrapnel and napalm, stripping flesh from exposed limbs as they crossed blades with the raiders that had them. Their swings were fast but reckless and over-committed, and so the shotgunners proverbially ran circles around their opponents, picking apart their defenses and morale bit by bit. Energy specialists redirected and strengthened their localized gravity wells, quite literally flying into the air by falling upwards. They flew over the battlefield, raining plasma down on the raiders. All the while, the riflemen steadily advanced forwards with nerves of steel. They shrugged off bullets and the occasional plasma bolt, for they were warriors. Even without fancy armor, they were warriors. Their tattoos shined a bright orange, and some sort of energy field manifested in front of them. It was shaped like… The barkeeper's face, twisted into a defiant scowl, fangs bared.
The members of Skull-squad had no choice but to meet expectations. And so it was that Armless took on the leadership position that Rika expected from a mythical warrior. Thankfully, his radio was a little more sophisticated than he expected, as when he turned to look over the others in his squad, they were already assigned codenames on his heads-up display. Rika was Skull-2, the shotgunner was Skull-3, and the one with a graviton accelerator was Skull-4. “Skull-2, stick with me and watch my back. Skull-3, pick off stragglers. Skull-4… Do as you see fit.”
The Marksman's eyes lit up with the hotblooded flames of youth, and he gave a single nod. He ran off into the fray and just like that, he was gone. Then, the sound of an anvil being struck resounded, and metal spikes exploded from a Truthseeker's back, impaling another that he was fighting with back-to-back. Another anvil-strike, another dead Truthseeker. On and on the youngster went, sliding and rolling through the battle-lines, picking out targets with calculated malice, and grinning all the way through it. It was as though he was a bird who'd never been allowed to fly until now.
Despite the numbers not being in their favor, the defenders were not the ones being pushed back. With their leader dead and reloaders crippled by void energy exposure, the raiders were clearly rattled and struggling to keep their cool. They weren't used to someone using such dishonorable tactics, and didn't know how to respond but to keep fighting. Armless would've normally used more efficient, area-of-effect attacks, but he couldn't. He couldn't risk subjecting his allies to void energy exposure. Not to mention, he had a strong feeling he'd need something other than a gun to defeat whatever that vehicle was. The lance had enough power behind it to go through multiple buildings, and the armor on that thing stopped it dead. With the raider's lines breaking down and exposing the vehicle's lower portion, where the fabric didn't cover it entirely, Armless didn't see wheels. He didn't see tracks, no jets or even a hover-drive. He saw legs. Sleek and angled armor, streamlined and self-contained thrusters, twisted and sullied through abuse and lack of maintenance. He didn't know where the Truthseekers got it, but they brought a battle-walker.
He delivered a command to his gun, hoping it would - hoping it could - do as he requested. “Apeiron, switch firing mode. High-power. Stable. Negative-polarity. Crystallized. Melee. High-precision.” It took a few seconds, but he got a response. A bright light shone within the barrel, Apeiron's hum built up to a whine. The light collapsed, and the gun fell silent, its two massive grippers retracting all the way back, ready to strike. “Firing mode recognized: Pilebunker. Ready to fire," the voice chimed. “Apeiron, divert remaining power to locomotive systems," he commanded again.
The familiar lilac glow ran up his arm and over the rest of his body, nourishing and charging his musculature. He pushed his foot into the ground and leapt forward. Time slowed down, and he saw the battle unfold. An elaborate symphony of duels and tag-team fights, thrown into disarray by the dishonorable tactics of Skull-squad. The slippery rifleman with a rifle that turned lizardmen into metallic hedgehogs. The amazonian powerhouse that piledrived and suplexed warriors head-first into the ground, breaking necks and rupturing major arteries with surgical precision and inhumanly fast jabbing fingers. The savage tactician that somehow kept track of sixteen different firing vectors as he meticulously picked apart three separate squads of men with a shotgun and half a dozen mags of slugs.
He wove his way through the chaos in a zig-zag pattern, coming to an abrupt stop multiple times when someone got in his way. When it was an ally he merely changed direction, but when it was an enemy, he did the obvious. He killed. Each time he would've collided with an enemy, he made Apeiron's fang-like grippers fire forward and hold the victim in a crushing grip, before driving them through with the crystalline pilebunker. In some cases, he intentionally pulsed additional void energy through the lance to make absolutely sure the target was incapacitated, as he knew warrior-caste lizardmen could recover quite consistently from the wounds he was inflicting. Thusly he moved through the fight, bobbing and weaving, starting and stopping, wounding and killing. His target was the walker, and whoever was inside the cockpit. The machine wasn't active, so he hazarded a guess that it was the Word-bearer that would've activated it as an intimidation tactic, a vulgar display of power.
With a final leap, he landed on the platform the Word-bearer once stood on. At first he ignored the corpse, ripping at the fabric. Behind the fabric was solid armor with a visible seam bisecting it horizontally, and a scanner-lens set in the metal - the hatch of a cockpit. This must've been a recon walker. He attempted to wedge his fingers into the seam, exploiting his left arm's titanic sustained strength to try and force the hatch open. He went on like this for a few seconds, until the mechanism creaked. The Word-bearer jolted awake, but kept low so as to appear dead. Despite his condition, despite his tattoos having completely burnt out, he looked ecstatic. He stared into Armless' eyes with fanatical devotion, his voice weak and shaky, barely the squeak it once was. “Y-your mashrrgk-," he coughed and sputtered. “Th-take it off. The machine will rh-rhe-rhehrrgh-," he sputtered again, coughing up a blue mass of congealed blood. Once more, he gathered his strength and spoke, barely a high-pitched hiss. “It will recognize you as one of the holy ones. Please...” The ego, the malice, the bombast, it was all gone from his voice. And so, Armless reached up to his face. The mask hissed as its locking mechanism released, and it came off. A hopeful smile spread across the Word-bearer's face.
Armless turned to take a closer look at the scanner-lens. Before he could do anything, it sprung to life and fulfilled its purpose, scanning his face. He received a comms request. He approved it. A weak, high-pitched robotic voice sounded in his mind. “Unit AIM-P T-228-89. Administrator privileges detected. Request diagnostics," it requested. He mentally approved it once more. The hatch released and slid out of the way. The platform he was standing on retracted, pushing both Armless and the Word-bearer into the walker's cockpit. The hatch closed behind them almost instantaneously.
He found himself in a cockpit surrounded by screens. It was full of dataplugs and hanging cables, joysticks and jury-rigged keyboards haphazardly connected to dataports intended for mind-machine interfaces. A fuzzy sense of familiarity floated to the surface of his mind. Before he could reminisce any further, the Word-bearer coughed up another blood-loogie and pulled himself into an upright position, giving Armless another hopeful stare, his face plastered in a toothy, froggy grin.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He wheezed with each breath, but somehow, the lizard didn't seem at all upset that he caught a load of shrapnel as big as his arm in the back, even if the crystal had already decayed into nothing by this point. He didn't even seem upset that he'd likely never be able to use that incredible speed again.
“At last, we can speak privately.”
The frog-like lizardman before him wore a facial expression that made him think of the phrase “grin and bear it”. The front of his armor covered in his own blood, the back of it completely shredded. He was leaning against the inner wall of the cockpit for support. Armless took up a slightly less awkward sitting position in the spot where one would usually sit in order to pilot the machine. He would've questioned the lizard, but as before, he was interrupted. It must've been the hiss of static that his voicebox let off just before he spoke. The lizard still sounded like an angry squeaky toy, though a liquid gurgling had crept into his voice. “Before you ask, the High Ecclesiarch's right hand used his gift to tap into my comms. The only way to free myself was-"
The Word-bearer broke into another bloody coughing fit. He almost doubled over as he hacked up a hunk of congealed blood, molded into the shape of his airways. It fell out of his mouth and flopped onto one of the jury-rigged keyboards below. He took a deep breath before continuing to speak, his voice much clearer and his breathing much less labored. “-either death, or severe void energy exposure. I felt your weapon severing his grip on me. The shockwave traveling across the link. The pain splitting his mind. I may speak freely, now. The others, not so much," he pondered, briefly looking towards the cockpit's hatch before turning his gaze back to Armless.
“They consider the Ecclesiarch an omniscient demigod. He is a narcissistic fool with delusions of grandeur and too many credits.”
Had he any eyebrows, Armless would have raised one. Instead, he tilted his head in a quizzical manner, subtly deforming his eye-lights from circles to slight ovals. “If I understand the situation correctly, you purposely led a raiding party to their death, so that you could have at me somehow exposing you to void energy in a nonlethal manner. Why exactly, beyond your own interests?”
Armless did his best to not come off as accusatory or interrogative, but rather intrigued - which he was. The Word-bearer's smile faded, his gaze drifted to the machinery below. Away from those piercing, unmoving lights that were Armless' eyes.
He started to speak, at first slowly, struggling to find the words. His voice slowly transitioned from the usual squeak to an atonal hiss, wrath and sorrow evident in both his tone and expression. “They... Knew they were being sent to their deaths. The Ecclesiarch, he… He would've sent those not suited to combat, if they hadn't volunteered. Untrained individuals from the builder and thinker castes, even hatchlings and juveniles," the Word-bearer seethed. His gaze had drifted back up Armless' body, to his eyes.
He stared into the face of a myth, a bogeyman. The face of forever, unchanging and expressionless. He gazed into the Great Empty itself, and he spoke a plea.
“Even without you among the defenders, this raid had no chance of success. I swore on my honor to win spoils and slaves, if only they allowed me to take one of the cursed beast-machines. To pay with my gifts and my life for the opportunity to pilot it, just once. I begged. I drove my digger crew to work harder than ever. I claimed discoveries that were rightfully theirs to gain favor with those above me. I spent months retrofitting the cockpit, altering the armor, hiding the fact that this abominable thing was alive unlike the others. All on the gamble that you were what I thought you were.”
“What did you think I was?" Armless questioned. Fuzzy memories began floating to the surface of his mind. The constant, dissonant whining of massive graviton railguns, firing in perpetuity. The bloody, metallic stench of livingmetal in its organic form, a bulbous mound of cancerous flesh, unceremoniously stuffed into a tremendous machine. The otherworldly, resonant screeching noise it made as the machine came alive and forced the flesh into a metallic state, pounding away with pulses of un-worldly energy. The great empty itself as a hammer.
The hiss of the Word-bearer's voice dragged him back into the physical world. “...This. This iron-skinned beast of a man that now sits before me. I'm not strong enough to do what needs to be done. Not on my own. The Ecclesiarch and his inner circle, they must die. You can, you must do it.”
“Why?" the skull-faced man asked.
“Cut off the head, and the snake dies. You kill the Ecclesiarch, and those among us only after wealth and glory will scatter to the winds. Those who truly believe in the legacy of your people will rally behind you. This town and its people will not only be safe, they will prosper. I know you are a man of action, gun-hand.”
Armless wasn't one to lie to himself. Even without the Word-bearer's request, he would've done what was being asked of him. He was willing, but he still desired answers. “Let's say I accept your request and set out on a journey to topple a bandit clan on nothing more than a promise.” Armless gestured in a circle with his left hand, pointing to the machine as a whole. “What about this? Where did it come from?”
The lizard let out a strained laugh. “Ah, of course. I forgot you likely aren't aware. There's this… Self-sustaining factory. Buried in the bowels of whatever it is we're excavating. Some think it's an old underground base, others say it's a crashed ship. The factory, it… Builds these things. Every other month or so, it spits one out. They're usually horribly misshapen, and only one in three can even walk around and move properly. One in ten is functional enough to be used in combat. Seven out of nearly a thousand are… Alive. The higher-ups always made a big show of it when one came out and locked it away in the vault, hasn't happened in years.”
His gaze wandered around the cockpit. Armless understood that the lizard held a deeply rooted respect for the machine, like a priest would for a solid gold statue of their god.
“This one… This one, we found. It was just sitting there in an empty chamber, projecting something on loop with the lens on its chest. A recording of some pink-haired woman with horns like an archdrake, speaking in a voice like yours. Something about a barrier around the planet and how help was on the way. The transmission date was supposedly seven cycles ago.”
Armless nodded, and stood up. He'd heard all he needed to hear, all he needed to justify to himself what he was about to do. But now, in the moment, there were other things at hand. There was still a battle raging out there. He placed his mask back on, and the moment it locked into place, a distressed voice sounded off in his head. It was… The barkeep, of all people. Or rather, it was the elder.
“Skull-1, come in. We've successfully scattered the remaining raiders, all that's left is the walker at the southern gate. A few folks claim you went inside it, can you confirm?" the elder quizzed, the low warble of his voice colored with an undercurrent of concern.
Just before he replied, Armless sent a command prompt to the machine, instructing it to wait for six seconds and open the hatch. “Affirmative. The raid leader is alive and willing to defect; turns out he was on our side all along. I will open the main cockpit hatch in three… Two… One…”
The hatch slid upwards with a hiss. The sun was high up in the sky. A tremendous noise erupted before him. The sound of six dozen lizard-men roaring to the sky in unison, their right fists pressed up against their chests. Rika's voice sounded in his head. “The raiders broke quickly, after you dragged the Word-bearer into the machine. Some defected. Claimed that his defeat at your hands was a sign from above. Do not let it go to your head.” Armless willed his radio to transmit one final time for the day. The first phrase, for Rika. The second, for all to hear.
“I won't. Tonight, we drink.”