They departed at nightfall, the very night when the Seventh would become Legion.
Ten two-man vehicles, voidfire roaring beneath shells of black-stone. They came screaming through the desert faster than any rover, barely large enough to carry their own machinery and their passengers. The absolute pinnacle of Igron technology, given to damned men.
They weren’t criminals, slaves, or nerve-stapled. They were the most loyal, skilled warriors the Twins found amidst their subjects, supreme specimens of their caste, chosen not through creed or clan, but through raw merit.
Lowborn, poor, and most importantly, unlucky - unlucky to be born with exceptionally weak blessings, or even worse, unlucky enough to survive voidburn.
A legion of dead men walking, saved from a sad death in the tech-mines or as front-line grunts the only way the Twins could - death. As far as the people of the Oasis and even the other Igrons were concerned, these men and women had died in unfortunate accidents.
So it was that they were brought into the Twins’ underground labs, their bodies reinforced and strengthened, their skills honed to a bleeding edge without any pretensions of honor code or proper combat decorum.
They weren’t soldiers, or warriors - they were commandos, trained and equipped not to win pitched battles, but to eradicate the enemy before a battle could take place, given equipment meant only for the highest-born and most decorated, taken from the Twins’ personal armory. Each of them held a long blade hewn from solid black-stone and a variable-fire accelerator, capable of operating either as a heavy scattergun or a precision sniper rifle, both modes bearing the firepower necessary to penetrate almost any armor short of that worn by nobles.
The armor they wore was a bastardized, streamlined version of the Full Casement - instead of being built around a servo-suit as the skeleton, it was instead supported by the wearer’s own body.
Fifty of them there were, in the lead a single grav-bike with a single man sat upon it. His armor was no more decorated, he held no more authority than any of the warriors he had come to know as family. Over a third of his body-mass had been replaced with cybernetics even before he was selected by the Twins, his form and reputation marred in equal measure by a decision he made down in the tech-mines.
Faced with a rampaging security proxy he chose to face it man to man, battling the stone-skinned beast whilst the miners he was overseeing fled to the surface, only to be captured and sentenced to death for the crime of having been voidburned.
Indeed, he held no real authority over the men he was leading, and yet, they looked to him for leadership, out of sheer respect. His armor looked functionally identical to every other cyber-commando, save for the alphanumeric designation on his back - A3, the third-ever soldier of his kind, and the oldest still-living one.
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Alpha-3 had no previous identity, for his name had been scrubbed from records long before he joined the Igron clan. Even before the cyber-commando program he had been a nameless thief, only allowed into the Igrons’ forces thanks to the arcane gifts he brought to them in exchange for the station of a lowly tech-mine overseer - six of the Seven Dragon-heads. His very own right arm was one of these legendary items - the Twins justified it as a punishment, to have one’s own limb ripped away and have a void-spewing abomination grafted onto the raw stump, but that was all a show.
The moment he was dragged out of sight, voidfire scorching his insides, the Twins took him to that pool of theirs and left him floating there until the last remains of his blessing left his body, and only then did his change into a cyber-commando begin.
Mere weeks after having completed his training, he was here - sent on an utterly mundane reconnaissance mission after the presumed loss of the Machinist’s entire reclamation force. They were to stop at the transportation ritual’s arrival circle, ensure the beacon was functioning properly, perform further reconnaissance of Canyontown, regroup with Legion’s forces, and aid in conducting the assault.
And so he led the cyber-commandos through the desert, riding upon their screaming steeds long into the night, spread out far enough apart that their collective energy signatures were virtually undetectable by those they were truly trying to hide from - the other clans, with their borderline all-range sensor arrays.
The beacon crested the horizon, barely visible as a speck, but glowing as brightly as the sun on the sensors of Alpha-3’s and every other cyber-commando’s grav-bike. They converged upon the arrival circle as they approached, and nearly simultaneously they all realized the beacon was surrounded by something it very much wasn’t supposed to be. Their grav-bikes having been running continuously for the entire journey, at least half of the machines dropped like stones the moment their drivers tried to land them, the grav-drives overstrained and unable to function without time for the self-repair mechanisms to do their work. A mere few minutes of downtime, and an eternity of combat.
“...Statues,” Delta-7 muttered through his helmet as he got off the grav-bike, looking to Alpha-3 with a nonverbal request for guidance, as did many of the other cyber-commandos who landed in his immediate vicinity. Alpha-3 remained silent for some time, observing the kneeling statues with great caution as he retrieved his accelerator and sword from his vehicle, attaching the gun to his lower back while he held the sword with his right hand. Just then, the outermost statues in the circle began to stir, slowly rising from the ground as arcs of void lightning jumped across their skin and their hollow eyes blazed a dark purple. He knew what they were, he’d dealt with them in both their benign and lethal forms during his time as a tech-mine overseer. Taking great care to move as little as possible as to not provoke the death-machines too early, he opened a direct comms channel to the other cyber-commandos.
“Request to neuro-synch and proceed with extermination,” he asked.
“Affirmative,” came a chorus of thirty-one voices as the readouts on the others’ face-plates changed from their designations to a human symbol that supposedly meant “exterminate”. Alpha-3 was always the last to enter neuro-synch. He flipped the mental switch and felt himself intertwine with the others, his senses became theirs, their thoughts became his, and vice versa. Their collective perception of time slowed, and even so it was with a blinding velocity when one of the statue-things finally lunged.
Then came the next, and the next after that - it had taken Asura’s proxies some time to determine that, despite the presence of novahuman cybernetics, these were draconians.
Black-stone talons and bone-shattering punches were met with black-stone swords and equally forceful kicks, the cyber-commandos flowing as a single many-limbed organism to strike against the equally coordinated security proxies with their swarm intelligence.
They were outnumbered by only four individuals, and yet even without armaments, the proxies struck the first lethal blows, the neural feedback of Delta-14’s death manifesting itself as a jolt of sharp pain in every living cyber-commando’s head. Alpha-3 came face to face with one of the machines, its eyes dead and lifeless despite the blaze of void energy behind its motionless face. It tilted its head quizzically as he came to blows with it, grappling its left arm with his own and drawing his blade in reverse-grip underneath its armpit.
They struggled, locked in a contest of strength as the machine-intelligence was more than content to sacrifice a single unit to keep Alpha-3 busy, having determined his superiority to the other cyber-commandos, no matter how marginal. Seconds that felt like eternities passed as Alpha-3’s blade bit deeper and deeper into the proxy’s shoulder, only for it to eventually reach up and grab hold of the blade when it was too deep to be pulled free. It squeezed, and squeezed, and its claws dug into the glass-like hardened surface, cracks spidering across the sword’s surface. Alpha-3 could’ve sword he saw a flash of voidfire in the shape of a grin behind its face-plate, a moment before it closed shut its fist and his sword exploded into a million fragments.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The swarm intelligence could predict near any conventional battle tactic, it could effectively combat the neuro-synch system that gave cyber-commandos such a massive edge, but there was one thing it couldn’t predict - non-human voidtech. As he felt the vibrations of his sword beginning to shatter, Alpha-3 let go of the handle and willed his dragon-head to come alive, voidfire from his suit’s capacitors drawn into the arm.
“I will not burn as long as I don’t exhaust the capacitor,” he thought, knowing full well that doing what he was doing made it more likely he would be killed by his own voidfire than the machines. Despite this knowledge, he pushed on. The dragon’s eyes on his right forearm flashed as his perception of time briefly came to a near-halt and the dragon-head activated. Even in this state of dilated time perception, he could still clearly see the proxy’s eye-lights tracking him, it had no issues keeping up with his accelerated thought processes.
Type-KRT-6 Blast Impactor “Yuugi”
Charging...
Charge level at 15%
Please use code-phrase to discharge.
The same words he said to the Twins so long ago flashed through Alpha-3’s head, deep enough beneath the surface that not even the other cyber-commandos could hear. His perception of time resumed and all that came out of his mouth was a scream as his face-plate’s “exterminate” readout vanished, drowned by lilac light.
“I’ll burn so they don’t have to.”
There were four, perhaps five centimeters between his open hand and the proxy’s armpit, the gash in its plating barely more than a centimeter deep. It only took a small motion with no physical force behind it, herely fast enough to make contact with his intended target, and he felt the sensation of voidfire rushing out.
A flash of light.
A high-pitched whip-crack sound.
The glass-like sound of shattering nanolith, the entirety of the proxy’s outer shell losing integrity and exploding into black sand, the pulse of void energy resonating with its constituent nanites and causing a catastrophic chain reaction. The strike was immediately followed by the telltale clang of three accelerators set to scatter mode as three other cyber-commandos took the opportunity to annihilate the proxy, sending it flying into another of its kind with enough force to slow the other one down.
His armor’s capacitor had enough energy remaining for perhaps one or two more shots like that, equivalent to no less than ten minutes of continuous operation at full power. After that, he’d be running on his own voidfire, and he wagered it’d kill him in under a minute. A second ping of pain in his head as another commando fell.
That was enough time.
Alpha-3 reached for his own accelerator with his left hand, setting it to scatter mode as he focused again and willed his dragon-head to charge, this time only half as much. Time stopped to a near-stop, and the same exchange happened again.
Charging...
Charge level at 7.5%
“I’ll burn so they don’t have to.”
Another transmission to the other commandos. “I will compromise their armor, focus on the ones I tag,” he said, and received a chorus of “Affirmative.”
This time it was only twenty-eight strong.
A third jolt of pain.
A third dead commando.
Unacceptable.
He let go of the focus and began running, sliding underneath the legs of a proxy as he tagged its leg, huge cracks spidering up its torso and chunks of armor falling to the ground. “Seven percent seems to be enough,” he thought, knowing his armor’s capacitor didn’t have enough energy to charge his dragon-head to this point thirty-four more times.
Clang. Clang. Clang. The sound of his accelerator mixing with those of his comrades.
The cracking of the sound-speed barrier under superhuman strikes from both sides.
Charging…
Charge level at 7.5%
“I’ll burn so they don’t have to.”
Another jolt. A third dead commando.
Alpha-3 leapt to his feet behind a proxy locked in a grapple with Delta-19, putting his entire core into a right hook so forceful the proxy’s head came off after the voidpulse shattered its shell. It cost him some capacitor charge, but he didn’t care. He still had two shots like this left.
Two jolts in quick succession. Five dead commandos.
He felt his self-control slipping, emotional suppression implants struggling under the surging of his inner voidfire. Use Gamma-2’s corpse as a jumping-off point, grabbing his sword out of the ground in the process and throwing it to Beta-9, just in time for Beta-9 to parry an upward claw swipe and cut into the proxy’s forearm.
Charging...
Charge level at 7.5%
“I’ll burn so they don’t have to.”
A downward punch into a proxy’s chest, its posture shifting as if it had decided to dodge at the last second. Too late. The sound of cracking glass, pieces of plating falling to the ground. Alpha-3 buried the muzzle of his gun into the hollow monstrosity’s open chest. Four jolts of pain. Four shots to shred the machine’s insides.
Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.
He knew there was a proxy above him, readying an axe-kick with enough force to break him in half.
Charging...
Charge level at 6.8%
That was all the charge his suit had left.
It wouldn’t be enough to stop the kick.
He’d rather burn than die to some hollow machine.
Charging...
Charge level at 7%
7.2%
7.6%
7.9%
Arcs of void lightning began to visibly jump down his right arm, he could feel the power surging as his emotional suppression implants burned out. He had maybe half a minute before voidburn set in.
Two jolts of pain in his head.
8.3%
Delta-3’s right arm lashed out and he grabbed the proxy’s leg as it came down, both his own and his suit’s musculature elevated beyond mortal limits by the waters of the void flowing through them. He turned to face the proxy, and saw that its head had that quizzical tilt to it. The swarm intelligence recognized him as its opponent, not his compatriots. The other cyber-commandos were not a major threat without him on the field.
Another jolt.
8.5%
“I’ll burn so they don’t have to,” he said.
The proxy’s shell cracked from its leg, up its torso, and to its head, pieces exploding into black sand in the very same sequence. Delta-3 aimed and fired. Clang. Clang. Clang.
One for each dead commando.
Delta-3 felt himself losing control, power and sorrow and pain consumed his world as the seemingly boundless power of the void failed to save the few he had come to hold as brothers and sisters.
Aware of their impending doom, the proxies dropped all attempts at self-preservation and aimed to kill as many as they could.
Charging…
Charge level at 28%
“I will burn so they don’t have to!”
A jolt of pain. A dead commando.
Arcing lightning.
Flashing lights.
Shattering nanolith.
One punch.
Three dead proxies.
Two more jolts.
His left arm was numb.
He hadn’t noticed himself drop his gun.
Charging…
Charge level at 31%
I̢ w̨ill̛ b̕urn̷,͠ sõ̧ t̏͂̓͜h͑̽͂ey ̙̪̘̐ͯ̀ď͔o͏̦n̕'͛̐҉̘̫t̠ͭ͢ ̖̩̩͞ȟ͖äͭͣ̀v͇e ́t͍̣̹o̾ͮ!
Muscles pulling.
Bones bending.
Metal straining.
Tubes and veins bursting, nanites and biogel seeping into what little of his flesh remained untouched.
Alpha-3’s faceplate exploded off his head, and tears of tar gushed from the sockets of his cybernetic eyes.
He burned, and within his fist there blazed a fire that annihilated every proxy he touched.
There came more jolts of pain, for he was outnumbered by far, and in his rage he lost count.
Alpha-3 burned, and when the sun dawned on the slaughter, three survivors remained.
The waters of the void swirled about them, and they remained unburned.