Armless nodded once more. He reached for a meat-onion and took a bite. That night, they drank. They also passed out in the bar, like most everyone else.
In the morning, he awoke to the sound of rainfall. He was still leaning back in his seat, but the table was more cluttered than he remembered, covered in more empty bottles and several bowls containing the half-eaten remains of meat-onions. The bar was mostly filled with sleeping lizardmen, though some had woken up and left - most notably all those of the builder caste, including the elder and his helpers. Among those who had already left were also the members of Skull-squad, save for the Commando, who was still soundly asleep in his chair straddling his shotgun. As he sat there waiting for his motor systems to come online, Armless looked around, his gaze drifting to the bright yellow piece of paper stuck to Apeiron and the blocky writing on it. It read: “COME TO THE SOUTHERN GATE”. With a brief glance towards the door, he noticed that it had been left open, and it was raining outside. He got up out of his chair and the backup motors in his knees let out a quiet whine, followed by the noise of Apeiron's grippers dislodging from one of the polymer floor panels. As he began to walk towards the door, he took note of how quickly the sleeping warriors were healing from their wounds.
Plasma burns already having shed damaged scales and growing new skin, stump limbs already forming the beginnings of their missing parts, of new bone and muscle. The strange thing was that the process looked much like how he remembered high-grade self-repair modules behaving, in that the body appeared to be building the missing parts from the bottom up rather than plugging the hole with scar tissue and restoring full functionality later. However, what he found the most intriguing was the warrior in black, as the reason behind the skeletal nature of his prosthetic arm had just become obvious. His body wasn't just repairing itself, it was growing new tissue over the arm, incorporating it into itself.
Though this phenomenon intrigued him, Armless had other business to attend to. When he passed through the door and onto the main street, he couldn't help but stop in his tracks. The sky was clouded over only partly, great beams of sunlight penetrating the grey blanket. As he gazed up into the sky, Armless felt the warm raindrops running down his exoskeleton and across the exposed fibres of his synthetic musculature, the vivid feeling of water on Apeiron's surface juxtaposed with the temperature-numb plating of his other arm.
Like this he stood there, at first for a few seconds, then for a few minutes, until a distant pop rung out and a small, metal slug dinged off his right shoulder. When he turned to see who had just fired at him, he saw that it was Rika, the slug-thrower even smaller and weedier looking in her tremendous hands. Certain that she'd gotten his attention, she let out a pleased chuff and tossed the gun back to its owner. It was one of the warriors who didn't lose any limbs in the battle, though the entire left upper part of his torso was severely scarred, the scales a pure white in contrast to his natural dark blue coloration. The white was only broken up by a pattern of dark purple which crawled over his left shoulder and halfway down towards his left elbow, his body having seemingly re-grown the scales in a different hue to replicate the lost tattoo. Even his left eye had been burned out of its socket, the snake-like original somehow having re-grown in a form similar to the eye of a chameleon. He was leaning on some sort of rover, a boxy eight-wheeled vehicle with a variety of solar panels and rainfall capturing devices on its roof, winding tubes wrapped in reflective foil winding round and round and into the rover itself. It had a pair of large plasma-throwers nested atop scrappy-looking turrets, which had been attached to either side of the vehicle with scrap metal, bolts, polymer and belief, their bulky gearboxes encased in thick plates of metal. Rika and the Burned Warrior weren't the only two waiting for him at the gate, of course. Even from that far away, Armless could clearly distinguish the Marksman's lithe figure, sitting atop the rover tinkering with his rifle, and there was Vezkig, floating a solid meter off the ground perched atop his hoverslate.
As he walked towards them, Armless' metal feet left unnatural, three-pointed footprints in the wet soil. It took him a little under two minutes to reach the southern gate. Though he meant to say something, he just looked to each of them in turn and nodded. Rika gave a sharp, short nod, punctuated by an exhalation. Vezkig returned a slower, reluctant nod. The Burned Warrior gripped his gun too tightly, stood at attention too readily, and the nod he gave was far too mechanical in nature. “Skull-3 is his father. He agreed to let Orsha over here take his place. He has hatchlings to care for. Can't risk a journey like this.” , Rika rumbled in answer to Armless' rather obvious puzzlement, his head beginning to tilt to the side ever so slightly, seemingly in proportion to Orsha's growing and rather visible anxiety, his left eye darting around nervously even as the right one stayed stone-still. Though he didn't know why, something in the back of his mind told Armless what to do. “You asked to join this journey, did you not?" he queried quizzically. “Y-yes," Orsha stammered out.
Armless straightened his back, raised his head, stuck Apeiron into the ground like some sort of superheavy cane, and spoke in the most inspiring tone his voicebox could muster. “Calm down, then. You will stand with us against the Truthseekers, you will face death, and you will return here bearing freedom and victory. Do you understand?” Orsha gave a sharp nod and got into the rover through the door he had been leaning on up until then, leaving it open and revealing some of the surprisingly spacious, if utilitarian interior. Rika and Vezkig both gave his strange looks, though Rika's was much further from disapproval than Vezkig's. The tinker followed in Orsha's stead after a few seconds of silence, closing the door behind himself. She kept her distance, but it was clear that she did it more so that she wouldn't have to look down on him than anything else. She crossed her arms, something she'd never done up until them, and just stood there in silence, exchanging stares with the skull-faced human for a solid minute before speaking.
“You will control the towering destroyer. I will control the rover. You will follow. The Word-bearer is in the rover. He will guide us. Honor has not left him yet.”
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Armless nodded, but didn't move. She had more to say, and he knew it. “The Elder gave me some of his stash. Tonight we drink.”
“Tonight we drink," he replied. She entered the rover's front door, and the vehicle sprung to life. No rumble of an engine, only the whirring of powerful electric motors. As she guided the rover out through the southern gate and through the purple-white field of flowers, Armless followed in its stead, making his way to the feet of the walker, close enough that it would detect him. “Administrator detected," the machine's deep rumble of a voice sounded in his head. “Preparing for boarding," it responded to his command before kneeling down, its foot ripping a second canal in the soil behind it.
With a bit of struggle, Armless pulled Apeiron out of the muddy ground, and made his way to the walker. As he approached the armorclad titan, he took a moment to take in its imposing figure. Its body was encased in a mixture of two primary materials. One was a kind of grayish-white livingmetal, distinguishable as such by the fact it had visible scarring on its arms and torso in areas where the plating suffered damage and repaired itself. The other, tremendous slabs of polished, black stone, as though the thing was some sort of walking monument to the arrogance of man. Its hoof-like feet were caked with the dried blood of a hundred dozen lizardmen, and the armor covering its thighs looked a little wrong - beneath the outer layer of plating, a layer of purple synth-fiber musculature had been added, as though to fill in empty space.
The gap between its legs and torso was bridged by bands of that black material, though something in the back of his mind told Armless that they were more than just armor meant to cover up the joints. Its torso was, as was to be expected, distinctly humanoid, shaped like the idealized form of an upside-down triangle. He could see exposed machinery which mingled with livingmetal beneath its armpits, and the armor on its torso was clearly not uniform across the whole - there was a visible split between the front and sides, but he couldn't quite distinguish where the armor was thicker from the outside. The centerpiece of its hull was, of course, the massive multi-functional hololens protruding from the middle of its chest, gazing down at him in perpetuity with the unflinching eye of a living machine, the cockpit hatch positioned just below it on the walker's chest. Its shape reminded him of an ancient burial practice, but the memory of what it was called averted his grasp.
Its head, a domed polyhedron of polished black, reminded him ever so slightly of a human skull, if only because the livingmetal frame around its bottom had tooth-like deformities. Its shoulders were crowned with thick pauldrons, the left side possessing an additional plate not unlike that over his own left arm, while the right side lacked such a covering. The walker's left arm was mostly humanoid, though the elbow was omnidirectional, rather than a lever, while the forearm housed a bulky accelerator assembly with a stone-like stake the size of a small building entombed within it. Its hand was a lot of things, but human was not one of them. It had two thumbs and two fingers, and though mostly concealed by armor, Armless could distinguish the joints as omnidirectional.
Where a right arm would otherwise be there were two, one below the other. The upper right arm was almost mundane in appearance, a mechanical replica of the human arm with little to no alteration to the overarching construction of the limb. While the lower right had a similarly humanoid joint arrangement, it had a set of four jaw-like grippers instead of a hand, with wicked teeth and a spiraling black drill between them. With a thought, the cockpit hatch slid open and a long metallic cable fell out, a loop at the bottom. Armless stepped into it and grabbed hold of the rope, then sent the walker a mental command to retract the rope. Moments later he found himself pulled upwards at a breakneck speed, then hanging at the entrance of the cockpit, the cable seemingly hanging from an assembly in the ceiling of the cockpit, just behind the hatch. The very moment he stepped into the cockpit and removed his foot from the cable's clutches, it retracted into its spot within the ceiling in perfect sync with the hatch closing behind him. The dark cockpit sprung to life with a thousand tiny lights, completely silent now that the jury-rigged interface hardware was gone. It had nothing more than the pilot's chair with an array of hololenses around it. He sat down, and noticed there was no joystick, no keyboard, no physical controls. As if in response to his puzzlement, the walker sent a direct interfacing request. He approved it without a second thought, and before he knew it, nearly two-dozen dataplug cables of varying thickness slithered from recesses around the pilot's chair, winding and twisting around his body like black snakes, barraging his mind with requests to open armor panels and expose dataports he didn't even know his body had. With each one he approved, a trickle of the machine's own mind was added to his stream of consciousness. Request by request, dataplug by dataplug, Armless became as one with the walker.
Portions of armor on his thighs, back, and left arm slid out of the way to expose dataplugs underneath. Finally, the synth-fiber muscles on the back of his neck parted, allowing a dataplug nearly five centimetres across to plug in. With the hiss of escaping gas, the interior of the cockpit faded into the background of his vision - not gone, only out of focus, unimportant. His sight was now an amalgam of all the walker's sensors, both optical and otherwise. Though far from omnidirectional, the machine could see much more than any human. His own thought-stream mingled with the walker's limited intelligence, only made greater by the influx of data and diagnostics. From what he could gather then and there, its full designation was AIM-P T-228-89 SOA-S, and its callsign was “Amalgam”. He would've investigated further, but Rika and the others had already built up a solid head start.
With no more effort than it took to move his own body, he impelled Amalgam to stand up and begin walking after them at a steady pace. Sandy mud dripping from its legs, the titan stood up and did as was asked, not a millisecond of delay between command and action. After the first few steps, Armless' radio hissed to life. It was Rika on the other side, distinctly unimpressed. “Took you long enough. Now just let the balance compensation take over.”
Before Armless could respond, Amalgam's voice entered the transmission, as it broadcast on the same frequency. “This unit is not equipped with a balance compensation module. The hardware space it would take up has been replaced with a mind-machine interface module and additional musculature, ” it rumbled. The radio stays silent for a moment. Before long, a bewildered unison of three voices comes through. Rika, Orsha, and Vezkig.
“WHAT?”