I

First the fusion reactor melts down, so we have to rely on the sun and wind for power.

Then the fuckin' Truthseekers not only decide to ignore our protection contract, but raid our food stores themselves. Assholes said we could either give 'em food to feed their diggers, or the workers to replace 'em once they drop dead of exhaustion.

To put a nice lil' bow on top, the morning after the raid a stranger draped in dusty tatters limped into town. Walked into my bar first thing, if word o' mouth is anything to go by.

Guy wore a mask fashioned from a chunk of scrap ceramic, looked like a rectangular piece of ablative armor he whittled down, a pair of faint pinkish-purple lights in the eyeholes. Don't know why he bothered, it's not like anyone gives a shit what you look like this far from the nearest oasis-city.

He stepped on a loose panel in the floor, poor guy. Haven't heard that horrible squidging noise in months. I hoped the local warrior-caste ruffians would avoid stirring shit for once, but given that the noise startled ol' Rika, I wasn't too hopeful. I hesitate to call that creature sapient. A little too in tune with her hunter instincts, that one. Still, she pays her tab, so I let her drink in my bar. She'd thrash it if I didn't, I'm pretty sure she could beat an elder in a contest of raw strength. Good thing she's centuries from her metamorphosis, maybe she'll grow a second brain cell to rub together by the time that comes 'round.

Not that it would've helped him if he knew to avoid that specific panel. Rika starts shit with everyone that looks at her weird. Or just looks weird, at all. Or even doesn't look “roight un' propa”, whatever her lizard brain means by that.

So there I was, ducked behind the bartop with my finger on the blast shield button, watching Rika walk up to that stranger. She moved to grab him by that tattered cloak o' his, and he moved out o' the way surprisingly quickly.

Figured he'd try to fight back, but nah. “I'm sorry if I offended you, miss”, he pleaded, trying to just walk into the bar. Every time he tried to slip past her - pretty skillfully might I add - Rika just swiped or grabbed at him again.

The two spent nearly two minutes playing this deadly game of grabass, and every time she grabbed at him, the violent oaf that caused both much of my profits and expenses got closer and closer. The stranger wasn't getting tired or slower - she was getting faster. Her tattoos were starting to glow a faint yellow. Oh no.

I was just about ready to push the button, when she finally grabbed hold of his arm, ready to throw him out of the bar with the force of an angry demigod. Or rather, she grabbed his cloak where his arm should've been. Only… There was no arm. As quickly as he slipped out of her grasp, cloak an' all, I still saw what was underneath. All four of us in the bar at the time did.

His left arm was missing completely, I'm pretty sure the right one was only there down to the elbow. Everything visible of his body looked like it was more metal and polymer than meat. Now that I thought of it, I did wonder why the part of his head not covered by the mask looked more like a helmet than… Well, a head. Just wasn't right, reminded me of one o' those freaky scrap statues the Truthseekers would build in their camps.

The guy just stood there, in a low stance with his feet wide and knees buckled, staring up at Rika's towering form. Ready to pounce, not to attack, but to try and slip by her once again. Zhelru - the thinker-caste geezer that he was, only decades from metamorphosis - spoke up from his little corner of papers and empty stimmix bottles near the window.

“Oi, let 'im go. Can't you see the lad's had enough of a beating from life already?”

Oil my ass up and roast me on a plas-thruster, 'cause that was the fourth time ever I saw Rika actually listen to reason and back off. She trudged back to her table without so much as a word, almost shattering the reinforced chair as her nearly half a ton of muscle fell into it.

Meanwhile, mister armless stumbled his way to the bar. Just stood there, weirdly hunched. Looked like he was barely holding his own weight up. That, or dodging Rika took a toll.

“Strongest stims you have, please.”

Guy's lil' eye-lights flickered as he talked. Didn't notice it earlier, but his voice sounded… Off.

Synthesized.

Of course it would.

I went to reach under the bar to grab a bottle of the strongest stimmix that I had a decent stock of, horrifically sweet, gooey stuff that nobody but the weirdo offworlders liked. The bottle was a light pink, I could almost smell the fruity flavoring through the polymer. Between it being unpopular and the armless guy being entertaining, I figured I'd just let him take it.

It wasn't as if having a single extra bottle of saccharine stimmix would somehow fix the fusion reactor, or make the Truthseekers walk into town and give back all the food they stole.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

He didn't know how he got here. Frankly, he didn't care. When he came to, he found himself in the dead bowels of a small, crashed voidship, his body barely functional and missing the entirety of its left arm. The right arm was a little more intact, but it was still gone up to just below the elbow.

There was almost nothing of use to be found in the wreck, it seemed that everything useful had long been stripped clean. Just some tattered fabric on a few polymer rods for cover from the sun and a few stray ceramic plates scattered around the airlock, though why it was so he had no clue. The ship clearly wasn't designed to use ceramic ablative armor, going by the curves. It didn't look like it was even designed for re-entry in the first place. The medbay was empty, so was the cargo bay, even the containers were gone.

He figured the scavengers would've stripped him for parts too, if the pilot's cabin didn't have relatively good security. Too much effort to crack it open for too little potential reward - either the scavvers didn't understand the value of a 3D printer, or didn't know there was one in the cockpit.

With how beat up his braincase got upon landing, he didn't exactly remember when, where, why, or how his predicament came to be, but at least he knew one thing. He had to find a town and get some stimulants.


A nonexistent chuckle sounded in his head. How fortunate that the crash site of his voidship was within sight of a town. Sure, that didn't mean it was even remotely close, but it was something. It was certainty. And it wasn't as if he could die of dehydration. Overheating, however, was still unpleasant.

So, he did what he thought any sane man would do. He took one of the ceramic plates in his mouth, bringing it to the pilot's cabin. It took him almost half an hour to get it done with half an arm and his tongue, but he got the 3D printer to carve the piece of ceramic into something vaguely resembling a mask. It wasn't pretty, but it fit. It would have to do.

The fabric making up one of the makeshift tents would have to do as far as clothes went. He used his teeth to rip the patchwork sheet in two pieces, then made holes for his head.
It took him a few attempts and mouthfuls of sand to finally get his head through both of them, but when all was said and done, they sat on his shoulders pretty well and covered most of his body.

And so, he began walking.

Left. Right. Left. Right

The sun-bleached, dead, cracked soil seethed with radiant heat, the air shimmering as though possessed by some sort of malevolent spirit hellbent on extracting every last drop of moisture from all those who wish to pass.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The persistent whine of his legs and the occasional gust of wind became the only things to keep him company. He walked on for hours, his sight set stone-still on the town off in the distance at first. Soon enough though, he began looking around the sun-blasted wasteland all around him.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

Desert flats stretching for kilometers on end, with a mountain range off to the north, what seemed to be greenery far, far off to the south, and a whole lot of nothing to the east. The mountains were bisected by a tremendous canyon, one too sheer to have formed naturally. It looked as though they had been cleaved asunder.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The sun had gone down mere hours after he left the crash site. The planet's moons were as numerous as the stars in the night sky, and were only a bit bigger than those distant, cosmic lights. The blasted fields around him were illuminated even in the dead of night, brightly enough that the eyes of a normal man wouldn't struggle to see - let alone those of a creature such as himself.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

By the time he got to the town, the sun had risen high into the sky. It was a typical settler town. Prefabbed buildings. Polymer walls. A bashed-in gate which had yet to be repaired. A pair of massive, tattooed lizardmen clad in little more than… Loose, knee-length shorts. He expected loincloths, but he supposed that civilization held its grip even this far from big cities.

They didn't move from their posts as he approached the gate, though they stepped in to bar his path before he could pass. He could tell they were on edge, but they didn't seem too eager to fight a man who looked like he had barely enough strength to support his own weight.
Gazing up at the pair, he noticed that the tattoos covering their skin were part tattoo, part artificial scar, creating a layer of thickened, brightly colored scales where there would be exposed skin otherwise.

It took a solid eight seconds for his voicebox to boot up, a garbled mess of static bursting out from under his mask before it quickly transitioned into words. He was certain the two giant lizardmen tensed up at that. Probably thought he had gone mad for a moment.

“H̵̨̀̀͡g̢͜͡k̴҉̢͞͡ŕ͡͠͡r͏҉k̸͟͞͏̸-ould you let me in? My voidship appears to have crashed some distance to the east. I only need some stimulants and supplies and I'll be on my way.”

For almost half a minute he just stared up at the two titans of scales and muscle, his eyes unmoving, unflinching, ublinking. He could tell they were considering what he said, gauging how threatening he appeared.

Then, they stepped aside.

“Thanks.”,  he said as he walked through the gate.

The town was as he expected. Pre-fabbed buildings, perhaps two or three different shapes. Single-floor ones, two-floor ones, usually some variation of a rectangular cuboid with windows and a slightly customized facade on one side.

It had a single main street running from gate to gate, with stores and businesses running all alongside it, while homes, warehouses, and other structures made up the remainder of the town.

Even the signs above most storefronts were just LED panels in various colors programmed to display something different. A few of the nicer-looking stores even had rapidly rotating bars of LEDs contained in polyglass cases, which produced a sort of faux-hologram effect.

Truly, the spirit of industry and advertising persisted even on the frontier. Not that he was one to complain - thanks to these very signs he had an easy time finding his way to the town bar. On his way there he passed a store that particularly stood oud - “Repair and Reclamations” in bright pink. There was a smaller panel just below it with text in garish blue - “Quality Reclaimed Tech at Reclaimed Prices”. There was a third sign hanging on the door, a simple rectangular polymer board with “Now also stocking archeotech!” written on its surface in faded letters.

He made a mental note to visit the place, see if he could at least find a functional scrap arm, hoping that whoever ran the store was the kind of person to trade goods for insights.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The bar had a simple sign. Cherry-red rectangular outline, with the word “BAR” in pale blue, blocky letters. It was almost disappointing that the building had completely normal sliding doors, rather than those he had seen in cheesy, low-budget westerns.

He tripped over the precipice after struggling to open the door, as the door seemed to slide open of its own volition after he stood in front of it for a few seconds. Either the system that controlled it was particularly sluggish when it came to recognizing people or it was a manual switch, he thought to himself.

A step past the precipice. A glimpse of what the bar looked like on the inside.

A tower of meat and scales, immediately in front of his face.

...He was pretty sure he depleted a considerable portion of his energy reserves trying not to get swatted by that gigantic, savage-looking she-lizard for what felt like minutes. It seemed to shock her, when she finally grabbed at where his left arm would've been, only to pull up his poncho to reveal a distinct lack of any arm at all.

However, it was a quiet voice from the corner of the bar that stopped the onslaught.

"Oi, let 'im go. Can't you see the lad's had enough of a beating from life already?”

A sigh of relief would've escaped his mouth, had he any lungs to breathe with.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The bartender, and, he presumed, the sole proprietor of the establishment, was a surprisingly human-looking lizard. A lizard-man, even. He didn't seem to have visible tattoos, but he had a distinct feeling that they were merely hidden by the lizardman's sleeveless shirt.

“Strongest stims you have, please.”, he forced out through his voicebox.

He had hoped that the mix would at least not be too toxic, let alone taste remotely good. Hell, he was hoping it would even be properly mixed, given the fact he was asking for handouts.

...Only to be pleasantly surprised when the bartender reached under the counter, and brought out a bottle of costly, name-brand stimmix. It was like asking for a shot of flat, piss-tasting energy drink, and receiving a bottle of preserved artisanal coffee.

It didn't seem like the lizardman even wanted anything for it. He slammed the bottle down on the counter as though he was, in fact, giving him liquid garbage. However, he was not one to turn his nose up at good luck. Attempting to get the throat of the bottle in his mouth, it slipped out and almost fell over. The lizardman looked on with what seemed to be mild amusement in his face.

Another attempt, this time successful. The bottle still had the cap on, but that wouldn't be too much of an issue. It was just a degradable polymer that would break down into various nontoxic chemicals upon exposing the inside of the bottle to common waste-disposal agents.

Still, the lizardman finally broke just as he was about to bite the throat of the bottle and suck out the drink that way. The alien even reached out with a hand as he spoke.

“Hey, I'll open it for yo-”

His hand froze in the middle of the motion, as did the words on the tip of his tongue when he heard a crack and saw the pinkish, opaque liquid inside the bottle slowly start to drain. The armless man before him kicked his head back and emptied the seven-deciliter bottle of what he considered to be horrible swill in four seconds flat.

The bottle dropped onto the counter, the top entirely missing, bitten off. The armless man turned and started walking towards the door, and just as the sluggish sensor registered him and opened, the bottle slowly rolled off the edge, clattering to the floor. He could've sworn he saw the corners of Rika's mouth quirk upwards as the armless man walked out the door, but she quickly drowned any semblance of facial expression in her massive tankard of borderline toxic stim-swill.
______________________________________________________________________________________________

Sure, he swallowed the top of a polymer bottle. Sure, it didn't go down all that smoothly. But having that sweet, sweet nectar to wash it down was more than he could've hoped for.

It had only been a minute or so since he downed the bottle of stimmix, and he already felt the condition of his body improving. Between the stims and the biogel content, it was the perfect way to kickstart his self-repair subroutines and keep them going for long enough to matter.

Frankly, he was feeling great - being stuck on an assbackwards frontier world and disarmed aside. Hm. Disarmed. Could do as an alias. Disarmed. No, needs work. He disembarked that train of thought as he found himself at the door of the scraptech shop which he intended to visit earlier.

The single main street was seemingly deserted, though he was certain he'd draw a few sideways glances if it wasn't. The building had a much more involved way to enter - what seemed to be the doorbell rack from an apartment block, rigged right next to the door. Instead of different tenants, the different buttons were labeled with… Some sort of symbols he didn't understand. Looked like a runic alphabet. He pressed the top one on a guess. The camera lens of the module emitted a quiet whirr as it focused on him. The speaker emitted a burst of static, what sounded like scrambling and stuff falling over, and the door opened.

Within the shop, he witnessed a scene of purposeful disarray straight from a romanticized, eccentric inventor's workshop. The room was a simple, rectangular floor plan, with a counter splitting the room roughly one third of the way from the back wall. There was a polymer door with a jury-rigged ocular scanner at waist height behind the counter.

He saw bits and pieces of technology strewn all over the place, on the counter, on tables, in boxes piled to the ceiling, on the window parapets, obstructing the view. Everything from indistinguishable pieces of scrap electronics, to what looked like either well preserved or masterfully restored pieces of ancient cybernetic prosthetics and organs.

The nicer pieces were proudly hung up all over the walls. Placed on shelves, some were even in bulky display cases with thick polymer viewports and solid shielding, as though some hazmat containment unit. His eyes wandered across the walls, his mind did so through the possibilities of where the proprietor of the store might be, or whether he would be willing to cut a better deal than scraps of info for scrap parts.

“I'm comin', I'm comin', just you wait there!”, he heard from the back room. A raspy voice, he'd say it was like that of a heavy smoker, were he to know what one sounded like. He could, however, hear eagerness in the creature's tone.

The backroom door hissed open and then closed, though he didn't see who passed through until a few seconds later - when a diminutive, reptilian biped climbed up onto the counter from the other side. Its eyes went wide at the sight of him, the frog-like horizontal pupils expanding vertically, much like the pupils of a reptile or feline. It reminded him of someone going wide-eyed from a discovery, despite the fact the lizard's actual eyeballs seemed only able to open or close, and nothing in between. How strange.

“Ooh, lookit you! All covered up and masked and mysterious! But I can tell, you's not fully organic. None of the meatheads ever come by my shop, not unless they absolutely NEED a prosthetic. May the archdrakes condemn them, the primitives.”

The bitterness in the lizard-man's voice was… Far from subtle. Now that he thought of it, the little alien kind of sounded like the small voice that stopped the giant reptile-woman at the bar  from flattening him against the wall. Not quite the same, but similar enough

His voicebox hissed with a bout of static before spitting out the words.

“I need spare parts. Anything, please...”

“I dunno lad, y'look like you're in a good enough state to walk n' talk. Maybe if you'd lemme take a good look at what makes ya tick…”

He lifted what was left of his right arm, leaning back as he did so and exposing the patchwork mess of ancient plating and milky-white synthetic skin, thinly draped over the myriad of components that made up his body. It was in equal parts organic and synthetic, at this point repaired too many times for anyone to fully grasp how it all worked together.

The lizard-man's pupils expanded fully into gaping black circles, and he swore he could see the activation diode of a prospecting-grade deep scanner lens, blinking a staccato of faint blue in the bottomless pit of the xeno's left eye.

He reached up to his eye as though to adjust a monocle, despite there not being one.

“Well I'll be…”

The lizard-man froze mid sentence, staring at the stump of his arm, his gaze moving from it to the side of his torso, the exposed plating, the faint, anemic pink glow of his power conduits. A muffled beeping noise sounded from within the lizard's eye socket. It sounded like a warning, and the alarm evident in his expression only served to confirm it.

“...damned. Armless or not, there's no way you could've lasted long enough to walk all the way here just on batteries. I figured you must've had some way to extract energy from ambient heat or summin' since there ain't a recharge station anywhere nearby, but I didn't even fathom someone could be mad enough to use that as a power source.”

“Not unless you're... Show me your face.”

“He's smarter than he looks.”, a thought crossed his mind. He raised the stump of his right arm even higher.

“Right, armless. I uh… Doubt the mask would come off without your input, so I won't even try to pull it off. Most o' the stuff I've got 'round here runs on electric charge, save for…”

He turned his head to look at one of those hybrid display case/containment units on the wall behind the counter, spanning almost half the room. He dug up a small remote from an inner pocket of his jumpsuit, turning a dial. The shielding on the unit receded, exposing fully what was within.

A very, very large gun.

It was a tremendous thing, as long as a grown man is tall. The magazine-like power source unit on the back portion of it glowed with a baleful red light, crackling with red sparks every once in a while. There were small, crimson crystals growing on the inside of the unit around the tremendous weapon's power source. It was a mixture of white and purple, the long barrel crowned with a trinity of pointed, articulated grippers.

The lizard-man's eyes flicked between the gigantic weapon and the stump of his arm. A mixture of fear and excitement became quickly evident to his mannerisms, and the creature stared into Armless' eyes.

“...I need an arm. Not a gun.”

“Fine, fine. I'll give ya… That one o'er there. Just let me try an' hook up the big 'un, c'mon.”

The lizard hastily used the remote to gesture towards one of the smaller containment/display cases on his wall, this one with a large enough viewport to see into it without necessitating the shielding be retracted. It was a contraption of dark grey synthetic muscle and brass-like metal plates. The shoulder-plate in particular resembled a shielded pauldron, with a stylized lizard-head etched into it. The hand assembly was a solid exoskeleton, the whole assembly a collection of smaller pressure-sensor plates.

It looked like a modern recreation of an antique design, going by the fact it had proper synth-fiber muscles instead of archaic servomotors and hydraulics, but still made use of purely mechanical joints and had visible coolant and lubricant tubes, though skillfully enough concealed that a layman's eye wouldn't pick them out among the mass of metal and polymer.

The lizard noticed him looking at it a little longer than just a glance, and gazed in the same direction.

“Yeah, she's a beaut. But no-one's willin' to have a piece o' blacktech grafted to their hide. 'Cept, of course...”

At this point, the lizard's gaze fully shifted to Armless. He didn't look him in the eye this time, rather staring at the stump of his right arm.

Armless let out a breathless sigh, more a social gesture than anything. “Very well. If you wouldn't mind, what is your name?”

The lizard-man pointed with his remote in turn at both display cases. Each emitted a loud hiss, the bottom plate of either case sliding open. Both prosthetics descended out of their containment cases using some sort of rail system that enabled the display stand they were both held by to move up and down.

So that was how the xeno got those monstrosities in there.

“Vezkig. Just Vez is fine. C'mon then, all my tools are in the back.”

Vez jumped off the counter, scuttling into the back room. Armless intended to follow him, but stopped before he could even start walking when he heard a click and a continuous whirr. Immediately afterward, Vez 'wheeled' out a pretty small, flat grav-platform which hovered only about twenty centimeters off the ground. He struggled, and Armless had to help him get the tremendous arm-cannon to sit on the platform, but it had no trouble carrying the weight once the cannon was in place.

After a few minutes of maneuvering it around the workshop, changing elevation and orientation to get the arm-cannon's length to fit through the door, Armless at last followed Vez through that very same door into the back-room of his shop, the lizard's personal workshop.

It was… Bewildering.

The room was a textbook example of ordered chaos. Worktables, robotic arms and mechatendrils hanging from the ceiling, blueprints and diagrams plastered all over the walls to the point of serving as wallpaper. There was a very intentional lack of order to the placement of everything from the outlandish tools to the half-finished pieces of scrap. His eyes wandered across the walls, the diagrams, the dusty speaker in the upper corner of the room...

He was snapped out of the haze by Vez beckoning him towards a plain, metal bed in the corner of the workshop, immaculately clean. The floor below it had not been not so fortunate, the wood soaked with blue blood  too deeply to clean off.

Armless sat on the bed and held out his right arm. Vez used the grav-platform to raise both the arm-cannon and himself to a matching height, the whirr now a distinct and very noticeable noise as the platform's graviton manipulator.

The diminutive tinkerer worked fast.

Very, very fast.

The arm-cannon had a surprisingly flexible connection port, capable of changing size and orientation to accommodate attachment at different points. As he lacked some necessary equipment, the arm-cannon had to be lifted to his stump and forced to connect via hardware override, then manually and painstakingly calibrated. Only once the calibration matched up with the end user would it activate and interface with his power grid.


Though he wasn't being completely fair to the lizard. He was doing in a few hours what would take many trained professionals half a day. It wasn't just that he was skilled - he was in a hurry. Armless was certain he heard the hiss of a venting heat-sink at least once while he wasn't looking, and saw the residual off-gassed steam rising from under Vez's jumpsuit.
It went on like this for over three hours. Armless sat there, trying to interface with the arm-cannon, giving Vez verbal feedback, and Vez did his best to not have a nervous breakdown while he worked. He felt the pieces falling into place, the engine of destruction becoming more and more in tune with its intended host. And then, an ear-scraping static blasted through the workshop.

“STAY IN YOUR HOMES AND HAVE A WEAPON HANDY. THE GUARDS HAVE SPOTTED A TRIO OF WARRIOR-CASTE TRUTHSEEKERS APPROACHING THE SOUTHERN GATE. TWO APPEAR TO BE ARMED WITH SLUG-THROWERS.”

...And Vez just started working even faster, now muttering to himself.

“Shit, not yet, they weren't supposed to be here until sundown…”

Armless had a feeling this lizard wasn't just a charitable soul.

Seven more minutes passed. Vez was moving faster than a lizard of his size had any right to be, at this point openly letting bursts of steam vent from within and soak his overalls as he pushed his rather well-hidden body modifications to their limits.

Armless felt the connection port tightening around his stump, he felt the slack of the plug-cables tightening and pulling the massive weapon even closer onto his arm. Vez pulled out some mutant abomination of technology from within his toolbox, it resembled a handheld motorized drill with a proprietary battery pack, a PDA jury-rigged onto the back, and a dataport plug on the front instead of a drill bit.

He opened the emergency access panel on the underside of the gun and jammed the abomination into the dataport, muttered a prayer to the archdrakes under his breath, and squeezed the trigger.

An ear-splitting whine sounded from weapon, its connection port locking around his arm like a vice. A baleful, red grow rose up from the power source, illuminating seams in its structure, moving towards the connection ports. When the glow reached it and entered its new body, Armless' systems flooded with a level of power output they hadn't experienced in a long, long time.

A high enough power output to bring his true musculature to life, to re-activate subsystems that he'd forgotten his body even had. To awaken vital segments of data storage, restoring some fragmentary knowledge of who he was before all this.

Not enough to form an identity - it was all flashes and fragments of emotion. But it was something. It was enough to grant his shadow of a personality some semblance of substance. It was enough for him to know he was somebody, before all this. To know that he had a life before all this. Not one of grandeur and great wealth, but it was a past.

He still didn't know how he got here. Frankly, he still didn't care.

When he came-to, he found himself in a dusty workshop filled with clutter, its walls covered in patchwork wallpaper of diagrams and blueprints.

He had an experimental-looking energy projector for an arm, and there was a small tinkerer looking up at him, grasping some mutant abomination of technology in his hands. Part drill, part PDA, part data-plug. Vez started to speak, just about to say that he didn't have the time to attach the other arm, that Armless had to help his town as he was. That he believed Armless' arrival to their town was a blessing from the archdrakes, that he must have been chosen by fate to be…

“...a hero. A-a stranger from out of town, come to drive off the bandits and save the townspeople.”

Armless wanted to laugh, but he couldn't. Not with this little man staring at - looking up to him. He didn't know exactly who he was, but he wasn't any sort of legendary hero. He was no Kuroha, no god-slayer, he wasn't a man with no name.

But then again… He couldn't remember his.

Armless stepped off the slate. His metal feet click-clacked against the wood floor,  the synthetic skin not thick enough to hide the bulky endoskeleton. The Gun shifted in response to Armless' subconscious impulses, the connection port displaying its surprisingly impressive level of articulation, rotating around its axis and angling upward like an elbow.

He looked down at Vez. He willed his voicebox to activate, intentionally forcing it to cycle faster than it otherwise would to produce static.

He had nothing here, he was nobody. No ties. No relatives. No debts. No-one who remembered him.

He was free.

“Very well.”

Armless turned, and walked out of the workshop. He heard the distinct growl-yelling of a warrior-caste lizard-man. It reminded him of the noises Rika made as he dodged her grabs.

He stood in front of the outer door. Though he didn't see him do it, Vez took his remote, and pressed the button that opened the front door.

Armless stepped out into the street, the Gun at his side. There they were, the three towering Truthseekers, only some twenty meters down the street. Two of them wore loose shorts similar to the gate guards and bore large, crude firearms in their hands, looking like a replica of an old-world gun built by someone who didn't understand the reasoning behind certain design elements.

The one yelling was a solid half a head taller than his subordinates, and was clad in massive plates of armor. Or rather, he had massive plates of armor physically bolted and sown into his hide. On his head was a strange, wide-brimmed hat, and his left eye was a glowing golden orb. He was yelling at nobody in particular, making statements and promises of how the Truthseekers would bring about some sort of technological golden age and only needed enough workers to excavate a few hundred cubic metres of soil. That the townspeople could either walk into the new golden age as Truthseekers, or be dragged kicking and screaming into it as servants.

The lizard heard the door hiss as it opened, and saw Armless' masked, cloaked visage stepping out of it. A snarl formed on his face, and he turned his full size to face him down, ever so slowly walking towards him with thunderous step after thunderous step.

“What is this? A homunculus fresh out of the metal-womb, dressed up to look like one of the many-limbed ones? What are you, some sort of pretender hero?”

Armless meant to decouple the mask from his face so he could speak with the lizard face to face, but it was stuck. So, he did the next best thing. He opened his mouth. With a horrible noise the ceramic strained, cracked, and shattered, following his mouth in a jagged grin.

For the first time since he came here, his voice actually came out of his mouth, rather than the voicebox itself.

“A̸̡ ͘͟͜͝h̵̵͝҉̴ȩ̸̀͏r̸̢̀̕͜o̷͡ is just a man, who knows he is free.”

The massive lizard's snarl faded, turned into an expression of… Pity? Sadness?

“Oh dear. You truly believe you are one of them, don't you. He even built you a replica of the accursed destroyer. I will do my best to make your death painless. I am sorry, motherless child.”

Pity turned to anger as the armored giant noticed diminutive inventor, who was now standing behind Armless, just behind the precipice of the door.

“And you, Vezkig… You will pay. Homunculi or suffering, your choice.”

He had enough posturing. Armless stepped forward, brought the Gun to bear on the massive lizard. The inside of its barrel lit up with a baleful purple. A loud whine sounded from within, the light built, and…

He went blind for a split-second. A horrid scream ripped through the air as a burst of unstable, pinkish-white energy burst forth from the Gun, not losing focus immediately after exiting the muzzle, but never having been focused or properly directed in the first place.

It ripped a conical crater into the soil in front of Armless, but the energy dissipated far too quickly to harm anyone. When the dust and the unworldly light cleared, the golden-eyed reptile was aggressively pointing towards Armless. He was yelling something about how Vezkig had committed a heresy of the highest order  against all that was holy, that he had tried to falsify divinity by forcing a homunculus to harness the unworldly light of the many-limbed ones.

His two lackeys had taken up firing positions, with their crude slug-throwers trained on Armless' head.

Armless took another step forward.

Brrrt.

A rapid stream of surprisingly weedy gunshots rung out. Where he expected a series of thunderbolts, there came a belt of firecrackers going off in a metal pot. The small, fingertip-sized projectiles took a solid few seconds of continuous fire to even crack his mask. Soon enough, they ran out of ammo.

Once more. The Gun whined. Charge built up inside the barrel, much faster this time. The glow grew, then shrunk. From a floodlight, to a laser pointer. And then… Pew. The noise it let off was much less a scream than it was a squeak. A finger-thin beam carved a small indent into the largest plate on the golden-eyed lizard's chest.

That…  Was not the intention. In his mind, Armless imagined the Gun focusing a thin beam that would punch through the lizard's heart. It seemed that, after all, his mind still hadn't fully synced with the weapon.

Thankfully, the recommended method of resolving that issue was continued usage.

Both of the gunmen backed off, attempting to get into better firing positions while reloading their weapons, pulling new magazines from the sizeable pockets of their shorts. Golden-eye, however, stood his ground. Grinning. He knew Vez wasn't good enough to build a homunculus even remotely close to anything made by the many-limbed ones, let alone something approaching their kind in its capabilities.

He could've dodged the shot. The charge time for that pathetic replica was all too slow to be useable. But he knew it wouldn't do any real damage. That fireworks display beforehand was barely strong enough to kick up a dust cloud.

The huge lizard standing before Armless lashed out. A forward lunge, teeth and claws flashing, one eye trailing gold. Killing intent in the other.

The Gun briefly whined. A pulse of Void energy entered Armless' system just as the thought of dodging crossed his mind. He jumped to the side, turning his body in mid-air to keep Goldeneye in his field of vision. His subjective perception of time slowed to a crawl, combat calculation subroutines coming online for the first time in decades.

He expected Goldeneye to crash into Vez's shop, but the musclebound giant stopped himself with surprising grace. He used the inside of the crater Armless' first shot created as a jumping off point to make his followup lunge even faster than the first.

Armless willed the Gun to pull back, for it to build up charge inside its circuits without doing anything with it.

Goldeneye lashed out at him as he approached, fully expecting the Gun to fire another weak shot.

Instead, it - and the arm it was attached to -  lunged forward.

The three stakes at its muzzle slammed forward with a resounding thunk. They were to hit Goldeneye in the left shoulder, but as the draconian attempted to strike,  they were met with the underside of his armored forearm.

It would've been an insult to armorcraft to call what it was encased in a gauntlet - a patchwork of roughly bent metal plates, bolted into scales and hide. The upper and lower right stake successfully penetrated into thick, leathery hide, while the bottom left one met solid metal and wedged barely halfway into a plate of armor, retracting before it could get stuck.

Armless forced the gun to dump all its remaining energy into his power grid and forcefully straightened his left leg, embedding its foot into the soil. It ripped a track in the ground. Immediately afterwards he turned at the waist, using his leg as an anchor. A small cloud of steam vented out of his back as he smashed a quarter-ton of lizard into the ground.

Due to the sheer force of impact, all three stakes were driven fully into his arm, blue blood gushing out around them. He grabbed at the Gun with his free hand, but before he could get a good grip, the stakes retracted. Thunk. Squelch. A geyser of blue began spraying from one of the holes - a major blood vessel severed.


The masked one ripped his contorted leg free of the ground, the Gun's power source glowing just a little brighter as the combination of muscle alignment and self-repair subroutines forced the limb back into a vaguely correct shape. His opponent bit off the claw on his left index finger, then plugged the most severe wound on his arm - though he stretched the hole wider, the difference in size did mean that he effectively stopped the bleeding.

And so, he got up. His gaze was entirely focused on the back of the abomination that so arrogantly dared to harm him. It seemed to be frozen in place, standing still.

A piece of ceramic fell to the ground. Another. And another. The homunculus turned its head, then its entire body.. A solid third of what was under its mask was visible, its left eye - emotionless circle that it was - glaring at him from within a gaping, empty hole.

The circle became a pinprick and the homunculus broke into a sprint, cursed light shining from within that fake it had for an arm.

Goldeneye had an exceptional blessing - where others of the warrior caste could bend the world to make themselves stronger or faster, he saw all as it was. And that light, it was no fake. Homunculus or not, somehow, this thing harnessed the power of the many-limbed ones. Even if it couldn't sunder mountains and shape the land as their god-machines did.

With a roar and a one-handed lunge, Goldeneye met the masked fake on his own terms. He met the replica with his own grip, grabbing its muzzle. From this position, even if the three stakes fired again, they would only go between his fingers - and they did. Only… Goldeneye noticed that what he took for cracks were in fact seams, and the stakes had joints.

Joints that opened up, and stakes became metal fingers. Metal fingers with the strength to lock around his hand and dig into flesh, to find seams in his armor and exploit them. And so…

He pulled his fingers out of the wound and let his left arm go. Muscles constricted and blood flow was cut off. His left arm came off from the elbow down. Where some could shed tails, his clan could shed entire limbs. A limb can't bleed if it's been shed. A dishonorable tactic to be sure, but it saved his life many times.

He knew this would give him enough of a window to strike the pretender down. And, in a way, it did.

His right fist met the mask, shattered it with the force of a vengeful demigod. The sheer force would've caused Armless to bend over backwards, were it not for the fact he anticipated the blow and allowed it to land, subtly moving his head back so the strike only hit his mask.

Another piece of ceramic fell to the ground. Another, and another. Piece by piece, his mask fell away, and piece by piece, Goldeneye's expression of righteous anger turned to disbelief. The Gun's stake-grippers let go of his arm.

No skin. No face. A pair of piercing, pink dots, set in gaping holes. A gleaming, metal skull, with a mismatched partial faceplate that looked like… Discolored, grey bone.

This wasn't a homunculus, and Vezkig didn't build a single piece of it.

Goldeneye felt the cursed destroyer's muzzle slam into his stomach. He heard the whine, the three stakes-grippers digging into the seams of his armor, into his skin.

He wanted to lash out at the creature before him, but… How could he? The Truthseekers sought out the legacy of those that chained the cursed light to their will, the many-limbed ones. His own life wasn't worth even a tenth of what one of theirs was. He'd already brought dishonor on himself by so foolishly striking against this one.

The skeleton-faced being which he, in his disdain for Vezkig, mistook for a mere homunculus, surged with unworldly power. He could feel the cursed light snuff out his eye. In his moment of impending death, Goldeneye became One-eye.

One-eye heard a whining noise building from within the Gun. It took all the will he had to choke out the words, despite the fact he was practically unharmed. It was that accursed light, it stripped him of his strength, of his second sight, burned it away and salted the wound.

“Wgh… Why defend them? They would not stand for themselves, n-ngho matter what we did, and so we lef to see- seekgh the truth. Thgey use your kind as bogeymen to scare children with, speak of you as though you were inconceivable horrors from beyond the veil of sanity. They will never truly see you as a hero. So why?”

Armless hung his head, the whine dying down for but a second as he thought. One-eye's weight pushed his feet into the soil, yet his posture showed no strain. He raised his gaze to meet One-eye's. His mouth opened, and he spoke.

“A hero is just a man, who knows he is free.”

The gun charged, focused, crackled with an immense tension and pressure building up within its firing chamber. At that moment, whatever limited intelligence the weapon became fully synchronized with its wielder's will.

A pillar of pinkish-purple light erupted into the heavens. A deafening scream could be heard for kilometers on end, carried on the wind. Armless allowed One-eye to fall to the ground, and turned his back on him. With slow, deliberate steps, he walked towards Vezkig's shop, ready to have his new left arm mounted. And Vezkig, well Vezkig was more than ready to provide. Word spread through town quickly, and though One-eye wasn't lying, the story that spread wasn't hushed whispers. It wasn't a reverent legend either, but… Armless wouldn't need to worry about getting into bar fights anymore.

One-eye's unconscious body,  missing an arm and with a gaping hole in its chest, was dragged out of town and left to the elements. His bodyguards didn't need to be made to leave - they ran away the moment Armless' mask fell off.

The next day, the town guards went to the spot where they had left the body to check on it, but it was gone. All that was left was a distinct lack of blood to stain the soil, and a word clumsily scraped into it.

“FREE”

II

At the moment Armless crossed the precipice of Vezkig's shop, he realized much of his newfound strength had left his body. The engine of destruction grafted to his right arm had gone dormant, with no more than a faint glow and a quiet hum to prove its continued functionality. Though he didn't notice, by the time he entered the shop townspeople had already gathered on the main street. Those brave few that gathered the courage to come investigate what was going on, after that horrible scream-like noise shook the town.

Immediately after this realization hit him, he was beset by the aforementioned lizard, who was in a mixed state of barely-contained jubilation, aversion, and nervosity. The little mechanic pushed his hoverslate closer and closer to its limits as he grabbed at Armless, attempting to pull him towards the door to his workshop. He gladly went along, of course - Vezkig still owed him a left arm, after all.

A few dozen stumbling steps later, Vezkig very assertively sat him on the metal slab in his workshop. He'd already set up the brass-colored limb in some sort of mechanized scaffold assembly sat atop the medical slate. There were nearly a dozen black, tube-like cables connected to the arm on the inside of the shoulder joint. The numerous cables wound back around through the scaffold and to a somewhat bulky portable computer, situated atop a box at the foot of the bed - the perfect height for Vez to work with it. The computer itself was rather bulky for a “portable” device, its profile harkening back to some alternate history where typewriters never fell out of fashion. Instead of a screen, it had a row of small hololenses, most of them either cracked, or obviously repaired. There was a small joystick at either side of the keyboard, labeled with pieces of paper that had long faded beyond legibility.

Once Armless was seated, Vez pressed a button on his remote and lowered himself to the ground, walking over to the computer. Following a few clickety-clackity keystrokes, the device flickered to life. It projected a somewhat disjointed hologram of the arm, while an array of data and notations filled most of the remaining “screen” space. Vez went on to spend a solid two minutes flicking the joysticks and tapping away at the keyboard, all the while his actions were reflected on the arm. He made it individually close and open its fingers, bend the elbow a few times, rotate the wrist, tilt its shoulder-plate, even perform a series of elaborate hand gestures.

Satisfied with its apparent functionality, he rolled his shoulders.

"A'ight, keep still, I'll need to get this right in one go. Decouplin' dataplugs…"

He tapped the uppermost row of keys in sequence, from left to right, and as he did, individual cables were ejected from the arm and clattered onto the metal bed, one by one, some slipping and falling to the floor with a dull thud. He pressed something on the screen of his horrible dataplug-drill-thing, and with a hiss, the thick socket it was connected to also fell off its plug.9

“Now just keep still…”

Between occasionally jiggling the left joystick and tapping in commands, Vez used his scrap-tech computer to line the arm up with Armless' shoulder, then slowly manoeuvred it into position right up against the semi-flat surface of the joint. With far more intensity than was warranted, the lizard used his thumb to flip up the top of the joystick and press a red “fire” button.

Thunk. Whirr. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Slowly, the arm connected itself to Armless' shoulder - or rather, it transmitted connection requests that Armless had to mentally approve. With the first one approved, the largest, central plug extended and connected the arm to his shoulder, then pulled it tightly onto the joint. From this point onward, the process of integrating the arm was a long series of connection requests and dataplugs moving into place.

Armless found the whole ordeal and primitive at best, though he couldn't help but respect the ingenuity it would require to make such an antiquated piece of cyberware compatible with his own, relatively modern body.

Vezkig found it immensely fascinating, filled with satisfaction at his creation's apparent functionality.

The final plug in place, the arm locked itself to his shoulder and finally tapped into his body's energy and data infrastructures. A pinkish glow ran down the entire length of the limb in the gaps between plates. It vented gas through the seams around its joints as they shifted and tightened in the limb's transition to an active state.

Armless felt a jolt of sensation. His left arm was cold - not freezingly so, but rather as though it was heavily insulated to heat, and its sensors hadn't been properly tuned to compensate.

“So? How is it?”, Vezkig questioned.

Armless raised his left arm, closed his hand a few times, and then gave Vez a thumbs-up. He even smiled, somewhat. Though he had no face to smile with, the little lights that were his eyes deformed to a more cheerful shape, for but a few seconds. He could've sworn the small tinkerer let off a puff of steam with his sigh of relief.

"That's good. You're gonna need two arms if yer gonna go butting heads with the Truthseekers."

He would've questioned Vez about why he though he'd need to go up against the group known as Truthseekers, but with a bit of thought, the answer became clear.

"I either am, or look like some sort of mythical creature to them, and I just murdered someone who was likely a high ranking member of their organization. Of course they couldn't allow the death of a member to go unpunished."

"Uh, you alright there?"

The raspy voice derailed his train of thought. Armless realized he'd been staring directly at Vezkig, and it seemed to be making him rather uncomfortable. He resolved to speak, and for once, his voicebox obeyed without a fuss.

"Sorry, I got lost in thought. Do you mind if I rest at your shop for a bit?"

"Great. Now start speaking like a robot, won't you?", Armless scolded himself. He really hoped inappropriate voicebox malfunctions wouldn't become a pattern.

"Sure. Don't see why not. Just lemme get this junk…"

Vez got back on his hoverslate, and begun struggling to fish the remote out of his overalls.

"Hold on, I'll do it."

Vez froze, reluctantly nodded in agreement, and stepped aside. Armless got off the bed, and hoisted the messy-looking motorized scaffold assembly off the bed and onto the hoverslate.

"There. Do you need help getting it to its place? It's not as if I ne-e-ed to rest. Just helps with repair and self-diagnostics. Like figuring out what's wrong with my voicebox."

He was fully willing to help - after all, using a new piece of cyberware was the best way to master it. Nevertheless, Vez was already at the back of the room, forcing his hoverslate to lift the whole assembly onto a workbench. Between his relatively soft tone of voice, the hoverslate's incessant whirring, and Vezkig's own chaotic thoughts, the lizard didn't even notice Armless speaking.

And so, he did as he said he would. He sat down on the metal bed, made sure the Gun wouldn't fall off, and activated rest mode. His posture relaxed ever so slightly, and his eye-lights faded away.

Armless drifted into the depths of his own mind, his body's systems processing data from his period of activity, diagnosing interactions between sub-modules and whether or not either of the new modules could synergise with non-essential systems.

He woke up to a data interfacing request, about four hours later. The lights in his eyes blinked to life, and he turned his head to the source of the alert.

Vezkig, standing next to him, frozen in place. Staring at him. He was clutching that horrible drill-like data-tool in his arms, connected to a short extension cable, which was plugged into a bulky wrist-band placed around his left arm. Though he didn't mean to come off as such, the fact he had just come out of rest mode caused his voice to be exceptionally static-filled.

"̡͘I̛͞'͢m͠ ͟͟şo̸͡r̷ŗ̸y, ̵̢w̕҉e͝ŕe̷͘͟ ͠y̕͞o͏͢u ͘͞t̛ryin͠g̢ ţ̕o͡ ̷͘g̡a̧t̕͏h͠͏͞e̷̷͟r̸̢ da̵t́҉a ̶̵f̷̡r҉om͏ ̸̛̕my̛͜ b͢͏̵o̕d̷y̴?͏̶"

Vezkig'͢s eyes went wide, his frog-like pupils expanding. He froze up in place, and began trying to choke out a sentence.

“N-n-now look '͢ere, I-I-I was jus' tryin' to...”

“Note to self: Avoid giving the lizard an aneurysm.”, he thought before speaking.

“I don't mind. I did agree to let you do exactly that, didn't I.”

Armless mentally approved the connection request as he spoke. He could clearly see Vez relaxing with each word said, though he was visibly shaken. That horrible device let off an affirmative ding. Still slightly trembling, Vez reached for the wrist device, gently pulling it off his  arm.

“W-well, I'll just go a-an' sift through the da-a-ata. Y'gonna go back to sleep or…?”

Ever so slowly, he shook his head. Four hours wasn't quite a full cycle for how long he'd been active, but it was enough. His muscles tightened and his body shuddered in place, taking all the time it needed to bring its subsystems online. The Gun awoke with its master, a faint pink glow now illuminating the mostly dark room. His left arm off-gassed with a hiss, fingers opening and closing. Armless sat up and got off the bed. Left Vezkig to his devices. The data he got in that short timespan wouldn't be remotely enough to build anything significant with, but… It'd provide enough insights to make him feel like he got more than his asking price. At least, that's what Armless hoped would be the case.

With slow, deliberate steps, Armless walked out of his shop and headed towards the bar. It was still the middle of the night, the night sky illuminated with a thousand-thousand stars and tiny moons. The main street was deserted, as he expected. As he approached the bar, he could hear people talking within, even some faint notes of music. But it wasn't piano, or any other physical instrument - a recording, likely being played through a similar PA system he saw at Vezkig's shop. A song he didn't remember, but sounded similar to others that were included  in the troves of cultural history and media that were sent out as part of first contact. Sung in an ancient dialect of modern cityspeak, one which used a horrendously over-complicated writing system.

From what he could tell, the lyrics spoke of a lonely way, a blue comet in the sky, of an ancient hero named Melos. That awfully slow door finally opened, and Armless stepped through. This time, he knew to avoid the squeaky floor panel, and though he got a few glances, his presence didn't seem to disturb the patrons too much. If anything, he heard a few excited whispers from the tables further back.

And then, a suspiciously familiar tower of yellow-tattooed scaly muscle stood in his way.  A growling voice rumbled from above him. Strangely, there was no animosity in its tone.

"Come. Sit."

Rika didn't even wait for a response. In fact, she just turned around and walked towards the very same chair she nearly broke after their previous encounter, at rhe same table.Before he could muster up any sort of response, she'd already turned around and began walking towards the same chair that she almost broke less than a day prior. Armless didn't exactly want to risk another confrontation, and so he did as she asked, walked over to her table, and sat down at the only free chair. It was a rickety polymer and plastic folding chair, and it creaked under his weight before he rested his gun-arm on the table.

He couldn't help but take in the appearance of the intimidating lizard-woman before him. The only way he could distinguish her from warrior caste males was the fact her scales were closer in hue to cyan than green, were pointed  in shape rather than rounded, and the shape of her skull was somewhat softer. She wasn't any smaller than her counterparts, though - larger, in fact. Whether that was due to sexual dimorphism or simply her being an outstanding specimen, that he wasn't sure.

His attention wandered, and he began observing the bar itself. Now that he was actually able to think clearly, he could take in the layout of the establishment in greater detail. It was one large, rectangular room, with an exceptionally high ceiling, a solid eight metres top to bottom if he were to guess - probably to accommodate those of the warrior caste. There was a mixture of round and rectangular tables filling the room, some wooden, some polymer and metal, some a patchwork. The bartop was just that - a bartop, with an eerily human-like lizard-man, polishing a glass mug with a surprisingly clean rag. He could tell the lizard was watching him, despite the fact that his eyes were on the mug.

“Here. Drink.”

Once more he'd become lost in his train of thought, and one more someone forced it off its rails. His eye-lights blinked. He realized that there was now a bottle filled with opaque, pinkish liquid in front of him. His left arm let off a quiet hiss as he spurred it into motion. Still not fully synced, huh?, he pondered as he carefully reached for the bottle, and as he did, he noticed two things. When did she… The bottle was already open, and she was sitting in an ever so slightly different position. When did she do that? For that matter, when did she even put the bottle there?

A long sip. A look of confusion on her face - a furrowed brow, a puff of steamy breath from her nostrils. She questioned in a curious tone, “Lips on the inside?”

Though not aware of how his own mouth worked, he thought that simply showing her would be enough. With a nod, he set the half-empty bottle down and opened his mouth wide, displaying the outlandish, milky-white flesh inside. His mouth was not entirely unlike a normal human's - some parts were missing, some parts were different, some new parts were present. No tonsils, no uvula, a tapered tongue in place of a normal one. Instead of saliva, some sort of runny, lavender gel. In the back of his throat, the flesh visibly mingled with metal, with something resembling some sort of grinder visible. There was a pair of fleshy ridges just behind his front teeth, seemingly present to mimic the function of lips.

A noise bordering on the edge between a growl and a dry-heave rumbled from her throat, and she spat out a single word dripping with audible disgust.

 “Enough.”

Armless closed his mouth and took another sip of that lovely, fruity nectar that the lizards seemed to regard with the same fondness one would regard biowaste. Even as he sat there, he felt the mixture of biogel and stimulants being absorbed and circulated throughout his body, kickstarting, fueling ongoing self-repair processes and refilling biogel reservoirs. Meanwhile, Rika was clearly holding back a strong, visceral sense of disgust and aversion, one entirely unfitting for someone as imposing as herself.

“You come to our town. You fulfill Vezkig's mad theories. You kill Goldeneye. Now open war with the Truthseekers is inevitable. Will you fight like a warrior, or die like a whelp? Time will tell.”

That was… Surprising, to say the least. She didn't exactly speak like someone he would consider to be at the height of civilization, but he could tell she was far from savage. One more sip. The bottle was empty. Squeeze. It crumpled in his grip, he dropped it on the table.

“I am free.”

“They will chain you. You will be an idol. A captive icon of worship.”

“Then they will burn.”

“Time will tell. Tonight we drink. Tomorrow we prepare.”

Armless nodded. Rika gestured at the bartender with two fingers outstretched. He almost missed it, but this time, Armless could see what was happening. The bartender threw two bottles of stimulant in close sequence at Rika, her tattoos lit up, and she caught them faster than any human eye could see. Somehow, the incredibly quick motion didn't cause any extraordinary air displacement, as though instead of literally moving faster, she was accelerating herself in the flow of time.

One bottle was filled with the now-familiar opaque pink and round in shape, which she put down and rolled towards him. The other was much larger, rectangular in shape, and contained bitter-smelling, translucent green liquid. He could tell even from across the table, so noticeable was the aroma when she unscrewed the cap. To be perfectly fair, she didn't complain about the smell when he opened his own drink, despite the grimace she made.

A smaller sip, this time. He wasn't in desperate need of biogel anymore, and so he was drinking for enjoyment more than to refill his reservoirs. Rika pointed at his left arm.

“Can you feel with it?”

He nodded, taking another sip of his drink. The bottle felt pleasantly cold against his metal skin, despite the fact heat sensations were still dulled considerably.

“Touch, yes. Temperature is dull.”

This time, Rika nodded.
“Vezkig made it that way. Said it could withstand dragonfire. The others chased him out of the bar. Nobody trusts blacktech.”

“Why?”

“The cursed light. It rages inside the machines. Burns away at our gifts. Some never recover. Vezkig will never fly under his own strength again.”

“Gifts? Is that what you call…”

A gesture with the bottle towards her tattoos. A strangely somber nod of affirmation.

“We... Bend the worldly laws. The cursed light enforces them without quarter.”

The pieces necessary to form a revelation fell into place. “They're a species of natural reality-warpers. Of course they'd be scared of void energy.”

“Now I understand.”

She shook her head ever so slightly. “No, you do not. But one day you might. And I might understand you.”

“What do you mean?”, Armless questioned, tilting his head.

Another steamy exhalation. “You are not of my clan. Not of my caste. Not of my kind. You are not man. Not machine. Something in-between.”

“Like Vezkig.”

She shook her head again, more forcefully this time. “No. Vezkig was broken. Repaired himself with machine. You are of the many-limbed ones. You change yourselves when it is not necessary. This is unheard of to our kind. Many who were changed think of themselves as abominations. Yet here you are. I see your body. I cannot help but be disgusted, but also fascinated.”

Armless took a long sip of his drink, then let out a synthesized chuckle.

“Thanks for the compliment.”

At first, he thought he'd upset her when he heard Rika make a rumbling noise. Then, he realized she was laughing. She gestured for the bartender to throw her another pair of bottles, and set them down in the middle of the table.

“Tonight, we drink.”

Armless nodded.

“Tonight we drink.”

______________________________________________________________________________________________

When he came to, he found himself still in the bar, sat at the same table, only… Something was off. Perhaps it was the several dozen pink bottles on the table, meticulously arranged into three rows. Or perhaps it could have been the fact Rika was gone. It could have been that the front door was stuck open. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the fact there was a paper note stuck to his right arm.

With the hissing of escaping gas, he spurred his left arm to life and grabbed the note.

It had “Today we prepare. Come to the southern gate.” written in blocky, rough letters, using some sort of ink. He noticed there were depressions in the paper as if someone had written on the other side as well. Sure enough, when he flipped the note it had another note in much smaller, cleaner writing, though still in the same black ink. "Come to my shop. Ask about Apeiron.  - Vezkig”

Armless synthesized a vocalization emulating the sound of a groan, and stood up. He could feel that all of his biogel reservoirs were full, that his body was nearly at peak performance. At least, as good as his self-repair subroutines could make it. While all the organic parts could be re-grown, and vital synthetic components were built to be fully reconstructible by the self-repair system, his body still had parts that had to be repaired or replaced the old fashion way. Then, there were the disposables. Redundant. Secondary. Even entirely cosmetic. His skin was one of the latter, and it appeared his body had deemed it too damaged to salvage. When he stood up, it was left behind on the chair in one piece, ripped open from the inside out. A milky-white hide that would never rot, merely atrophy over the course of decades.

He glanced at the row of bottles one last time before heading out, and noticed that one was still mostly full. Not wanting good stimmix go to waste, he put the cap back on and took it with him as he exited the bar.

It was… Early in the morning. Very early in the morning. He couldn't see the sun, which meant it was low enough that even the town's relatively small buildings obscured it. It was still pleasantly cold. As the note requested he headed to Vezkig's shop, and the moment he stepped near the door, it slid open. The lizard was waiting for him, standing on the countertop with his remote in hand. Vez beckoned him inside and closed the door behind him, then led him to the workshop in the back. There was a solid slab of something set up at the back of the room. It was sitting atop Vezkig's hover-slate, the device quiet and inactive. Vez clambered up onto the workbench immediately opposite to the medical slate, and started peeling back layer after layer of paper. “What was this about “Apeiron” you wanted to tell me?”, Armless questioned.

Vezkig kept on pulling papers off the wall, meticulously ordering them into piles on the workbench even in his state of frantic exhilaration. “When you fought Goldeneye, the gun wouldn't fire properly, right? It took ya the whole fight to build up enough power to make it fire even one proper shot, and goin' by the noise, a whole lot of that energy was wasted.”

He hesitated for a moment before responding. “...Yes.”
Armless didn't know why it took the weapon so long to synchronize to his system, but he viewed it as a failure on his part. He must've overlooked something, or perhaps rushed a bootup sequence. "Maybe…"

“S-see, that's 'cause you were tryin' to control it like you'd do with any other machine-limb, even the Aegis that is your left arm. But it ain't like that. Now, I can't prove this, but when I first got my hands on that thing, I fell into a trance o' sorts when I touched the power source. Woke up to a big ol' pile o' notes and my hands all inked up. Most of it was gibberish, but one page…” At last, he triumphantly pulled a tattered, dusty page from the layers of paper plastered above the workbench. A mad glimmer in his eye, the tinkerer handed it over to Armless. Though he couldn't remember who he was before all this, the manic, scribbled symbols that covered the paper spoke to him on a primeval level. It was as though the nonsensical hieroglyphs conveyed the purest form of a given concept, rather than being abstract symbols representing an interpretation of it.

Parent-creation Azoth.

Creation-origin human.

Alive-metal heart.

Partial-mind.

True-name Apeiron..

“...made a lil' more sense than the others. I still can't tell what most of it says, but I could make out that the gun's got a name, and that name is Apeiron. Maybe it'll work as some sort of access code to make it work properly.”, Vezkig went on speculating. His eyes, filled with the glimmering of excitement and hope as he stared Armless in the eye. “Can't hurt to try, right?”

It wasn't as if he had a reason not to. The gun - Apeiron - was his best option for weaponry, even if it couldn't fire properly in most cases. Armless nodded in affirmation, and the lights in his eyes blinked out as he faded into the depths of his own mind, for but a moment.
“Initiate diagnostics mode for module 78a. State manufacturer designation..”, he said in his mind.

A purely robotic, high-pitched version of his own voice chimed inside his head. “Akaso Industries Zero-Emission Series Prototype. Sub-Designation: Self-contained All-purpose Void Energy Reprocessor Type-78a. Codename: [CLASSIFIED]. Please confirm codename to access diagnostics.”

“Product codename: [Apeiron]. Confirm.”

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. An affirmative ping sounded in his head. Seven seconds before the system responded. His robotic self chimed again. “Authentication confirmed. Access granted. Initiating full integration, stage one.” He pulled himself back into reality, and the workshop flickered into view. He caught Vezkig staring into his, just before the lizard noticed his eye-lights coming back on and scuttled away to a less creepy distance, trying to clamber back up to his perch atop his workbench. Apeiron felt… Different. The weight, shape, appearance, it was all the same. But something inside the gun was awake. Something inside that unfinished engine of destruction had just woken up, and it wanted to stretch.

Armless did his very best to sound as neutral as possible, he even tried to not stare directly at the lizard, instead looking at that hunk of super-plastic at the back of the workshop. “Vezkig, you set up that hunk of polymer as a target, am I correct?”

Vezkig finished seating himself on the edge of the workbench, nodding as he vented steam and tried to catch his breath. “Y-yes, fo-or the gun. The militia's hoggin' all the practice targets so I had to make do. Go ahead an' blow it apart, that's what I hoped you'd do anyway.”

Armless raised his right arm, and aimed it at the slab. With little more than a thought, it sprung to life. A lavender glow built up within its barrel. The robotic voice chimed in his mind. “Please confirm projection parameters: Stability, Polarity, Subtype. Awaiting further instruction.”

He didn't quite understand what it meant, but it couldn't be too difficult to figure out. “Stable. Positive polarity. Single pulse.”, he commanded. The whining noise coming from the gun intensified, but remained bearable. The light faded to black, as though whatever energy built up within had imploded. And then… A lavender-colored pulse of unworldly energy burst across the room.

Then, there was a circular hole a little over a meter across, blasted through the slab - and only the slab. “Apeiron, low power”, he thought. With that thought, the gun fell silent, its glow fading.
It was then that he noticed Vezkig wildly gesturing at him from his perch, seemingly beckoning him to turn around. He did, and was faced with a small crowd of townsfolk.

The murmurs were far from displeased - if it could even be considered murmuring. More like unintelligible whispering, given that the crowd was barely big enough to be considered one. Two of the builder caste, one of which could almost pass for an eccentric human with the correct outfit. One of the builder caste, wearing a tattered, bright green hi-vis jumpsuit, with the top half allowed to hang down like an apron, and a missing eye. What looked like a builder-caste child, barely a meter tall, hiding behind the almost-human lizard. And the fourth, standing at the back and towering over the rest… Rika. Śtaring. Not at Armless, surprisingly enough - rather, she was staring at the man-sized, rectangular donut of super-plastic behind him. Her gaze shifted to Armless, and she nodded. “Ready?”, rumbled the draconian amazon over her compatriots.

He nodded in response, his head held high. Was it because he had to tilt his head up to look her in the eye, or was it some sort of emotion building in that metal skull of his? At that moment, only Armless knew. Rika turned and began to make her way back out of the store, the crowd following in her footsteps with a surprising level of coordination and discipline. The only straggler was the hi-vis builder, and even then, only for a moment. Only for a moment did he glance at Armless, then at Vezkig. A bitter, toothy grin. Spiteful respect in his chainsmoker-esque voice. “You win. Fake or not, at least this one works.”  With those words, he was gone, and Vezkig was frozen in place, stunned. “A fake?”, Armless thought to himself.

It was only when Armless finally took a step to follow after Rika that he finally snapped out of that state. “Hol' on, you just stay right there!”, he said as he frantically leapt to the floor and ran over to one of the benches at the back of his workshop, covered in clutter and tools, including his frankendrill-PDA. He moved some of them out of the way, and grabbed something distinctly smooth and white. The object's true nature came to light when Vez climbed back up to his original perch, and held out the mask for Armless to take.

It fit his face perfectly, and so it couldn't have been based on a reconstruction of the mask he was wearing when he first walked through that town gate. It even locked into place correctly, the inside molded exactly to the shape of his skull. “Wait, was… Was this why you were pulling data from my system? To make me a new mask?”

Vezkig nodded. “They'll think you're a fake, underestimate ya, like Goldeneye did. Even if one of his bodyguards somehow got a picture o' your face, they's a fanatical bunch, they won't believe 'til they see the real thing in action. By then it'll be too late for 'em. Now go, the raiding party should get here in less than half an hour.” He hopped off the workbench, and started walking towards the back of his workshop.

And so, Armless left the scraptech shop behind once more, his face obscured by that replica mask. The main street was, as before, practically deserted - not because the townsfolk were hiding in their homes, however. It was because all capable men, women, and children were gathered in equal numbers at both town gates. He made his way to the southern gate, and was met with stares and murmuring. Looking around, he assessed the situation.

To the left of the gate, the townsfolk had set up a makeshift shooting range, for the young and inexperienced to practice marksmanship. Most of the trainees had low-caliber slug-throwers similar to those wielded by Goldeneye's bodyguards. A smaller, but still significant number of them wielded some sort of directed energy pulse weapon. A single one had… A revolver marked with a familiar logo. Unlike his compatriots, the adolescent warrior-caste lizard had no tattoos, and even though he was busy drinking watered-down stimmix, Armless could easily tell what the gun did to its targets.

The practice target - a smaller slab of polymer with a crude representation of a lizard-man painted on it - had a number of thin, metal quills poking out of the front, but had been completely ripped apart at the back, a mass of jagged edges stretching it apart from the inside out. A standard mass-reactive livingmetal graviton accelerator, then. The lad would do well, Armless felt it in his exoskeleton.

The other townsfolk were all armed in some way. Slug-throwers. Pulsed energy projectors. He even saw a few guns resembling cobbled-together graviton accelerators and plasma-throwers. They were all so different, but all so similar. Builders, Thinkers, Warriors. Different sub-types of people in a greater whole. A thought passed through his mind, spurred on by a fragment of memory. “They're not all that different from what we were like, only two millennia ago.” What a strange memory.

“Town elder says you're giving the pre-battle speech before the raiders get here. He will try negotiating with them over radio. ”, Rika's voice rumbled from his right. Armless nodded. “Very well.” She rumbled once more, this time much, much louder. At the thundering noise that was her voice, the crowd fell silent.

“OI, LISTEN UP! THE ELDER SAYS THE HUMAN WILL GIVE THE BATTLE-SPEECH THIS DAY. ANY OBJECTIONS?”

The crowd remained silent, with Rika standing behind him, infinitely more tense than the recoil springs in their glorified varmint guns. Armless dug deep into his mind, dredged up a faded visage of what once was. The sound of distant guns, the raging inferno of Terra's core shining beneath his feet. The sensation of the needle penetrating his skull, the flash of searing pain as a ravenous swarm of nanites ripped his nervous system to shreds and replaced it with themselves, neuron by neuron, cell by cell. The centuries spent aboard the Breaker of Dawn as little more than a ghost in the machine. The speech given by the last of the seven just before they made planetfall.

His voicebox hissed and crackled, power output beyond its intended specifications routed to the module. Thus spoke the gun-armed man:

“I burned my body in the furnace of science and industry, my soul as tinder for the flame. My blood to oil the chains, my bones to stoke the embers. In the inferno I forged myself wider
shoulders to bear the weight of the world with. The mortal man that I once was has died, but I am still no more than a man who knows he is free. So dig deep within yourselves. These fanatics think of you as weak, as no more than potential servants. How long have you withstood their incessant attacks, and for what purpose? To be snuffed out, made into slaves? No, I refuse. This day, you do not bear the weight of the world alone. This day, we build ourselves wider shoulders from the bones of all those who would seek to encroach upon our freedom! And should the very stars in the sky become our enemy, we will rend the heavens themselves asunder!”

A sudden, thunderous noise erupted before him. The cacophony of nearly two hundred individuals roaring in unison, raising their fists and guns to the sky. The noise was such that he felt the ground under his feet shuddering. Perhaps he'd gone a little over the top, but alas. Might as well live up to their expectations. When the roaring quieted down, Rika thundered from behind him once more.

“NOW, TAKE UP FIRING POSITIONS! THE RAIDING PARTY WILL BE HERE ANY MOMENT. THAT INCLUDES YOU AS WELL, YOUNG ONES. THE TIME FOR TARGET PRACTICE HAS PASSED.”,   she roared. Soon, the crowd dispersed and people distributed across the walkways on the town walls and on the roofs of buildings, Rika leaned in and spoke in a low growl, one that bystanders wouldn't hear. “Most of them will be on the walls. Us warriors will fight alongside you. We will stay out of your way, unless you command otherwise. Vezkig put a radio in your mask. Your callsign is Skull-one. Do not make me regret this.”

She didn't wait for him to respond, walking ahead to join the group of warrior-caste individuals which was forming just outside the gate. Armless could see her weapon still in its holster on her right hip - some sort of short, bulky firearm. He followed in her stead, and the nearly four-dozen musclebound titans parted to let him through to the front line. Around a dozen of the warriors formed up into two defensive lines to block off the gate, while the rest scattered into four-man groups outside the gate. Each group consisted of two individuals with slug-throwers, one with a pulsed energy projector, and one with… A shotgun? They looked like shotguns. Short, squat, bulky and mean, with cleaver-like bayonets and various tally marks. As they took formation, Armless saw that those with energy weapons and shotguns had put on sturdy-looking earpieces, somewhat strange in how they sat on the head due to the fact those of the warrior-caste had ear-holes just behind the jawbone.

Rika joined the squad which formed around Armless. Two tattoo-less warriors stepped out from the group, one with a utilitarian magazine-fed shotgun. The other had a truly antique mass-reactive livingmetal graviton accelerator, this one in the form of a long rifle. The thing was so old, its ammo plume had grown out from inside the casing and taken over, altering the simplistic design into a mixture of organic curves and bladed feathers, the muzzle resembling a savage beak. If its owner had any experience with the weapon, he would be a valuable asset.

In the end, they formed into a total of nine four-man squads, arranged in a formation of two rows. The first had five squads, the second three, and at the front was Armless' squad. He could tell there was logic to the layout - the biggest, most heavily tattooed  specimens were in the front row, while the smaller individuals made up the defensive line at the gate. The radio in his mask hissed and came to life, a hiss of a voice coming through. “This is Wall-nine, come in Skull-one. What is the battle plan? Over.”

He responded, falling into half-remembered jargon like an old pillow. “This is Skull-one, I hear you loud and clear. Stay on the defensive until we create an opening. Over.” After a few seconds, his radio crackled once more. “Understood.” , hissed the same voice from the other end.

They weren't anywhere near a professional level of coordination, but it was better than nothing. Armless was certain he wasn't a professional, at least not as far as radio communications went.
And so, they stood there. Waiting and preparing. Some, double-checking their guns. Others, simply standing at attention. Rika was entirely calm, serene, not even having bothered to unholster her gun. Armless' other squad members were attentive to a fault, their aim snapping from one bit of shimmering air in the distance to the next. He himself was… Uneasy. He'd sent an energy charging command to Apeiron thrice over by now, but the gun remained dormant. No error code, no notification, nothing.

Twelve minutes in, something began crowning the horizon. Something that kicked up a large dust cloud, something that was approaching… Not as quickly as a vehicle convoy should. It was a solid fifteen more minutes before the convoy became close enough for him to discern the shape of the convoy - a wide wedge of warriors, perhaps three lines thick, followed by an uncertain number of additional lizardmen. At the back of the convoy, he spotted a tall, slow vehicle, draped over with large sheets of light, tan fabric. It was swaying back and forth, and so he deducted it must have been either poorly constructed or simply in a state of disrepair. Apeiron began to glow a little brighter, and he could feel its energy flowing into his body, invigorating his musculature and subsystems. Twenty-three minutes after the initial sighting, the convoy was approximately six kilometers from their position, for whatever reason having slowed down to a crawl. Then… His radio crackled to life. And so did everyone else's, if the synchronized reaction was anything to go by. The barkeep's voice came through, tinged with regret. “This is Elder-one. All attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution have failed. All defenders, engage the raiders at will and stay out of Skull squad's line of fire. May the Archdrakes watch over you.”

With a click, his voice disappeared, and Armless saw all those around him take up battle-stances. Guns raised, backs straightened, steely gazes peering at the approaching enemy force. And approach, they did - only seconds after the town elder made his broadcast, the convoy sped back up, and continued speeding up to more than twice its original speed. Armless estimated them to be approaching at a solid forty kilometers per hour. By the time they breached the single-kilometer range, the first bullet pinged off his mask. At this range, he could easily see more specific details, even without the enhanced performance granted to his sensors by the additional power output from Apeiron. The warriors in the front lines were all clad in rough, heavy plating on their torsos and lower limbs, though it was not visibly bolted into their bodies. He wagered there were seventy, maybe eighty of them, in majority armed with a mix of slug-throwers and rugged, bulky… Katanas? The larger, more powerful-looking individuals were carrying hunks of metal in addition to guns. They looked unceremoniously beaten into a rough approximation of the single-edged sabre, sharpened, and put through haphazard selective heat treatment to replicate a hamon pattern. All the while, he could feel slugs pinging off his mask and torso. If nothing else, at least those underpowered guns were accurate.

One of his comrades was hit, hissing in annoyance more than pain as the slug bounced off his scales, and those in the front line equipped with slug-throwers returned fire. After a few seconds, he expected the ballistic fireworks to let up, for the riflemen to reload, but they didn't. Instead, their tattoos began to slowly light up, an amber glow smoothly flowing down their arms and into their weapons. Barrels cooled, ammo gauges on magazines which had them stopped and reversed, indicating that new ammunition was somehow being created inside the magazine faster than it was being depleted. Their bullets flew straighter, their guns fired more rapidly. From a steady rhythm, to a feverish staccato. Those with energy projectors, on the other hand, raised up their free hands. Violet light sparked across their skin, down their arms, between their fingers. The very fabric of the world before them twisted and reshaped, dust and soil pulled from the ground and accelerated forward. Artificial gravity fields - both offensive and defensive simultaneously. They took aim, and their weapons belched globules of superheated, orange plasma, moving relatively slowly in comparison to the bullets.

Soon enough, the convoy came to a complete stop a few hundred meters away, those in the front lines continuing their firefight - instead of reloading, they exchanged empty weapons for full ones with those in the line behind them, who seemed to channel the same amber light to reload the weapons and continue the process. Those armed with energy projectors handed them over for cooling, rather than reloading, their hands and forearms visibly calloused and scarred by burn scars.

More undersized slugs fell to the ground in front of their defensive line. Apeiron continued to glow. From a quiet hum, to a loud whine. From a faint glow, to a shining light within the barrel. His radio hissed and crackled, receiving an unencoded broadcast on multiple frequencies. He could clearly see one of the lizardmen in the convoy speaking into a jury-rigged microphone - a small, weedy looking thinker with bulging eyes, his voice appropriate to his appearance.  High-pitched and squeaky, not unlike the noise an angry toad makes, it dripped with an unbearable sense of smug arrogance. He was stood on an elevated platform, connected to that tall vehicle in the back. “Cease hostilities immediately and surrender to us the homunculus, the heretic Vezkig, and no fewer than thirty work-capable individuals. If you meet these conditions, we may yet consider leaving your town unharmed. However, heresy against the legacy of the many-limbed ones shall not be tolerated any longer.”, he squeaked into the radio. He wore an armored suit too well-made for him, with immaculate interlocking plates of polished silver, richly etched with complex imagery of dragons. His scalp was covered in elaborate, yellow tattoos, superseding even Rika's in complexity.

Armless had just about had enough by the second sentence. He dipped his fingers into the waters of his mind, his left eye blinking out for but a moment as he relayed a more complex command to Apeiron. “Apeiron, switch firing mode. Unstable. Positive polarity. Crystallized. Mass-reactive.”,  he commanded. “Firing mode recognized: Punisher Lance. Ready to fire.“,  chimed his robotic inner voice. The whining noise rippled and fluctuated, turning to a chittering whirr. He raised his arm. The light inside the barrel collapsed into itself. Time slowed to a crawl as the burst of energy supercharged his systems for a split-second. A glimmering, one-and-a-half meter jagged spear of lilac crystal flew through the air, faster than human sight, faster than sound. It shattered the sound-speed barrier four times over, soaring above the heads of those on the front-lines, trailing a path of shimmering lilac energy. A metallic slam. A flash of yellow. The lizard dodged it. Blue blood was leaking out of his nostrils, his ear-holes, from within his armor, he was breathing heavily and struggling to stand.  But he dodged it. He turned his head to gaze at the spear, which was now impaled roughly three quarters of its length into the vehicle that his platform was attached to, exactly at his head height.

A spark of blazing fury rose in his eyes, and he raised the microphone in his hand to his mouth, prepared to scream an order. A resonant, crystalline ringing resounded from behind him, a pulse of lilac energy flashed from the lance. His tattoos lit up a much dimmer yellow, and he attempted to leap off the platform. The lance exploded into crystalline shrapnel, showering the entire front line in shards and impaling him in the back, shredding his armor. He became as though a gruesome hedgehog, more blue blood bursting out of his tattoos and the seams in his armor as he struggled to accelerate himself. The world was like molasses, and the Word-bearer's dominion over his own speed meant nothing in the face of that accursed light.

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 a 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.

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.”