Showdown at the town gates.

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 maneuvred 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.

With 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 the 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 that 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 to 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 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 by 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 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 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 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."

The frog-like lizardman before him wore a facial expression that made him think of the phrase "grin and bear it". The front of his armor covered in his own blood, the back of it completely shredded. He was leaning against the inner wall of the cockpit for support. Armless took up a slightly less awkward sitting position in the spot where one would usually sit in order to pilot the machine. He would've questioned the lizard, but as before, he was interrupted. It must've been the hiss of static that his voicebox let off just before he spoke. The lizard still sounded like an angry squeaky toy, though a liquid gurgling had crept into his voice. "Before you ask, the High Ecclesiarch's right hand used his gift to tap into my comms. The only way to free myself was-"

The Word-bearer broke into another bloody coughing fit. He almost doubled over as he hacked up a hunk of congealed blood, molded into the shape of his airways. It fell out of his mouth and flopped onto one of the jury-rigged keyboards below. He took a deep breath before continuing to speak, his voice much clearer and his breathing much less labored. "-either death, or severe void energy exposure. I felt your weapon severing his grip on me. The shockwave traveling across the link. The pain splitting his mind. I may speak freely, now. The others, not so much," he pondered, briefly looking towards the cockpit's hatch before turning his gaze back to Armless.

"They consider the Ecclesiarch an omniscient demigod. He is a narcissistic fool with delusions of grandeur and too many credits."

Had he any eyebrows, Armless would have raised one. Instead, he tilted his head in a quizzical manner, subtly deforming his eye-lights from circles to slight ovals. "If I understand the situation correctly, you purposely led a raiding party to their death, so that you could have at me somehow exposing you to void energy in a nonlethal manner. Why exactly, beyond your own interests?"

Armless did his best to not come off as accusatory or interrogative, but rather intrigued - which he was. The Word-bearer's smile faded, his gaze drifted to the machinery below. Away from those piercing, unmoving lights that were Armless' eyes.

He started to speak, at first slowly, struggling to find the words. His voice slowly transitioned from the usual squeak to an atonal hiss, wrath and sorrow evident in both his tone and expression. "They... Knew they were being sent to their deaths. The Ecclesiarch, he… He would've sent those not suited to combat, if they hadn't volunteered. Untrained individuals from the builder and thinker castes, even hatchlings and juveniles," the Word-bearer seethed. His gaze had drifted back up Armless' body, to his eyes.

He stared into the face of a myth, a bogeyman. The face of forever, unchanging and expressionless. He gazed into the Great Empty itself, and he spoke a plea.

"Even without you among the defenders, this raid had no chance of success. I swore on my honor to win spoils and slaves, if only they allowed me to take one of the cursed beast-machines. To pay with my gifts and my life for the opportunity to pilot it, just once. I begged. I drove my digger crew to work harder than ever. I claimed discoveries that were rightfully theirs to gain favor with those above me. I spent months retrofitting the cockpit, altering the armor, hiding the fact that this abominable thing was alive unlike the others. All on the gamble that you were what I thought you were."

"What did you think I was?" Armless questioned. Fuzzy memories began floating to the surface of his mind. The constant, dissonant whining of massive graviton railguns, firing in perpetuity. The bloody, metallic stench of livingmetal in its organic form, a bulbous mound of cancerous flesh, unceremoniously stuffed into a tremendous machine. The otherworldly, resonant screeching noise it made as the machine came alive and forced the flesh into a metallic state, pounding away with pulses of un-worldly energy. The great empty itself as a hammer.

The hiss of the Word-bearer's voice dragged him back into the physical world. "...This. This iron-skinned beast of a man that now sits before me. I'm not strong enough to do what needs to be done. Not on my own. The Ecclesiarch and his inner circle, they must die. You can, you must do it."

"Why?" the skull-faced man asked.

"Cut off the head, and the snake dies. You kill the Ecclesiarch, and those among us only after wealth and glory will scatter to the winds. Those who truly believe in the legacy of your people will rally behind you. This town and its people will not only be safe, they will prosper. I know you are a man of action, gun-hand."

Armless wasn't one to lie to himself. Even without the Word-bearer's request, he would've done what was being asked of him. He was willing, but he still desired answers. "Let's say I accept your request and set out on a journey to topple a bandit clan on nothing more than a promise." Armless gestured in a circle with his left hand, pointing to the machine as a whole. "What about this? Where did it come from?"

The lizard let out a strained laugh. "Ah, of course. I forgot you likely aren't aware. There's this… Self-sustaining factory. Buried in the bowels of whatever it is we're excavating. Some think it's an old underground base, others say it's a crashed ship. The factory, it… Builds these things. Every other month or so, it spits one out. They're usually horribly misshapen, and only one in three can even walk around and move properly. One in ten is functional enough to be used in combat. Seven out of nearly a thousand are… Alive. The higher-ups always made a big show of it when one came out and locked it away in the vault, hasn't happened in years."

His gaze wandered around the cockpit. Armless understood that the lizard held a deeply rooted respect for the machine, like a priest would for a solid gold statue of their god.

"This one… This one, we found. It was just sitting there in an empty chamber, projecting something on loop with the lens on its chest. A recording of some pink-haired woman with horns like an archdrake, speaking in a voice like yours. Something about a barrier around the planet and how help was on the way. The transmission date was supposedly seven cycles ago."

Armless nodded, and stood up. He'd heard all he needed to hear, all he needed to justify to himself what he was about to do. But now, in the moment, there were other things at hand. There was still a battle raging out there. He placed his mask back on, and the moment it locked into place, a distressed voice sounded off in his head. It was… The barkeep, of all people. Or rather, it was the elder.

"Skull-1, come in. We've successfully scattered the remaining raiders, all that's left is the walker at the southern gate. A few folks claim you went inside it, can you confirm?" the elder quizzed, the low warble of his voice colored with an undercurrent of concern.

Just before he replied, Armless sent a command prompt to the machine, instructing it to wait for six seconds and open the hatch. "Affirmative. The raid leader is alive and willing to defect; turns out he was on our side all along. I will open the main cockpit hatch in three… Two… One…"

The hatch slid upwards with a hiss. The sun was high up in the sky. A tremendous noise erupted before him. The sound of six dozen lizard-men roaring to the sky in unison, their right fists pressed up against their chests. Rika's voice sounded in his head. "The raiders broke quickly, after you dragged the Word-bearer into the machine. Some defected. Claimed that his defeat at your hands was a sign from above. Do not let it go to your head." Armless willed his radio to transmit one final time for the day. The first phrase, for Rika. The second, for all to hear.

"I won't. Tonight, we drink."