The faint hope of simply tossing the Wurger into the Sea of Blood crumpled to nothing when six scarlet threads flared from the puppet’s back and dragged it back aboard, sending it tumbling, but leaving it otherwise unharmed. As if “by coincidence,” but more likely by the careful manipulations of its puppetmaster, the thorny impaler landed right next to Shellhead. From there, it scuttled at him again. Worse than the scuttling, it moved wrong; Shellhead had no frame of reference, yet to knowing eyes, it would appear as if sped-up stop-motion. Focused on protecting his limbs and vital organs, he failed to see the next strike coming; the puppet sought to take his foot, to smash the joint and tear it clean off below the ankle. It was only the jet of scarlet from its head at the moment of impact that clued him in quickly enough to see. It was mid-slide, there was no swing, no wind-up, it wasn’t “striking,” but rather “grappling,” digging its claws in for just long enough to stabilize its arm… And fire its pilebunker. A captive-bolt driver, a tool for slaying cattle and smashing rocks. A savage weapon from an age even more merciless than the War for Axis Fulcrum, a weapon that puppetmasters employed eagerly and employed often against one another and against anything that stood in their way. That brutish implement regarded its targets as victims rather than opponents, denied these victims even the honor of clashing blades; Shellhead’s derision for it was matched only by his respect for its terrible power.
Were it not for his defensive movement technique which he had honed painstakingly over a lifetime, combined with his sheer bodymass and the redundancy of having both an internal and external skeleton, Shellhead would have crumpled like a house of cards on the spot. But he was crippled either way; his rear leg, his root of strength, was now a weakness, one demanding constant attention lest it be targeted again, one demanding constant adjustment to his stance.
Shellhead continued in his relentless advance, reloading his particle smasher. Get at the puppetmaster, or get a clean shot on the puppet. Those were his options. Faint scuttling sounded behind him, but he knew it wasn’t the Wurger. It was too quiet, there wasn’t enough disturbance to the air. He wouldn’t get distracted, not today. A blur made itself known to him, and he stepped in its direction, bashing with his pincer. Thorns dug into it, but he drew it back swiftly enough that the Wurger recovered from the shock too late and its claws closed on empty air. A closed-pincer thrust followed. If all went well, he would get his pincers locked around its neck. Just one snip and off with its head.
But alas, no such luck, no such luck at all. The puppet ducked sideways at an angle far beyond the ability of a human skeleton, raising its arms in the gesture of an uppercut, but Shellhead had anticipated this, and had already drawn back his pincers and raised his smasher gun. The puppet’s pilebunkers shot out, the jagged-black rods of metacarbonate sparking against one another and the inner edges of his pincers. Shellhead saw that the scarlet jet on its head didn’t flare this time, but he failed to comprehend the connection between it and the pilebunkers. In the heat of the moment, he saw that they had discharged, saw the sparks of their collision with one another, and that was all.
Shellhead pulled the trigger, but the Wurger had never grabbed anything, and so there had been nothing stopping it from dodging. It was gone by the time the swarming, dancing lights sputtered out; they left not a heap of slag as he had hoped, but had carved a crater formed of smaller craters in the decking. There was just a vague, vertical blur in the composite dome of his vision. It had jumped over him. Something touched him, claws on his back, and he stepped away, swinging his shield around. Six merciless lashes fell upon his back, strikes from the Captain’s rifle, but Shellhead grinned and bore the pain. Right now, the puppet was the bigger threat.
Up above, on the first floor of the superstructure, Zanma sat, appearing nearly catatonic, but still watching through his own eyes while the majority of his mind was dedicated to operating the Wurger. With each of the puppet’s major movements, a faint glow strobed down the length of his hair and inside his eyes, and his fingers twitched nearly imperceptibly. From his perspective, he was there, sitting against the wall, but he was also inside the Wurger, all of its mechanisms clearly visible to his mind’s eye. At the same time he was inside a workshop-control room inside his own mind, a construct of pure thought, a visualization of his actual psionics, and there, besides the mental mechanisms of control, was a flywheel. A circle of glowing-red stone, spinning, spinning, bit by tiny bit faster with each revolution. Not yet. Neither the flywheel nor the Wurger were ready for the killing blow just yet.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The truth was, despite the appearance of overwhelming assault, the Wurger had little to no sustained firepower; it wasn’t designed to fight on fair terms, but to hit and run. Its most severe shortcoming in Zanma’s mind wasn’t its lightweight and highly specific armor protection, not the demanding nature of operating it; it was the absence of any weapons besides its pilebunkers, a compromise Zanma had made despite knowing it was against best practices. The pilebunkers could fire at full power once, each. After that, the rods needed time to reset and the kinetic battery needed recharging, which was best done by moving the puppet, thus feeding into a natural hit and run strategy. Only if it was totally immobilized would Zanma resort to dumping psionic energy into the battery directly, it just wasn’t worth the effort. In the absence of a battery charge, he could fire the pilebunkers under his own effort, but the power was lackluster and simply not sufficient, only good for harassment. The risk-reward proposition just wasn’t in his favor if he couldn’t inflict a serious injury with one shot.
But Shellhead knew none of this.
More importantly, focusing on the Wurger, he had failed to notice the Spider.
With the Wurger circling him, clashing with him rod to blade, ceaselessly smashing into his left arm with low-output pilebunker strikes solely to disrupt its reloading sequence, with all these factors combined, there was no chance for the pirate to catch on. He felt a strange sensation on his back every once in a while, but he couldn’t place it. Zanma went to great effort to touch him with the Wurger’s claws in the same pattern as he used for the spider’s walk cycle. The spider was so lightweight and held on so faintly that, when it was still, even someone with body awareness as keen as Shellhead would have a hard time noticing. No matter how good, hard chitin was hard chitin, it didn’t have the sensitivity of skin. Bit by bit, inch by inch, the Spider moved, and the Wurger’s kinetic battery recharged nearly in lockstep.
A slight sting. That was all, for a second or two. And liquid fire followed with it, setting blood alight, scorching veins and flesh without mercy, tearing apart flesh and chitin without differentiation. No mere venom, it rushed through the pirate’s veins, racing as deep as it could possibly go. Shellhead stopped dead in his tracks, eyes bulging out of their sockets, blood spraying out of his wounds and exoskeleton plates bulging apart as he gurgled in incomprehensible agony. Zanma, having foreseen that he might never get the opportunity to obtain more shipbeast ichor, had harvested several liters of the substance in his stay aboard the Etsutensoku. Not for consumption, but for this. Venom. Combining the ichor with the corrosives he had loaded into the spider previously resulted in the same type of amplifying effect it had granted to biogel. It was incredible to watch it take effect nearly instantly.
He didn’t dare hope it would kill Shellhead. He was an Eater, his physiology could weather the scourge, if not subdue and subsume the venom altogether. But that didn’t matter. He was wide-open. The flywheel inside Zanma’s head was spinning at full tilt, screaming with stockpiled psionic energy. Just like the Wurger, Zanma, too, had been charging up, skimming off the top. This was the most unorthodox among his cards to play, a means of compensating for his otherwise lackluster burst output.
With the pirate frozen in place and wide open, the Wurger set upon him. Not his chest, that wasn’t a guaranteed kill if he didn’t know the organ placements, and not his head either, the issue was the same, there was no guarantee he didn’t have a distributed nervous system or a brainstem capable of animating the body into a suicide attack. The Wurger dug its claws into Shellhead’s shoulders, closest possible point to the joint.
Two jets of red light. Two thunderclaps. Two limbs, now hanging limply, one impotently snapping its pincers and the other gripping a gun it could no longer aim.
Read ahead on !
Please consider rating and reviewing. It really does help a great deal.
