Chapter Text
One. Two. Three of them.
The ugly, ignoble machines are a little blurred through her brass binoculars, but the way they move is unmistakable. Their steps along the old dirt road are lurching and inelegant, with pauses every now and then to peer around nervously. The little column of motorcars and motor haulers they’re guarding keep rolling along all the while, slow and steady.
Constanze puts down the binoculars and sighs. She misses the civil war; duels against equals, for the honor of her Lady and her pride as a knight. This is just putting down stray dogs.
It pains her to sully her hands like this — but a knight bears pain in her Lady’s stead.
A breeze whispers by, too gentle to feel through her long skirt and petticoat, but all of a sudden it’s like the dogs have her scent. The three hounskulls stop dead all at once, surveying their surroundings and gesturing clumsily at one another, sure that they’re being watched if not from where.
She doesn’t waste a second. With a quick tug of a lever the cockpit platform pulls up and back, retracting into her Gisele's hollow torso. Before the porcelatinum armour has finished closing in front of her she drives a heeled boot into a pedal and the armoured doll rises from its knee. She breaks into a low sprint down from her hilltop vantage and deeper into the forest, towards the convoy and its three guards.
It takes a couple of minutes for Constanze to get close to the road, during which time the targets start moving again, trudging towards their makeshift frontline base a few miles northwards.
There’s about a hundred-fifty feet between the edge of the dark treeline cover and the rearmost hounskull. This close, if they look carefully, they’ll definitely spot a thirty-foot Dianellan armoured doll even under the thick shade of the old oak canopy, but that’s fine. She’s not planning to linger.
Constanze brings Gisele into a low kneel somewhere between ready to fire and ready to sprint, taking aim at the three hounskulls. She can feel the doll’s E.S.T. Engine hum as she begins to squeeze the trigger on her control handle, pulsing energy into the coils of its rifle.
Her first shot carves the bark from the trees either side of her and tears the nearest target almost in two. The others whip around the instant they hear the awful sound, scrambling to ready their guns as the victim’s depowered armor shatters like glass against the dirt.
The air is still sizzling from her first shot when she fires her second. It’s a little off-target, taking out the furthest hounskull’s left shoulder as it takes aim to fire at her position; it stays standing for a moment until its arm loses power, mass quadrupling in an instant and bringing the whole thing down on top of a motor hauler. The idiot pilot pulls their trigger in a panic as they fall, loosing a volley of high-diameter kinetic rounds that thud a string of craters into the soil.
She doesn’t take a third shot. Instead, she lunges forwards from her crouched position into a full sprint, stowing away her rifle and replacing it with a long saber all in a single motion.
The only standing hounskull takes fire at her as she rushes forwards, but is too terrified to aim carefully. Its shots crack into the hillside earth and the forest, nowhere near Constanze and her Gisele. Not stupid enough to keep shooting, it simply tosses its rifle aside, ejecting the weapon’s power cable to save time as it fumbles for its backup, a crooked spike — a disgusting parody of a knight’s saber.
It’s only just in time to deflect Constanze’s opening strike. The force sends it reeling sideways, barely keeping upright, but it manages to block her next attack. Constanze doesn’t curse — her Lady beat that out of her — but she mutters disappointedly, ashamed of herself for not having won already.
The hounskull pulls back, settling into a ready stance. So close and so still, the difference between it and the armoured doll is even more starkly apparent than through the binoculars. It’s misshapen, ill-balanced; lanky and squat all at once. A fitting machine for a Butrescan war-dog.
Though it ought to be a pushover under ordinary circumstances, Constanze knows she’s still outnumbered. The convoy, scrambling to get a move on, is no threat — but the second hounskull is still powered and still has its rifle, even if it’s short an arm and unable to stand. Its kinetic rounds wouldn’t even crack Gisele’s armour, but they could certainly knock her off-balance or sever a weapon cable, and then she’d be in trouble.
So, when her opponent steps sideways to try to find some vantage, she matches its step to keep it between her and the end of the downed machine’s barrel. Constanze hates to fight so reactively, but she hates losing more, so she dances with it, savage hounskull setting the tempo and noble Gisele following.
After a minute, they come to a standstill. The ugly machine almost looks like it’s breathing.
Nothing happens. For two, three, four seconds.
Ten.
Twenty.
Then the beast surges forwards, vicious and animalistic, spike aimed directly at Gisele’s torso.
The sudden movement catches Constanze by surprise, but it doesn’t matter. She’s a knight, not a base creature that would succumb to something so simple. On practiced instinct alone she parries, severs the forearm, and kicks the feet out from under it. She could’ve done it with her eyes closed.
Victory tastes like nothing worth savoring. She coldly finishes off the hounskull creaking and groaning below her as she was trained to do, then turns her attention to the other. It’s struggling pointlessly to its feet, using its only working arm to keep its gun trained on Gisele, but its knee joints already broke in the first fall and can no longer support its weight. Its display of empty defiance ends with the thump of fifteen tons of metal on dirt.
Constanze strides over to it and stomps Gisele’s heel on its one good hand, then lines up her blade with its back. She lifts it, and — pauses.
Something is wrong. She spots the indistinct rustle in the treeline, the subtle glint of glass of metal catching the sun, just too late, and doesn’t have time to move before a bolt of hollow light cracks through the air and hammers into the earth beside her.
It takes a moment to come together in her head. Only armoured dolls carry E.S.T. weapons like that. Butresc has only been fielding its “mechanized infantry” for a few months, and no hounskull has the core output capacity to power a transmission cannon.
But then, there were those rumors; that one of Lady Franziska von Laubach’s knights had gone errant, maybe even defected. Could this be her? That foul witch had always plucked her loyal from low places. It would be no surprise to find one of them rolling around in the dirt with these mutts.
Either way, the meaning of the shot is clear. It’s an invitation to a duel. Constanze is hungry for it. If not a real fight, at least a chance to put down some lowborn playing at knighthood.
She grasps her control sticks tightly and brandishes her saber as the figure of a knight in porcelain-silver emerges from the trees.
She recognizes it immediately. Dahlia. One of Lady Franziska’s, indeed. It’s a little bulky, more heavily armoured than the thin and wiry Gisele, but no doubt light on its feet. The pilot, then, must be sweet Anneliese, the witch’s most talented knight. What a pleasure it would be to drag her back to Dianella for retraining, or just to kill her instead.
Neither knight wastes a single moment. They rush towards one another, blades drawn, and clash atop the dirt road, Gisele’s long saber barely deflected by Dahlia’s shield.
Dahlia, for all her layers of armour, is more nimble than Constanze had expected, but she’s not stupid enough to let it overwhelm her. Gisele is still faster; Constanze just has to focus, use her superior speed and the length of her saber to win. It’s exactly how she was trained to fight.
It all goes according to plan, too, until a dodge by the narrowest of margins gives Anneliese an opening. She seizes it in an instant, striking at Gisele’s calf with her sword. It’s a clever move; not decisive in its own right, but it leaves the thinner doll reeling for just long enough to take advantage.
Anneliese capitalizes by whirling about, swinging the edge of Dahlia’s round shield directly towards Gisele’s center of mass. It’s too fast — too unexpected — to block. With a deafening crash, the back of her head meets her cockpit headrest with force, and in an instant all she can see through her front viewport is the open sky.
It takes a long second for Constanze to get her bearings. She hurries to bring Gisele back upright, with very little success — her arms feel shaky and weak, all of a sudden unable to tightly grasp her control sticks. She puts a hand to her forehead; her white gloves and the frills on her cuff stain red with blood.
It could be worse. She’s just shaken - she can still see clearly, mostly, and Gisele wasn’t seriously damaged by that strike. All she has to do is keep fighting. So, loathe as she is to do it, she tears off her gloves for what little extra grip it will afford her, and urges Gisele to move.
The armoured doll finally manages to pull itself upright, as if empowered by its pilot’s resolve. As a single unit, they grip their saber tight and take a ready stance, the blade’s tip pointed right at Dahlia. For just a moment both dolls are still, and then in a blink they’re moving, powered blades meeting once, twice, three times, E.S.T. overflow flickering and biting at the edges of conception each time.
After the third clash Dahlia staggers backwards, taking a low stance, and falling briefly still. Constanze is too hungry to realize it’s bait, and she bites hard. Before she even realizes what’s happened, Dahlia’s shortsword has cleaved right through Gisele’s arm, shattering it into pieces, and then struck the reeling doll square in the chest. It stumbles and falls again, hitting the ground hard.
Gisele is not fully broken, but is defeated. Without even hitting her opponent’s E.S. Transmission generator, Anneliese has won completely and thoroughly.
Constanze knows when she’s beaten. Preferring to retain some dignity, she climbs out from Gisele’s fractured torso rather than waiting to be dragged out, even with her arms and legs still weak and shaky.
Fifteen-odd Butrescan soldiers, the last stragglers from the convoy, have stepped out of their vehicles to roughly circle her. Even the pilot of that grounded hounskull has emerged to watch. They’re all exactly the stereotype of Butresc’s so-called resistance: grubby and ill-kept, wearing browns and greens and greys.
They keep a wide berth around Anneliese as she dismounts and breaches their circle, Dianellan long rifle slung over her shoulder. Dressed the part of a proper knight, she couldn’t stand out from them more starkly. Her long white dress is immaculate, and even her white leather field boots seem unblemished by the dirt beneath their long heels. She’s pretty, too — she was known to be Lady von Laubach’s favourite little doll — her skin pale and soft, hair dyed midnight black save for a few streaks of blonde and tied back loosely into a cluster of little ringlets. There’s no sign in her cold eyes of whoever she might have been before her training broke her.
It’s clear to Constanze, no matter her opinions about Franziska’s choice of stock, that Anneliese is a knight in substance, not just a common girl playing a role; but that only offends her more. Why would a knight betray Dianella? Why mingle with this rabble? It’s maddening.
Two soldiers approach Constanze as if to apprehend her, but she waves them off, insulted by the very idea. This is between her and Anneliese.
“You’re with Butresc now? Are these your men?”
Anneliese looks around at the soldiers surrounding her and Constanze. She regards them coldly, emptily, like she doesn’t see them as people. They in turn avert their gazes, only stealing glances back at her when they’re sure she’s no longer looking. She is not one of them.
They follow her command, though, when she gestures at the two soldiers by Constanze’s flanks to force her to her knees. As they do, she unholsters her pistol and holds it towards her defeated foe’s forehead.
“You’re Lady von Lüttringen’s knight?”
Constanze bristles at being questioned so curtly. The indignity of being pushed around by this scum, dirtying her dress, being addressed like a criminal, rises visibly to her face.
“Proudly.”
The thought of her Lady only seems to magnify her humiliation. She can’t help but spit out the first bit of venom that climbs from her throat.
“—Not like you. Did your Franziska never teach you loyalty? Or did it just not take? Lowborn pig.”
The knight errant’s eye twitches and an ugly expression starts to creep its way onto her face - but with a deep breath the anger disappears, masked by vacant, glassy-eyed determination. She will not rise to Constanze’s provocation.
“Keep her name out of your filthy mouth.”
Her finger squeezes on the trigger. With a bang and a splatter of warm, red blood, Constanze falls limply to the ground.