Archive of Our Own

12. 6. 2359

1700 hours

Anthrazic Capital Latudo

subterranean industrial sector

Operation Mammoth Hunting

The capital of the only nation on the Antarctic continent once used to be beautiful. A two hundred kilometer wide megacity circling around the south pole at a radius of roughly three thousand kilometers. Massive Skyscrapers reached towards the clouds high above, like titans holding up the fabric of the sky. The beating heart of the Anthrazic industry, a city with a subterranean industrial sector going through the entire length of the city. It used to be a gleaming testament to human ingenuity, standing tall in defiance of the incredibly powerful Antarctic Megastorms that regularly ripped through it.

It used to be.

Now it was the war zone Latudo, a city that, for two years, had been the battleground between the European Conglomerate of Corporations and the free nation of Anthrazica. Its once great titans of graphene and glass now stood mostly empty, hundreds of them collapsed in the intense destruction unleashed. The European soldiers marched through the outer sectors with brutal force, their rifles firing beams of radiation that burned through people and weapons alike with cold ferocity. Their tanks destroyed entire bunkers in less than an hour, leaving behind molten piles of concrete and steel.

Anthrazica was not without means to defend itself, however. Well-prepared ambushes left entire ECC convoys as burning wrecks. Anthrazica’s artillery far outreached their enemies’, capable of shredding any unaware target with a barrage of self-guided 275 mm high explosive shells. Their soldiers were vastly superior in urban and melee combat, resulting in severe European losses as they pushed further into the city. Experimental weapons of devastating power ruled the battlefield wherever they went. More than all of the factors above, however, was the unbreakable Anthrazican morale. A hundred million of their soldiers had already perished in the fighting, yet the nation stood firm, taking pride in the fact that the ECC had lost five times as much.

But the northern hordes kept on coming. For every European soldier felled, another one replaced them within the hour, just as zealous and just as merciless. Latudo’s defenders were quickly drowning under the tide of fervorous corporate conquest and needed an out.

“Novem team, you will reach the area of operations in t-120. Prepare for combat,” These were the words that reverberated through the inner metallic hull of the Armored Personnel Carrier making its way through the subterranean industrial sector of Latudo. Enormous black spires supported the streets above, preventing the upper residential sector from collapsing down onto the lower level.

The deafening screech of Anthrazic rotary machine guns against the steady corporate scream of plasma beamers filled the air. Occasionally, one could glimpse a European weapon self-destructing, painting the concrete buildings and streets in brilliant white light for a split second as the ammunition storage cooked off. The sector above had long been captured by the ECC, but they were having difficulty in the subterranean part of the city, the narrow streets not allowing their large armored vehicles through. Most of the lamps serving to illuminate the dark had been damaged or outright destroyed in the fighting, plunging the many factories and manufacturing plants into darkness.

The occupants of the APC looked to be entirely out of place in a modern battlefield like this, seeing as they looked almost exactly like knights out of fantasy.

Thick armor plates fused to a black undersuit that resembled human muscle fibers covered a superhuman wearer, genetically engineered to represent the pinnacle of biological life. Normally, these plates would be colored pale gold, the natural color of the metal that they were made of, but in this time of war, a dark coating of carbon as hard as diamond had been applied to them, changing it to take on a glossy black hue, with faint traces of iridescent blue on its edges.

Dim white light glowed from the eye slits in the helmet, signalling to an outside observer that this was no mere relic from the dark ages, but a highly advanced suit of powered armor that was only externally similar to its several thousand year old visual relative. Where there would usually be openings for the knight to breathe while wearing the armor, one could glimpse incredibly fine air filters, providing visual clues of the advanced gas mask set in the helmet. The knights all carried large, devastating melee weapons equipped with gleaming blades as dark as the night, most of them as large as the knights were tall. These fighters were the last of their kind, the rest of the ten-thousand strong organization having perished on the frontlines.

Their Leader, Paladin Silas, who sat at the front of the vehicle clad in a modified super-heavy four-ton variant of their armor with a large sheathed Zweihander resting on the floor next to him, keyed his comms device and commanded, “Weapons Check. We will enter combat formation as soon as the doors open.”

A knight near the back, one of four with a large shield and a heavy armored backpack spoke up, adding, “We will need to increase pace. The europeans have been increasing power on their newer rifles. Our scutums may not be able to survive for as long.”

Silas’ brow furrowed under his helmet as the other three defensive-equipped knights voiced their agreement. “When was this development, Knight Aurelia? Why was it not mentioned during the briefing?”

To which the now named Knight Aurelia slightly inclined her head, then answered, “This intelligence is fresh, only a few minutes old. I will transmit an image of the stronger european rifles to the operational network shortly.”

Silas only nodded, satisfied with the explanation. Almost immediately after, a comprehensive document was uploaded to the shared data space of the knights, giving them a short summary of the visual difference between the older european rifles and their updated counterparts. The occupants of the APC quickly skimmed through the documents, familiarizing themselves with the ECC’s new weapon.

“T-30,” announced the driver of the APC, inducing an atmosphere of tension in the troop hold as the knights reinforced their will and went through last checks of their equipment. The knights with the shields stood up, bracing their shields towards the door to act as mobile barricades. Aurelia stood first in line, her unarmored arms a metallic silver indicative of combat prosthetics. An ECC high-power beam had burned her original arms to nothing in the initial assault on the city, leaving her to replace them with mechanical facsimiles. In the hand not occupied by her shield, the grappling-hook-equipped right, a large poleaxe sat, a rifle magazine slotting in at the back end of the staff. A series of subdued snaps of air echoed through the inner compartment, prompting the driver to announce “Taking fire. Prepare for immediate combat.”

Silas rose from his seat, fixed his sheathed zweihander to his back, then turned to the rest of the cabin. “The corporate dogs have taken much from us. Our order lies in tatters. Yet we still stand strong. Some of us may not survive this day, but we will make the Europeans remember us! Nunquam derelinquat inimicos nostros frigus mortis!”, he shouted, which the others in the cabin echoed back with equal volume.

The APC came to a halt and a loud warning klaxon reverberated through the cabin before the doors slammed open and an immediate beam of radiation slammed against the shield of Aurelia, leaving behind a glowing and slightly melted spot. Her and the other scutum-wielding knights rushed out amidst the fusillade, then formed up next to each other in coordination honed by decades of fighting together to create a mobile wall behind which the remaining knights exited the vehicle. As soon as the last knight had left the APC, its doors closed with a loud clang and it sped away.

The knight strike group found themselves in a narrow side road between two automated factories, with fire from the ECC washing down it from the front. Silas transmitted an electronic signal, and the formation of the knights split into four groups of two with a defensive shield-wielding knight and an offensive weapon-wielding knight each. Two groups started independently sprinting down the road towards the European soldiers while the other two went towards their respective objectives.

Silas and Aurelia found themselves in a duo sprinting towards the largest of the pillars holding up the city above. The Pillar was located in the middle of an automated thermal energy distribution facility as the main electricity carrier to the upper city. The duo reached the thick steel gate meant to keep out any unwanted visitors, and Silas unsheathed his Zweihander. It slid free from the sheath with practised ease, the distant light of the European lances of energy reflecting off its edge. At a mental command, the gleaming black blade started emitting a slight hum, as the cutting edge of the blade had a graphene nanowire oscillating at ultrasound frequencies.

Silas swung the large and heavy weapon towards the thick lock keeping the two heavy metal segments together with mechanical precision aided by centuries of experience. There was a scream of tortured material, and it gave way under the force of a hundred kilograms focused on a monomolecular edge. Aurelia subsequently walked forward and kicked one of the segments, throwing the multi-ton entrance blockade wide open and allowing her and Silas to enter the compound.

The energy facility was largely made up of a large spherical central building, where the electricity was transported up from the depths of the earth's outer mantle via a laser-cooled superconducting graphene wire, then distributed to the city above and around by using additional laser-cooled cuprate wires. This led to the central building taking on the appearance of a dome pierced by a titanic needle, the pillar sitting right in the middle. The rest of the buildings in the compound were cubes of heavily armored large-scale energy storage, so that in case of the catastrophic failure of the main wire, the district could still support itself for a year. The facility was supposed to be overseen by a small crew meant to deal with issues before they arose, but it was evacuated and left with automated defenses when the ECC reached the district above.

Unfortunately, the defenses had been subverted by the invaders, which became apparent when a pair of machine cannon turrets swiveled at the two black-clad knights and immediately opened fire. Silas immediately started sprinting at the nearest in an erratic pattern, the few large-caliber bullets that still hit only making small dents in his heavy armor. Aurelia simply put up her shield and aimed the head of her poleaxe at the second turret.

A subdued crack sounded throughout the area, the result of the spearhead of her poleaxe splitting open to reveal the grip was hollow on the inside. Helical electromagnetic rails wound themselves down the entirety of the innards of the barrel, now slightly crackling with stored energy. The rifle magazine mounted at the bottom of the grip fed the mechanism a projectile, and a small spark of plasma ignited the first stage of the bullet. It sped through the barrel at speeds surpassing mach five, the EM-rails serving to accelerate the projectile even more.

Once the bullet left the barrel, the last stage of the projectile activated, a miniature rocket engine coming to life with a sharp hiss. The bullet cleaved through the air at hypersonic speeds, leaving behind a faint trail of plasma in its wake. With incredible precision, it flew into the barrel of the second machine cannon turret perfectly between two bullets being fired, impacting against the high-explosive shell in the firing chamber and causing a chain reaction in the ammunition magazine. The turret exploded in a violent fashion, the explosion of ammunition sending a shockwave across the grounds of the facility just as Silas reached the other one.

Ignoring the hail of bullets that rained on his armor, he swung his Zweihander with such force it tore the entire two-meter long barrel in two with almost no resistance. The turret subsequently stopped firing as its tracking systems were mounted on the barrel, continuing to try and access sensor equipment that simply wasn’t there even as Silas used the momentum generated by the first swing to bring the blade around in a spinning motion, cleaving the rest of the assembly in twain.

Sheathing the weapon, Silas turned to Aurelia, who was already walking towards their objective. They regrouped in front of the main entrance to the compound, a set of heavy double doors with an electronic lock. Silas keyed his comms unit before announcing, “Novem 1, entering facility now.” Seeing as the electronic locking mechanism had been long since compromised and likely wouldn’t open even if they had the correct entry codes, Silas moved forward, his sonic blade emitting a deadly hum as he aimed a large overhead swing at the doors. Just before it reached the metal of the doors, the hum changed to an electronic screech and a sound reminiscent to the supersonic boom of a rifle echoed through the compound, the nanofiber wire oscillating at such frequencies it broke the sound barrier with each movement forth and back. The blade sheared through the meter-thick heavily armored doors without issue, allowing Aurelia to grip the insides of the doors and temporarily pry them open.

The duo stepped inside, their violently torn open entrance slamming shut behind them, leaving them to the inky black of the inner facility, due to the lights having been damaged during the ECC’s capture of the compound. Any and all connections to the outside vanished, the sheer amounts of energy coursing through the facility blocking out any and all frequencies from entering the building. At a mental command, their perception expanded, the sensors the armor was equipped with directly connected to the brainstem via a cybernetic port on the back of the head. Ultrasound-based artificial vision worked in tandem with high-speed LIDAR systems as well as infrared and ultraviolet receptors to allow for effortless orientation independent from visual light.

Silas and Aurelia both took a few seconds to analyze their surroundings before deciding to proceed. A narrow corridor stretched out before them, barely allowing them to stand side by side. Dozens of unlabeled doors lined the walls, the digital system meant to differentiate them long since damaged and non-functional. Intermittently, the corridor was broken up by junctions, more narrow hallways leading away from them. At the end of the hallway, a large bulkhead door blocked access to the central chamber, where the energy was transmitted up from the depths and distributed to the sector.

“We will have to move in queued formation. These hallways do not allow for parallel movement,” Silas commented.

Aurelia nodded, then strode ahead, hefting her shield in front of her to act as vanguard. Silas followed behind, his gaze sweeping over the corridor behind them, searching for anything that might emerge from the doors they had already walked by. As they progressed deeper into the facility, a deep hum started reverberating through the hallway, signifying that they were nearing their target. The hum increased in volume as they neared the center of the building, growing louder and louder with each step. Just before they reached the bulkhead, the hum gained a crisp, almost crystalline edge, indicative of the microscopical vibrations within the central razor-thin wire through which the electricity travelled up from the depths. The duo reached the bulkhead, and Aurelia ripped it open with her prosthetic arms, ten centimeters of steel giving way with a grating screech. With the way now cleared, they stepped inside.

The inner chamber of the powerplant was a circular room with no visible roof, the walls extending upwards into the darkness. In the middle of the room sat the main energy distributor, dividing the singular strand of energy into thousands upon thousands of strands of weaker electricity. The distributor resembled a large matte grey cylinder with a ring of warning signs painted on at eye level, warning of extreme amounts of electricity. Just above their heads, thousands of differently coloured ceramic tubes extended into the darkness from the distributor, each one containing a thin cuprate wire enclosed by liquid methane. The whole room was lit up by cold, artificial light, resulting in a distinctly industrial atmosphere.

Aurelia set her large armored backpack on the ground and began taking out multiple powerful explosives while Silas began cutting into the walls, making openings for the bombs. In order to slow the ECC’s advance, these would collapse the pillar, sending the district full of European soldiers crashing hundreds of meters down.

—

unknown location

It could feel them walking from within its sarcophagus, the vibrations of their footsteps registering in its mind yet failing to change anything. That is, until a small light lit up, and the system began coming to life.

–initiating start-up procedure–

multiple hisses reverberated through the air as cryogenic storage units disengaged. A short rattle shook its frame, the central pump firing up roughly. Its noise faded into silence shortly after.

central circulation unit…100%

Two sets of lungs took a ragged breath. The next breath came smoother, and the following breath morphed into a continuous hum, lungs synchronizing with one another to form a smooth uninterrupted in- and outtake of air.

primary pulmonary unit…100%

secondary pulmonary unit…100%

A quartet of arms spasmed as its nerves suddenly began responding again, fists immediately clenching.

left lower manipulator…100%

right lower manipulator…100%

left upper manipulator…100%

right upper manipulator…100%

Slowly, a casket opened, hundreds of microscopic needles glinting from within. A pair of legs convulsed as the sedatives ran out.

left position manipulator…100%

right position manipulator…100%

A high-pitched whine started resonating through the chamber, the cold-fusion power unit spinning to life.

primary generator unit…100%

A pair of eyes snapped open, their iris inhumanly large and distorted, pupils shrunk into pinpricks.

left optical unit…100%

right optical unit…100%

A small series of containers around the central pump opened specific valves, injecting multiple compounds directly into the crimson liquid stream.

primary fuel compound…100%

secondary fuel compound…100%

tertiary fuel compound…100%

primary coolant…100%

secondary coolant…100%

Consciousness returned, sudden thoughts filling a blank space.

central processing unit…100%

…burning…

…

…it won’t stop burning…

…

…can’t let them win…

…

…IT BURNS-

A scream tore through the air, distorted and short, yet unmistakably human. An animalistic wail of such intense pain it overrode all other senses. In the midst of its throes of pain, a thought struck, which differed from the warped ones that otherwise would have filled the blank space. It was concise, orderly, mechanical.

…[targets designated for removal]...

The screaming abated. It went still. Four arms gripped the edge of the casket, pulling themselves out of it along with the rest of its body.

…

…kill them.

Two compartments on the casket opened, and four items were made visible. Two were small and ergonomic, and both had a nozzle on one end. The remaining two were larger, heavier. It took the items in its hands, and the smaller ones activated upon contact with it. Blinding light filled the space, and a growl was barely audible over the crackle of ionized gas.

—
Anthrazic Power Plant

inner chamber

Silas and Aurelia had already placed and armed five of the ten bombs they had with them, forming a line along the wall of the chamber. The bombs were placed in such a way that when detonated, they would catastrophically destabilize the chamber, which would lead to the rest of the power plant collapsing due to the design of Anthrazic Power plants using the main chamber as structural support.

Suddenly, the inbuilt Sonar of their armor picked up a vibration of the distributor that did not match established patterns. The pair tensed, turning their attention towards the grey cylinder in the middle of the room. Aurelia carefully laid down the bomb she was just about to plant in the wall, taking up her halberd from where she had laid it against a wall and pointing her shield towards the center of the chamber. Silas had quickly entered a combat-ready stance, looking towards the cylinder with his zweihander drawn in front of him.

With a short look at one another, they started cautiously walking towards the distributor, their footsteps echoing off the concrete walls. When they were only a meter from the surface of the matte grey cylinder, the temperature suddenly spiked and a bright light burst from the cylinder. The light moved across the cylinder in a rectangular pattern, leaving a trail of molten metal and burning graphene in its wake. Then, when the pattern was finished, the piece of the distributor fell to the floor with a resounding crash.

In the opening stood a horror. A vaguely humanoid being, clad in black European armor, but that was where the similarities to a standard ECC soldier ended. Four grotesquely elongated arms gripped a pair of blindingly bright plasma Blades as well as a duo of ECC breaching shields. The legs were similarly elongated like the arms, but had noticeably higher muscle mass, violently twitching every so often. The torso was deformed, the extra attachment points for the muscles of the second set of arms giving it a distinctly inhuman look. On the chest, the Logo of the ECC, a capitalized E surrounded by two Cs glowed brightly, extinguishing any doubt as to who had created this monstrosity. The head was covered by a featureless mask, with a slightly porous surface on the lower face indicative of a gas mask.

As the being stepped out of the opening, it stood to its full height, towering over the both knights by over a meter. A sound between a wet cough and chuckle sounded out through the porous gas mask.

Then, it exploded into motion.

A Blade shining like the sun screamed through the air, heading directly for Aurelia’s head. She barely threw herself to the side, plasma hissing where it touched the air. Silas swung his Zweihander towards the thing’s torso with incredible speed, nanowire screaming at its highest possible frequency while its back was turned to him. One of the arms holding the ECC riot shield twitched, and slammed into the flat of Silas’ blade, hitting the monomolecular edge away from its intended target. Silas immediately backstepped, dodging the second plasma sword as it headed for his midsection.

A loud crack sounded through the Chamber, Aurelia having shot at the thing with the rifle embedded in her poleaxe, but it achieved nothing, as the second riot shield twitched into place with inhuman speed and blocked the miniature rocket as it slammed against its surface. From behind the shield, it threw a sword at her, splitting the air with a high-pitched screech. Aurelia instinctively moved her shield into place to block the projectile, but she realised her mistake too late. Her eyes widened beneath her helmet as the plasma blade sheared directly through her shield, cleaved through the prosthetic arm holding the shield, and flew on with no speed lost, the blade cutting out before reaching the boundary of the chamber, hitting the wall with a metallic clang. Aurelia ignored the blinding nerve feedback from the ruined metallic appendage with experience brought on by a century of fighting the horrors inhabiting the northern american continent, hefting her poleaxe one-handed.

“Into the fight, once more” she muttered and went to join in on the melee with a grim expression on her face beneath the helmet.

Silas was barely holding his own against the thing, dodging the crackling plasma with fast, practiced movements, but Aurelia could tell he was pushing himself to his limit, backsteps and dodges cracking the concrete where he stepped. Every swing of his heavy blade was met with one of the shields or was outright dodged as the horror moved half a dozen metres in single evasive leaps. The one advantage Silas had was mass, being clad in four tons of armor plate. Every strike from his zweihander the european monstrosity blocked or deflected sent it stumbling, the sheer force behind the blade difficult to stop or even redirect. A stab at his torso was sidestepped and promptly answered with an overhead swing from Silas’ blade, which was intercepted by an ECC riot shield crashing into the flat of the blade and sending it off course just enough for the thing to dodge in the other direction and lash out with a kick. It hit Silas in the leg and sent him crashing to the floor, rolling to the side just in time to avoid a stab from a blade shining like the star of Sol.

The thing made to sweep his blade to the side to cut Silas in two, but a glint of glossy black forced it to instead dodge away, Aurelia’s poleaxe slashing through the air instead.

While facing the european, she said to Silas: “I would offer a hand to help you get up, but as you see,” the stump of her prosthetic twitched, phantom nerve signals routing into nothing “That might be just slightly difficult.”

The monstrosity in front of them snarled, the sound coming out garbled and warped through its mask. It made to attack, but just as it was starting to advance towards the two knights, the grappling hook launcher mounted on Aurelia’s arm shot out, splitting the air with a supersonic scream. The european dodged the projectile, easily stepping to the side and letting the hook embed itself into the wall.

What it didn’t expect was that the grappling hook was immediately ripped straight out of the wall, taking a chunk of concrete with it and slamming it into the back of the creature. It let out a pained howl, far too animalistic for anything so human in stature, and charged. Using the riot shields as cover, the thing ran straight between them, where the hilt of its second plasma blade laid on the floor. Silas had managed to hit it in the back with the tip of his Zweihander, and Aurelia scored a deep hit on one of the shields it was using, carving off the upper third portion, but the european managed to reach its second sword hilt regardless. The hilt ignited upon contact with its owner, bright plasma shooting out before forming into a meter-long semi-stable lance of plasma.

The thing turned back to the knights, its posture more confident now that it had reclaimed its second weapon. It let out an animalistic screech and leapt towards them, concrete floor cracking from the sheer power its legs used. Silas positioned his Zweihander in such a way that the tip of the blade was facing towards the creature, aiming to skewer the monstrosity on it. Aurelia readied her poleaxe for a devastating swing towards the creature's midsection, her intention to cut it in two. The european reacted to this by throwing one of its shields at Silas, the mass of carbon and ceramic impaling itself on Silas’ pale golden blade while a foot crashed against the hilt of Aurelia’s poleaxe mid-swing and sent her stumbling back.

A hiss of plasma against the air, and Silas just barely dodged a european blade which carved a deep trench through his right pauldron and set off blaring warnings in the damage monitoring system. Knowing the movement system of his armor would soon fail him, Silas acted quickly. At a mental command, multiple hundred kilograms of armor loosened themselves and fell to the ground with a resounding crash, allowing Silas to move his arm even as the nanofiber muscles of his armor lost all function, the sheer heat of the plasma combined with the inherent magnetic field needed to contain it playing hell on exposed electronic systems.

While Silas had been purging his right arm of now far too heavy armor plating, Aurelia had been barely surviving against the monstrosity, the blindingly bright weapons of her adversary cutting deeper and deeper with each successive hit. It was learning. Assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and acting accordingly.

Aurelia relayed this to Silas, hurriedly stating “The beast is learning our patterns! We cannot afford to let this go on for much longer” to which Silas answered with a quick nod and a change in posture, adopting a far more aggressive combat stance and announcing to Aurelia “I’ll buy you time,” before sprinting towards the thing to keep it busy. Aurelia used the short time she had to disengage the locks holding the spearhead of her poleaxe together and then tore the halves off, throwing them at the european at barely subsonic speed. The projectiles bounced off an ECC riot shield which had twitched into palace not a millisecond earlier, clattering to the floor just as Aurelia’s grappling hook shot out and buried itself in the shield.

Aurelia braced and let the winch in her arm pull the hook back in, ripping the shield out of the monstrosity’s hand and sending it stumbling at the unexpected force. Silas used the opportunity and stepped into its guard, spearing his Zweihander through its skull, the blade cutting clean through the graphene helmet and cleaving off a large portion of its head. The thing let out a wail of far too human pain and swung both of its swords towards Silas, one heading for his head and one for his heart. Silas managed to lean his head out of the way, the blade instead burning a deep trench through his helmet and searing the side of his head.

The other lance of plasma hit its mark.

It stabbed straight through eight centimeters of armor, destroying most of Silas’ internal organs through sheer heat and exiting through his back armor. Silas staggered away, the still remaining movement systems of his armor acting on automatic protocols to evacuate him from danger while various types of medication were pumped through his body, internal reservoirs almost immediately empty.

While the cybernetic neural link implant at the base of his skull kept the pain from registering, Silas could feel himself fading from consciousness, all feeling in his chest gone as the artificial nerves disconnected and the damaged movement systems of his armor gave up. He was barely aware of Aurelia’s halberd splitting his killer in two vertically, the halves falling to the ground next to his dying body. The last thing he heard before the darkness took him was Aurelia’s frantic yelling, desperately trying to keep him alive.

Aurelia stilled, sensors informing her that Silas’ brain had ceased all activity. Slowly, she stood up from where she had knelt next to Silas, slightly trembling grip tightening around her poleaxe’s grip.

An Anthrazicann mind could not be afforded to fall into the hands of the ECC, even in death, and neither could the neural link implant all Anthrazicanns had at the base of the skull.

“Calorem in frigore mortis invenias.", she muttered.

The nanowire on Aurelia’s poleaxe screamed mechanically as the blade pierced through Silas’s damaged helmet, utterly destroying his brain and the cybernetic implant which sat beneath it. Aurelia ripped the axehead back out of Silas’ mangled helmet and started dragging the corpse towards the opening in the energy distributor the european monstrosity had made when emerging from it.

Once she had reached the opening, she threw the rapidly cooling body down into the abyss, where it would hit the geothermal facility located just above the churning magma of the earth’s mantle. The facility was obviously not made for such impacts, so Silas would crash through the ceramic and metal floor, continuing on almost completely unimpeded until he hit the molten rock below, a fitting burial for a paladin.

Then, she started walking towards a spot which her armor designated as an ideal spot for a bomb. One swing of her axe carved a decimeter deep. A second swing cut an additional decimeter deep, the hole now half as deep as the thickness of the wall. Aurelia walked towards her armored backpack which had miraculously survived the fight and took out one of the five remaining bombs, walking back towards the hole she had just made and planting the bomb in the deepest point, the nozzles of the shaped charge pointing vertically into the wall.

She repeated this process four more times across the chamber, planting explosives in regular distances and closing a circle of destruction waiting to be unleashed. When all the bombs had been planted, Aurelia made to leave, but a glint of glossy black caught her attention. Turning her head, she noticed Silas’ zweihander, still embedded in the skull of the monstrosity that had slain the paladin. A sad smile formed on Aurelia's face as she walked up to the large blade, gleaming in the cold industrial lighting.

“In your name, Silas Nerva, this blade will continue to spill european blood until the war is won and every last corporate soldier is dead. This I swear on my name as Aurelia Faber.” she announced. Fixing her poleaxe to the electromagnetically supported clamps on her back where the grip folded in on itself, she grasped the hilt of the heavy sword and pulled. It slid free from the skull with almost no resistance, the monomolecular edge of the graphene wire deadly even when static and not oscillating. At a mental command, the nanowire receded into the blade, slotting into a millimeter-deep channel directly below it.

Aurelia hefted the now comparatively blunt blade on her shoulder, adjusting for the weight by leaning to the left, and strode out of the chamber. The echo of her footsteps was far more noticeable now, the facility having fallen silent as a result of the European cutting itself out of the distributor. Aurelia reached the armored doors she had temporarily pried open while entering the facility, and started cutting them open with Silas’ Zweihander. The heavy blade sheared through the large hinges, allowing the knight to send one of the doors crashing to the ground outside with a powerful kick.

Stepping over the mangled metal slab that used to be a door, Aurelia activated her comms unit, announcing, “This is Novem 2 to mission command, explosives have been planted and armed. However, the enemy predicted our plan and placed a melee unit in an ambush position. Novem 1 did not survive.”

the electronic crackle of the communications system she got in response heralded the answer from mission command. “Confirmed, Novem 2. The other teams faced similar resistance, with matching casualties as well. Novem 5 and 6 were both killed, their objective failed. Three out of four pillars have been armed, and the remaining Anthrazicns forces have retreated from the area.”

A frown formed itself on Aurelia’s face while she walked away from the central pillar. The ECC had expected them and laid a trap, but had seemingly underestimated them and prepared insufficient force to deal with them. The europeans, loathsome as they were, weren’t stupid, so why-

A split second of the targeting warning system of her armor crying out, and Aurelia threw herself to the side as a beam of destruction seared the air just left of her midsection, barely missing and scorching the surface plating, carbon coating burning away under the heat.

She barely had the time to react to another warning klaxon before a second beam of radiation hit her square in the chest, explosively evaporating multiple centimeters of armor and sending her stumbling. Aurelia managed to shift her torso barely out of the way of the third beam and sprinted towards one of the large heavily armored energy storage facilities surrounding the main building, each of her steps cracking the pavement.

Crossing the forty meter gap in barely a second, she ducked behind a thick concrete wall just as a fourth beam slammed into the corner, blowing away decimeter-sized chunks. Aurelia ran up to the industrial bulkhead serving as a maintenance access to the battery contained in the building, leapt with titanic force, and drop-kicked the door. The several hundred kilogram door went flying, its hinges instantly breaking apart under the force of several tons hitting it at superhuman speed. The knight wasted no time in picking herself up from the floor and darting into the building just as a lance of concentrated radiation hit her directly in the back, sending her sprawling to the floor. Rolling to the side, where a corridor branched off from the entrance chamber, Aurelia stood up and assessed her options.

The ECC had obviously predicted Anthrazica’s actions more than she had thought, seeing as they had set up at minimum five European anti-infantry snipers around the energy facility while she and Silas had been battling the thing the ECC had left in the central energy distributor.

“Command, I am currently pinned down in an energy storage building by at least five sharpshooters,” she spoke into her comms unit, “They won’t get through the walls, but going outside is a death sentence.”

Silence. No answer came from mission command. The red emergency lighting of the building gained an ominous edge.

“Command?”

Nothing. Not even the slight electronic crackle to indicate a person on the other side was preparing a response. A chill crept up Aurelia's spine. The comms system itself was working fine, testing the system via automatic query and getting the appropriate automatic response proved it.

“This is Novem 2 to Novem team. Requesting headcount”

Deafening silence greeted her. Initiating a request for status monitoring to the shared tactical network revealed the answer.

They were dead, all of them. The others must have been ambushed by separate teams of snipers as well, but had apparently not been as lucky as her. Judging by the lack of an answer from mission command, it had been attacked by the Europeans as well.

Aurelia grit her teeth. The mission was an absolute disaster. The last of Anthrazica’s finest knights almost completely wiped out by a simple ambush. And she would soon follow them, as the corporate bastards would almost certainly keep multiple close-quarters teams in reserve for exactly this situation. As if answering her thoughts, European shouts began to echo down the halls of the energy storage building, thermal sensors sweeping through the entrance and central chamber. Aurelia made her choice.

Transmitting the appropriate emergency codes to the tactical network gave her the digital detonator for the bombs planted in the various pillars holding up the ceiling, and the city above. Inputting a rapid series of commands, Aurelia had the bombs begin a thirty-second countdown, a hardwired safety measure as a result of the construction of the bombs.

T-30

Aurelia carefully and silently laid Silas’ zweihander on the floor and took her poleaxe from her back, grip unfolding to its full two-meter length. The open end of the poleaxe pointed at the entrance to the hallway, magazine feeding the firing mechanism a bullet.

A European soldier rounded the corner, heavy armor and radiation-shotgun pointed into the hallway. A deafening crack echoed through the hallway, and the corporate soldier jerked before crashing to the ground, the rocket having ripped a gaping hole in his head.

T-26

Hurried steps started echoing towards her hallway. If she did nothing, Aurelia would be swarmed in seconds. So she did. Leaping with extreme force, she flew around the corner, Axe-muzzle pointed at the line of startled soldiers. Another crack resounded through the building, and two more soldiers collapsed, falling backwards into the others following them.

T-23

Utilizing the confusion, Aurelia fired off her last two shots, killing an additional four. Seeing as her magazine had been depleted, Aurelia ducked back into the hallway while a scattered blast of radiation burned away a good centimeter of her overall armor. She collapsed her poleaxe and fixed it to her back before picking up Silas’ zweihander, the blade letting out a mechanical scream as the nanowire oscillated at its highest sustainable frequency.

T-19

The echolocation of her armor pinpointed a European about to round the corner, so Aurelia took the initiative by stabbing the heavy blade straight through the corner, cleaving through the graphene armor with the same ease as it cut through a meter of concrete. Ripping the zweihander back out of the newly-made hole, Aurelia barely had the time to jump away before an ECC plasma grenade flew around the corner, melting away the battered remnants of her plating and leaving her without armor. Purging the last remaining pieces of molten slag from the graphene muscle undersuit, Aurelia sprinted deeper into the corridor with far more speed than had been possible with her heavier armor plating.

T-12

Coming to a room where the corridor split into three more, Aurelia took position in the leftmost corridor while readying herself for the rapidly approaching thuds of footsteps against the floor.

As the first muzzle of a radiation-shotgun emerged from the opening, Aurelia activated an Implant that injected her with a very specific concoction of substances while the neural link implant handling her connection to her armor overclocked itself, rapidly heating up. The world slowed, enemy movement slowing to a miniscule fraction of itself.

T-10

The ground cracked where it met the soles of her boots, Aurelia launching herself forward with blinding speed, the zweihander angled in front of her to act as a spearhead. A flash of glossy black, and two corporate soldiers jerked backwards as the blade ripped through both of them, Aurelia cleaving upwards through their skulls and lashing out with a kick that sent the corpses hurtling through the hallway, impacting against the following soldiers and leaving them stunned.

T-9

Standing back upright, Aurelia steadied herself and threw the zweihander, blade cleaving through the air like a javelin while she sprinted after the thrown weapon, boots mulching the carpet of bodies on the floor into a fine paste.

The flying zweihander pierced through the first european soldier, continuing on with tremendous speed and impaling two more before coming to a stop from the sheer mass it had impaled. Aurelia reached the blade where it had pierced through three soldiers and ripped it out of its grim sheath, nanowire humming with mechanical ease as it ripped through three human bodies within a tenth of a second.

T-8

A glint of glass against the dark, and Aurelia threw herself behind the pile of corpses as a cone of radiation scorched the hallway, burning away multiple decimeters of flesh and leaving the hallway obscured by the steam of evaporated blood. Immediately, Aurelia leapt up from behind her makeshift cover, tearing through the air towards the remaining corporate soldiers.

The zweihander decapitated three soldiers before the automated systems in the european weapons gained a lock-on and angled their muzzles to fire at her. Aurelia used one of the headless corpses as a shield, ducking her head to protect it from the radiation ripping through the concrete surrounding her.

T-7

Stepping around the corpse as it fell to the floor, Aurelia angled the gleaming black blade so that the tip was facing the enemy soldiers and then lashed out with her arm-mounted grappling hook. It stabbed into a European whose weapon was just angling itself to aim at her, throwing his aim off and allowing Aurelia to pull him towards her with a heave and whir of the winch in her arm. The corporate soldier flew off his feet, hurtling through the air towards the unarmored knight, impaling himself on the humming blade of the zweihander.

T-6

Ripping her blade out of the European sidewards, Aurelia launched herself towards the remaining enemy soldiers, barely dodging a blindingly bright flash of radiation as it burned the air. The zweihander flashed in the light, and another ECC soldier collapsed to the ground, a deep slash to the chest cutting straight through both heart and lungs.

Aurelia ran past the rapidly dying European, blood coating her vision for a brief moment before it ran off of the hydrophobic lenses of her undersuit. When her vision cleared, the knight barely got a glimpse of a European lens glinting in the dark before painfully hot radiation burned through her nanofiber muscle suit, leaving a fist-wide hole in her lower torso.

T-5

Within milliseconds, the physical-trauma protocols activated, medical foam filling out the gaping hole and closing it shut with a thin layer of graphene over it. While Aurelia did not feel any pain, having the same implant Silas did, she too could feel her body weakening, a sign that she didn’t have much time left.

Instinctively gritting her teeth even though she felt nothing, she split the ECC soldier whose weapon had punched through her stomach in two, heavy sword screaming mechanically. Acting before another automated european lens could get a bead on her, Aurelia threw herself straight at the remaining enemies, zweihander once more pointing forwards to act as a spearhead.

T-4

Reaching the group of soldiers, she hit them with the velocity of a speeding car, black blade piercing through the first soldier and ripping him off his feet. Aurelia ripped the sword back out of the European and angled her arm so that it was facing the corporate soldiers, grappling hook lashing out and piercing through an enemy helmet while she leapt towards the rest.

She flew past the enemy the barbed projectile had hit, locking the winch in her arm and spinning the corpse like a twisted flail. The dead ECC soldier crashed against two of his comrades, hitting with barely subsonic speed and utterly obliterating their torsos.

T-3

Retracting the grappling hook from the mangled remains of the European, Aurelia surveyed the situation. Two enemy soldiers left. The red emergency lighting of the building reflected off the zweihander as it flew towards one of the last two corporate dogs, stabbing straight through his upper torso and nailing him against the wall. The last ECC soldier barely got a glimpse of a silver fist before it crashed against his helmet, shattering the lenses of his helmet and throwing him against the wall.

T-2

The black-armored european soldier had only just started sliding down the wall when a foot clad in black artificial muscle fibers punched through his gut, drenching the matte black undersuit in crimson viscera. Aurelia pulled her foot out of the corporate soldier’s stomach and formed a mechanical knife-hand, the tips of her metal fingers sharpened into needle-points.

The metallic limb punched through graphene armor with brutal force, shearing through bone and muscle alike easily and severing the european’s arm at the joint. Only then did his nervous system catch up with him, Aurelia seeing his eyes widen in pain through the remains of his helmet-lenses.

T-1

Deciding that she had sated her rage, Aurelia lashed out with a headbutt that crushed his skull, ending the ECC soldier’s suffering just as the pain was truly starting to register in his consciousness. Leaving the corpse to slump against the floor, she ran to the nearest doorway, picking up the black zweihander from where it had impaled a corporate soldier against the wall and stabbing it into the floor of the doorway.

T-0

Time suddenly sped back up just as a titanic quake echoed through the building accompanied by a deafeningly loud booming sound. Aurelia gripped the edges of the doorway and braced.

Outside the energy storage building where a massacre had taken place, the black sky ripped open. The great titanic needles that held up the graphene ceiling collapsed in on themselves, taking the darkness above with it. Brilliant Sunlight illuminated the erupting chaos in the subterranean industrial sector.

The destruction wrought carried outwards from the locations of the needles until the whole sector collapsed to the ground, over a thousand square kilometers of Anthrazic civilization and industry irrevocably destroyed through their own weight. The destruction had taken multiple other structural needles with it through sheer momentum alone, only being stopped by the monolithic walls that separated the sectors subterraneally.

In the end, an almost forty kilometer wide, two-hundred kilometer long stretch of ruined Civilization remained, providing the Anthrazicans substantial protection from an invasion from the ECC-controlled sectors of the city through sheer impassibility to ground troops. The corporate forces would adapt as they always did, but that would take time, giving the Anthrazicans a short respite from the ever-advancing Europeans.

Operation Mammoth Hunting successful

14. 6. 2359

0500 hours

The first thing to register in Aurelia's returning consciousness was sound, a sharp warning siren blaring directly into her skull and wrenching her awareness out of its dazed state.

-=]warning[=-

-=]heavy Damage to internal organs[=-

-=]digestive tract irreparable[=-

-=]main set of lungs irreparable[=-

-=]backup lungs at full operational capacity[=-

-=]seek nearest trauma center[=-

Regaining sight, she opened her eyes and was treated to absolute darkness. Activating her other sensors revealed that she was buried beneath rubble. Sending out a pulse of her sonar array gave her the reason for why her legs felt numb. A massive slab of concrete had completely crushed her legs, forcing her armor to amputate them at the knee and thigh respectively. Her condition was stable for now, but the extensive damage done to her body ensured it wouldn’t remain that way for long. After a look at the internal gyroscope, Aurelia made to start shifting rubble out of her way to the surface. Before she did that, however, a glint of black caught her eye, drawing her attention to Silas’ zweihander, embedded in the same concrete slab that had torn her legs off. It had been angled in such a way that instead of being horribly bent out of shape by the chunk of incoming concrete, it had cut clean through instead.

Reaching for the heavy blade, Aurelia’s fingers just barely brushed the hilt of the sword, but that was enough to activate the electromagnetics in the grip and send it towards the knight’s outstretched metallic hand. Aurelia fully closed her hand around the grip, and the weapon hummed to life, showing it was still functional. Aurelia powered the weapon down and, after shifting some detritus around, managed to fix the weapon to her back next to the miraculously mostly undamaged poleaxe. The tip of the sword was digging into the rubble beneath her, giving her somewhat solid structural support. Using that to her advantage, Aurelia started carefully shifting rubble and climbing towards the surface with the assistance of her sonar array to preempt an accidental cave-in.

-=]warning[=-

-=]backup lungs at 50% critical capacity[=-

-=]seek nearest trauma center[=-

Hours passed.

A look at the altimeter told it had barely been a dozen meters, but she kept on slowly ascending. While she climbed, Aurelia’s body slowly started to give out, severely damaged organs not able to deal with the stress. The only thing that ensured she kept going was that her prosthetic arm had its own power generation, unaffected by the weakening biological functions of its wearer. The neural link implant responsible for the nerve signals sent to her brain kept up the steady stream of chemicals normally sent by the rest of the body through emergency reserves, meaning that while the mangled remains of her body started to die, Aurelia remained wide awake.

-=]warning[=-

-=]backup lungs at full critical capacity[=-

-=]backup lungs irreparable[=-

-=]seek nearest trauma center[=-

Aurelia’s second set of lungs had given out under the stress, her body no longer able to intake air. Soon, the rest of her organs would give out as well, cut off from their primary source of oxygen. Still, she had to press on.

Late into the sixth hour, her communications system was barely able to breach the rubble and send out an emergency signal. The surface was near.

-=]warning[=-

-=]main heart irreparable[=-

-=]backup heart at 75% critical capacity[=-

-=]main liver irreparable[=-

-=]backup liver irreparable[=-

-=]main kidney irreparable[=-

-=]backup kidney at 85% critical capacity[=-

-=]seek nearest trauma center[=-

Aurelia’s body was nearing death more and more with each passing minute, organs failing one after the other and cascading into a self-destructive chain reaction. She persevered. Her prosthetic arm ensured she kept on moving upwards at a steady pace. The zweihander was used as a lever, stabbed into pieces of rubble to act as a handhold and allow the knight to pull herself upwards.

Finally, the dark blade cut through the last piece of rubble and the cold antarctic sun cut through the darkness, allowing Aurelia to pull herself free and gaze at the sky. Destruction surrounded her, a carpet of jagged spikes and concrete ruin. Aurelia had emerged on top of a hill in the destitute wastes, the remnants of the huge needle forming a mountain of concrete pieces and sharp graphene debris.

Suddenly, her communication system crackled to life.

“Novem 2, location has been confirmed, stay where you are. We’ll come to you”

Aurelia attempted to smile, but the muscles in her face had long since died along with her vocal cords, so the only thing she could manage was a series of clicks in morse code, signaling her confirmation.

/ -.-. --- -. ..-. .. .-. -- . -.. .-.-.-

A few minutes passed. The noise of rotating helicopter blades slowly increased, but nothing appeared in Aurelia’s field of vision. Then, with an electronic crackle, a large four-rotor craft appeared above where she laid, optical camouflage turning off as the doors opened and a squad of teal-green soldiers wearing light white-coloured armor with copper accents descended on ropes, a stretcher lowering itself to the ground automatically. As the group of soldiers started to lift Aurelia towards the stretcher, the automatic system of her armor judged that she was now in safe hands, and so she faded into an artificially induced sleep, life support systems switching to keep her unconscious mind intact until her brain had access to what it needed to keep itself alive.

…

Aurelia drifted through unconsciousness, the mission flashing in her mind.

…

Narrow industrial streets, buildings with thick concrete walls, black spires holding up the perpetually dark sky.

…

Twin stars crackled in the air, an animalistic scream pierced the silence.

…

A flash of blinding light accompanied by the hiss of molten metal and sizzling flesh.

…

The sky fell.

…

A grave of rubble.

…

unknown location

9. 7. 2359

1600 hours

With a snap, Aurelia woke, sudden mental clarity washing away the remnants of sleep. She attempted to open her eyes, but found that she couldn't. Trying to move her eyes had the same result. She also found that she couldn't feel anything and neither did she hear anything.

They had to have removed her from the armor which would have deactivated the nerve block her cybernetic implant had been maintaining, so why did she feel nothing? The only thing she could interact with was the neural link implant. Focusing on the only tangible thing she could see, Aurelia sent a mental pulse into it, and its operating system activated, electronic interfaces springing to life.

Aurelia Initiated a status report.

-=]status[=-

-=]BIOS functional[=-

-=]MPU functional[=-

-=]RAM functional[=-

-=]Nerve connection ports functional[=-

-=]maintenance port connected[=-

-=]ocular nerve not found[=-

-=]cochlear nerve not found[=-

-=]vestibular nerve not found[=-

-=]olfactory nerve not found[=-

-=]central nervous system not found[=-

-=]peripheral nervous system not found[=-

The report hit Aurelia like a fist to the gut. Her nervous system was permanently connected to the implant, the nerve endings themselves fused into electronic ports. If a status check could not find any of them, that meant that the nerves would have to be completely missing, either dead or removed. Yet, if she were dead, she wouldn’t be able to think about that, let alone use a cybernetic implant to check on herself. So why was she still alive?

Before Aurelia had time to think about that further, the implant alerted her to an incoming data transfer from the maintenance port, the only currently occupied port. It was a voice transmission which Aurelia somewhat carefully accepted.

“Aurelia Faber, my name is doctor Cicero Tullius. If you are conscious and can understand the words in this message, please respond”, a professional voice with an undertone of bone-deep exhaustion said. Lacking the ability to verbally answer, Aurelia answered in Morse code.

.. / -.-. .- -. / .... . .- .-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.. --- -.-. - --- .-.

“Good. Let me start this off by saying how incredibly lucky you are to be alive. Not only did every single one of your organs fail from excessive physical trauma, but by the time the medical extraction team reached you, your body was already in the early stages of necrosis. The team tried to stop it from reaching the brain via surgical removal of the brain from the skull, but a portion of the temporal lobes was lost to necrosis and had to be cut away. A crystalline data repository has been installed as a replacement, but the stored memories were only partially able to be transferred due to tissue damage.”

While the doctor paused, likely looking through medical documents, Aurelia processed the information. ‘Surgical… removal? I don’t have a body anymore? Memory damage? What did I lose? Didn’t Paladin- why can’t I remember his name? My last mission was with him, so why can’t I remember? I know he was a friend, so what was his name? What was his name? WHAT WAS HIS NAME? WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER? I SWORE TO WIELD HIS BLADE IN HIS NAME, SO WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER?’ Interrupting her spiral, doctor Tullius continued talking.

“Regarding your missing senses, we are installing a physical access cable to the cameras and microphones in the facility soon, now that you’ve woken up. A voice program and corresponding speakers are included, naturally. Regarding a new body… that will take more time. Our cloning facilities are currently completely overworked, and making a completely new body takes months, sometimes years. With how the war is going, that may not even happen.”

As the doctor spoke, the implant alerted her of the neural ports for vision and hearing being connected, and suddenly she was flooded with feedback from senses she had been missing up until now. Her vision was filled with a view from the ceiling of a stark white room full of medical equipment. The floor was made from marble, and reflected the light the luminescent ceiling gave off. Lining the walls were dozens of monitoring devices, displaying various information, some of which Aurelia recognised as implant diagnostics readings. In front of a central liquid tank stood who she presumed to be doctor tullius. He was tall, yet not overly so for an Anthrazicann at approximately two meters ten centimeters and surprisingly thin, given how much importance Anthrazic culture gave to the physical body. His body was covered by a white, self-sterilizing lab coat, but the distinctive silhouette of layered plates was visible beneath the fabric, a sign of heavy radiation protection. His face was gaunt and marred by stress lines, no doubt caused by the war. His eyes were fully black voids, indicative of the mechanical replacements installed instead of his original ones.

The opening strike of the war had been hundreds of European missiles aimed at Anthrazic military bases. The blinding light unleashed by their detonations had destroyed the eyes of many, with the lucky ones able to get cloned replacements while the rest had to make due with mechanical facsimiles. While able to see in roughly the same definition of their biological counterparts, they strained the user’s nervous system and reduced their ability to use more mentally straining war machines such as neural-link-equipped tanks and fighter jets. This led to the cloning facilities prioritising vehicle operators and pilots when deciding who received new biological eyes, forcing the rest of the population to use cybernetic replacements.

Doctor Tullius flipped a few switches, and shortly after Aurelia’s hearing returned, filled by a deep electronic hum as the devices in the room continued monitoring her. A notification flitted across her vision, informing Aurelia that the voice program was ready to be used.

“Doctor, while I am grateful to be alive, what is to happen to me? Everything I could do in this state is something a sufficiently sophisticated security algorithm could do faster, better and with less error”, she asked, foreign voice sounding out her words. The voice program wasn’t provided with recordings of her voice, so the voice it produced was a generic pre-configured human voice with slight artificial distortion at the edges.

Tullius turned to look at the camera with pity and an apology in his eyes, and her heart sunk.

“Truth be told, the only thing you can do to contribute to the war effort is administrative, since your biologically-limited reaction time prevents you from effectively fighting in the digital side of the war, even if your vastly different thought structure would provide you with a minor advantage due to the European AIs being unfamiliar with human mental processes. Even then, if we were to drastically reduce your reaction time with performance-enhancing drugs, the average lifespan of a digital warfare AI is measured in days due to the chaotic nature of the conflict. You, as someone not intricately familiar with the landscape of a computerized system, wouldn’t even survive that long”, the doctor revealed.

“I can’t stay idle while the corporate dogs destroy everything I’ve ever known! Even with pieces of me missing, I can still be effective in combat! Can’t my brain be placed into a combat vehicle or Full-Body-Prosthesis?!”, she pleaded desperately. A Full-Body Prosthesis, often shortened to FBP, was almost exactly what it sounded like. It was a completely mechanical replacement body, oftentimes somewhat stronger than a standard Anthrazicann and with just slightly higher endurance, but they put great strain on the neural link of the user and were only usable if one had a sufficiently powerful implant such as the combat pilot version or vehicle operator version. This was due to the fact that the more complicated a machine became, the more powerful the Neural link had to be. In larger vehicles such as tanks and fighter jets, this problem was solved with neural link amplifiers built into the craft, but these were too large to fit into an Anthrazicann-sized-body. Before the war, FBP were almost never used, as a cloned body was less maintenance-intensive and also cheaper. This led to the slowing and eventual halting of development of FBP, resulting in many of the issues that came with the technology such as the requirements for specific neural links never being addressed. Aurelia’s neural link was an older model; an Anthrazicann received their neural link as part of their compulsory military service, and Aurelia’s service had been almost a century ago now. She had been part of a tank crew, but neural link technology had progressed far since that time, so she was unsure whether it would be strong enough to handle a Full-Body Prosthesis.

The doctor paused, then walked up to a screen showing the diagnostics readings of her neural link, and looked through it for a few minutes. Then he switched to a different screen showing the dozens of cameras in the facility they were in and proceeded to flick through them for just under a minute before he sighed and answered “Your neural link is a vehicle-operator-type, but is too far out of date to be able to use an FBP, since it requires a neural link from at least the last fifty years. The nearest production site of Full-Body Prostheses is right on the front lines, and with the Europeans advancing as they always do, we wouldn’t even be able to procure an FBP for you to use had your neural link been compatible. Every combat-capable vehicle at this base is either already in active use or far too old to be of use, and that extends to the larger Anthrazic Army as well. The best I can currently do is give you access to the defensive emplacements of the facility, which should give you the opportunity to fight the ECC soon, looking at the way the frontline is moving. Until then, please try to find other ways to occupy yourself.”

The doctor turned to leave, each of his steps against the white marble floor like a death knell announcing the end of her hopes. Aurelia wanted to reach out, to keep him here; him leaving the room would make it real. But the words died on her digital tongue, never leaving her inner consciousness. Doctor Tullius reached the door, and it slid open silently, revealing a featureless corridor with blue accents along the wall. He stepped through, and the door closed with the finality of an executioner’s axe, leaving Aurelia alone in the room.

A scream tore its way through her digital throat, but she had lost her focus on the voice program, so nothing left the speakers. Her breathing started quickening, but then she realised she had no lungs anymore with which to breathe. The walls started closing in, the clinical room too cramped for her to remain there, but she couldn’t move. She was stuck here, unable to leave and unable to keep her promise to a friend whose name she couldn’t remember. ‘I have to continue on, just as the tenets of the- I can’t even remember the name of the order. Why did I join them? I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I can’t- I- I- Who am I?! What makes me… me? Am I even still me? Am I just a thing parading around the broken pieces of someone else? How much of me is missing? Do I even deserve to carry the name of Aurelia Faber when I’m missing so many things? What am I? Why was I kept alive when I have no way to fulfill my purpose, no way to take my revenge? I have to leave this place, I have to leave, I- there has to be something here I can use to get back to the fight.’ Frantically, she started flicking through the cameras, trying to find something to allow her to get back to the frontlines.

The war had taken almost everything from her, and now she couldn’t even remember what survived. The only purpose she had left was the fight, and if she couldn’t even do that, she was nothing, better off dead. Dozens of security cameras flitted through her field of vision, each containing a different yet useless view. A corridor, an office with papers everywhere, an empty hangar, an empty subterranean runway open to the air on both ends and surrounded by support beams holding up the ceiling, a view of the ocean surrounding the mountain the base was set in on three sides, which gave Aurelia pause. She flicked through the cameras until she reached one of the entrances to the base. A plaque with a name sat under a stylized triangle which contained a jagged greek gamma letter in the upper corner, and the numbers zero-one written in rectangular letters, with a diagonal line through the zero. The plaque read “GAMMA-SITE-1”, and had she still possessed a throat, she would have broken out in hysterical laughter.

Gamma-Site-1, known to the greater population under the name of “Pyramis”, was the first military research site Anthrazica had ever built, situated within a uniquely rectangular mountain on the outskirts of the Antarctic continent, and an enigma to the wider population. It was the home of the infamous experimental combat unit Nimbus, a small group of specialists that routinely performed acts of what seemed like outright magic wherever a member appeared. Notable acts included one of their number lifting up a European tank and throwing it at a nearby group of ECC soldiers, another one of them surviving a direct nuclear strike, and another member warping the fabric of reality itself, compressing space to such a degree that it created a localized singularity, which proceeded to destroy an entire battalion of corporate soldiers in two minutes before suddenly disappearing. Unit Nimbus was Anthrazica’s ace in the hole, a localized apocalypse to be unleashed where and when needed.

‘Anthrazica’s own superhero base, and even they can’t help me. Am I really that hopeless? Aren’t at least two of them in basically the exact same situation as me?! How can I be denied an FBP when at least one of them is a confirmed FBP user?!’, Aurelia thought, anger building up within her. The indignation gave her the motivation to continue on searching through the cameras, various pieces of technology flying through her vision as she switched from view to view. Seeing an automated maintenance bay for a Full-Body Prosthesis made her pause, but after confirming it was empty and no mechanical body was anywhere to be seen, she continued on scouring the base.

Then, she reached a camera that showed a dark room, multiple towering silhouettes taking up the space within. At a mental command her view lit up in exotic colors, dozens of sensors springing to life. The room was highlighted in hues of red and blue, thermal lens showing the lattice of heating architecture with the walls of the room and how it spread through the space. It showed vaguely human structures, but the sonar and lidar sensors that activated a split second later sharpened it into a defined shape. White outlined the edges of bipedal giants, four mechanical titans hanging from ceiling mounted cranes and support structures in a half-circle surrounding the entrance to the room. Ignoring the obvious disrepair they were in, Aurelia decided that this was going to be her ticket back to the front. But first she had to find out what these machines were even built for, since for all she knew, they could be advanced power armor purpose-built for the void of space, if one looked at the extensive thruster assembly one of them sported. Though, their sheer size made something like that fairly unlikely.

Digging through the research files of the base, Aurelia eventually found what she was looking for, in the form of a document file labeled “RNLATV Program - Reduced Neural Load Armored Test Vehicle Program”. It detailed how, in the search for armored vehicles that required less powerful neural link implants, structures similar to Anthrazicann Anatomy were tested and used. Anthrazica was developing mecha. The document also told Aurelia that there should be a fifth prototype, with a sixth currently in development, but the fifth was listed as currently deployed in combat. Apparently, the sixth design would be the final iteration of the project before mass production would begin.

The leftmost mech appeared to be model A, the first of the program and visibly the most unrefined design. Bulky armor plates covered a complex maze of hydraulics which allowed the mechanical giant to stand tall regardless of its operational status, and thus it required minimal support structures when powered down. Though, according to the document, the hydraulics were prone to bursting under maximum pressure, and did not provide sufficient power for the movement required in combat. Insufficient for her purposes, so Aurelia moved on to the next mech.

On the right of model A stood its successor, model B. Its design was noticeably sleeker, optimized armor plating on top of powerful electromagnets instead of hydraulics. Reading through its specifications, Aurelia discovered that, while powerful and requiring virtually no maintenance when the magnets weren’t used at full capacity, the system drank energy like a jet fighter did fuel. The extreme currents running through the magnets needed to produce combat-viable movement also led to them melting if one remained in battle for too long, limiting its maximum engagement time to just under thirty minutes before critical failure. The gigantic electromagnetic fields produced during high-performance operation also regularly interfered with its own sensors and any exposed electronics, leading to sudden loss of control if one moved too quickly and preventing it from effectively integrating with a military command structure due to extensive communication difficulty.

However, It did provide excellent protection from EMPs due to needing to shield itself against its own magnets. The sheer power of the design appealed to Aurelia, but the many caveats prevented her from outright choosing it as her new body. Keeping it in the back of her mind, she kept on looking.

Model C looked less like a combat machine and more like a piece of art. Perfectly adjusted armor plating sat atop of a maze of hydraulics interspersed with electromagnets. The sheer intricacy was boggling to look at, a mechanical symphony working in perfect harmony and leaving no room for error. It had far less problems during operation than its predecessors, both hydraulics and magnets covering for each system's faults. With the magnets providing assistance when moving at higher speed, the hydraulics could run at lower pressure, reducing the risk of bursting and significantly decreasing the power the magnets had to take, eliminating the operational time limit caused by heat buildup and power drain. It also didn’t suffer from its own electromagnetic field interfering with its sensors as a result, massively increasing its line of sight and making communication far easier.

It was art in machine form, a mechanical beauty. Yet its intricate and optimized movement proved to be the achilles heel. It required ruinous amounts of maintenance. For every hour of combat, a hundred spent getting the millimeter-thin system back in order would be needed to prevent catastrophic damage. The sheer complexity required a dedicated team of technicians for each individual body part, enough personnel to maintain and repair fifty Anthrazic heavy tanks simultaneously. That much downtime between combat deployments was something Aurelia couldn’t tolerate. Two hours of operation would see her confined to the base for over two thirds of a month under realistic working times with all maintenance teams at full capacity. Good for operations planned far in advance, but useless otherwise. Next one.

Model D used another different movement system than the first three, artificial graphene muscles closely mimicking Anthrazicann Anatomy. Its performance profile was by far the most impressive of the mechs in the room. Speeds above anything any other ground-bound military vehicle could reach, achieved through dozens of small rocket thrusters mounted on the mech. Strength beyond compare, able to crush an entire tank through sheer grip strength and hurl the destroyed remains hundreds of meters. But its high power also led to developing the same weakness that model B had, requiring extreme amounts of electricity to facilitate that strength. Since it was also far faster than its predecessors, it required extensive g-force protection in order to keep the pilot aware and conscious.

While the issue of g-acceleration was one Aurelia didn’t need to concern herself with as it was far easier to protect a brain than an entire body against acceleration, the other problems the craft had combined with the fact it was missing multiple critical internal parts such as the fire control system and pilot tank made it unusable for her.

Looking at the mechanical giants in the room, she assessed her options. Model A was far too much of a test vehicle, Model B had an engagement time of 30 minutes, Model C needed exorbitant amounts of maintenance and Model D was missing almost all internal components. Model C would be her best bet to getting out of the base, even if her freedom would be limited to a few hours every month.

While she was preparing to send a request to be transferred into Model C to the command center of the base, the automated defense system notified her of an aircraft approaching the base bearing friendly identification data. Quickly switching to the sensors of one of the air defense emplacements mounted on the mountain, Aurelia surmised that this was not a fighter jet normally seen in Anthrazic airspace. Its silhouette was far more angular than the usual compound-delta-winged fighter Anthrazica used, wings perfectly merging into the fuselage and forming a sharp triangle of perfect aerospace engineering twice as large as the standard thirty meter long fighter jets usually seen in the sky. The center of the aircraft was unusually large, indicative of a larger type of engine. There was no discernible cockpit, only a pair of small hatches just behind the nose of the craft barely visible to the sensors, behind which sat a large singular air intake.

The craft flew unsteadily, frequent twitches of the control surfaces indicating that it was an aircraft built for far higher speed than the comparatively slow speed of sound it was traveling at currently. As it approached the landing strip set into the mountain, a communications channel opened and a scratchy voice announced “This is Nimbus One-dash-Three, approaching base on vector zeta-six, initiating braking burn shortly, clear landing strip” The voice sounded like a duo of voices speaking in synchronized tones, indicative of the combined consciousness typical of multi-personnel vehicles.

As it reached the entrance of the subterranean runway, still moving at the speed of sound, the engine nozzle suddenly snapped to point at a right angle to the direction of travel. Multiple small points of light and heat all over the craft joined the main engine in a short burst of light, and the aircraft was suddenly flying upside-down with its rear pointed forwards while the radiation sensors of Aurelia’s camera blared a warning. The nozzle snapped back into its regular position, and a blindingly bright plume of flame burst forth as the radiation warning blared louder in Aurelia’s mind, slowing the craft from its barely subsonic speed to an almost complete standstill in less than a second. The plane orientated its nose to point upwards, micro-thrusters flaring, and then slowly lowered itself towards the ground while metal landing supports longer than the craft snapped out from the middle of the fuselage at almost exactly 45 degrees. As soon as they touched the ground, the engine cut out with a harsh mechanical clang, plunging the cave into silence and quieting the radiation sensor warning.

Almost immediately after, a team of technicians clad in maintenance-spec power armor with heavy radiation shielding approached the craft. When they reached the plane, one of them jumped up and magnetically fixed himself to the inner side of the still glowing engine nozzle. The microphones in the camera picked up a series of deep thunks followed by the sounds of an impact wrench, and a team of technicians holding a carbon cylinder positioned themself beneath the nozzle.

The top of the cylinder resembled a revolver cylinder, with eight gleaming metal cylinders arrayed around the center, where the lids for each could be seen on electromagnetic rails. At an unseen command the team hoisted it upwards, with the technician hanging off the inner nozzle guiding it towards the center. When it had almost disappeared within the nozzle, the cylinder suddenly clamped itself to the engine and a series of electric hums started up one after another as multiple compressors whirred to life. A sequence of beeps followed, after which the cylinder decoupled itself from the engine, and the technicians carried it away, lids closed and giving off faint amounts of gamma radiation. The mechanic hanging off the nozzle disabled his magnetic gloves and went after them, plugging in a cable that protruded from his power armor-clad arm into the cylinder.

Aurelia watched them walk away, but her attention was drawn towards the aircraft, where the hisses of hermetic seals disengaging announced the opening of the hatches just below its nose. The lower seal cracked open first, revealing a humanoid mechanical body with a pair of pistols strapped to its sides. A Full-Body Prosthesis, likely containing one of the pilots. Its head was covered by the glossy black sphere typical of Anthrazic Power Armor, but the rest of the body was too thin to be anything other than an FBP. They jumped from the hatch, grabbed hold of the edge of the air intake to arrest their fall, then threw themselves towards one of the landing legs holding the plane upright, landing on the half-meter thick beam of steel with perfect precision and proceeding to slide down it until they reached the ground.

The pilot turned to look at the craft, and Aurelia focused on the upper hatch, expecting it to open next. However, the next thing that opened was the weapons bay, revealing another FBP, this one heavily armed and armored. It was clad in thick segmented armor, its surface marred by scorch marks and half-melted sections. A large rocket-equipped handle connected to a pale silver blade poked out over the left shoulder, the sheath for said blade sticking out past the right hip. Fixed to the left shoulder was a missile pod with half of its three dozen micro-missiles spent, muzzles warped from rapid-fire.

Aurelia was familiar with this person. Known under the codename Tacet Tonitrua, he was unit Nimbus’ second member, and had a kill count in the tens of thousands. The matte silver blade currently sheathed at his back had cleaved through entire tanks, and his sheer speed made him virtually invincible. Unlike the pilot that had dismounted before him, he chose to simply drop to the ground, forty meters by far not enough to damage him. Just before impact, a small array of rocket boosters around his legs activated, slowing his fall and allowing him to land without damaging the concrete floor.

Tonitrua immediately started walking away, presumably in the direction of the FBP maintenance bay Aurelia had seen earlier. She tried to send a request for communication to him but was soundly ignored as he just continued on, aggression coloring his movements. Deeming the endeavor a lost cause, she turned her attention to the plane just in time to see the last hatch on the plane open, revealing another FBP, almost certainly containing the other pilot of the craft.

Its head was covered by a glossy black dodecahedron, far more angular than usually seen on Anthrazic Power Armor, yet that wasn’t the most striking feature about it. Its chest area was taken up by the largest neural link port Aurelia had ever seen. Where most other neural links took up a small portion of the back of the skull and the more powerful ones took up approximately double that, this one was a full thirty centimeters in width and twenty-five in height.

The FBP made to jump down towards the ground, but seemingly remembered something and paused. They reached into the plane, and pulled out a large piece of metal, attached to which was a piece of rubber which mimicked a neural link cable port. Pressing the port cover to their chest where it fit into the opening perfectly, the pilot jumped from the hatch. They followed the same motions the other pilot had done, yet theirs was noticeably less graceful. Their hand slipped when grabbing the air intake, sending them hurtling through the air. They hit the landing leg with a heavy thump, sliding down it in a barely controlled tumble before hitting the ground and stumbling just slightly before stabilizing themselves.

The pilot turned to look at the other pilot watching the ordeal, and both stilled as a silent exchange of words followed. Shortly after, the dodecahedron-wearing FBP threw its hands up in exasperation while the other chuckled silently. Movements light with mirth, it started heading away from the craft while the other stayed behind and approached the landing struts. Opening a latch revealed a series of buttons, and the pilot wearing the angular headpiece pressed one of them, sending the metal landing legs into motion. The ones extending from the upper fuselage retracted into the craft while the rest slowly rotated the plane and lowered it towards the ground. Once it was close enough to the ground, more conventional landing gear emerged, rubber wheels supporting the aircraft while the landing struts disappeared within the central body. The pilot jumped up onto the left wing of the aircraft, pulling a small cable from his upper back and plugging it into an opening near the back of the wing. An electronic whir echoed through the cave, and the plane started moving from the landing strip towards one of the armored gates lining the walls, presumably a hangar. While it drove across the pavement, Aurelia sent a communication request to the pilot sitting on the wing of the aircraft.

-=]sending request[=-

-=]request accepted[=-

-=]initiating vocal link[=-

“Well this is a surprise. Didn’t expect you to recover so early, given your state when they wheeled what was left of you into the base”, the pilot stated, “I’m Nimbus One, callsign Nix Aquila. My actual name’s classified, so just call me by my callsign or whatever fits. You’ve probably already clocked where we are, so I’ll skip the preamble of welcoming you to Gamma-Site One.”

His voice carried the same artificial distortion that the voice program had, yet was obviously adjusted to what his original vocal cords had sounded like. The slight imperfections when pronouncing certain words combined with the slightly European accent produced a far more convincing copy than what Aurelia currently had.

“I… yes. I am Knight Aurelia Faber of… an Order. I would say it is an honour to meet a member of the famous Unit Nimbus, yet the circumstances of my being here have… dampened my spirit”, Aurelia answered, speaking haltingly while digging through what remained of her memories for information of Nimbus’ first member. Not much was known outside of him being a pilot and flight tester for most Anthrazic Aircraft before they were mass produced. There had been another pilot just like him whose callsign she did not remember, but he had disappeared without a trace approximately thirty years ago, leaving Nimbus 1 to pick up the slack. In most official documents pertaining Anthrazic Aircraft, he was listed as the primary tester, yet still he was a person surrounded by rumours and hearsay. According to what she had heard in the field, his kill count far outreached that of Nimbus’ second member, his plane equipped with weapons that wiped out squads of corporate soldiers in seconds while he danced through the European air defense beams. His main combat jet had the reputation of seeming more like a shooting star than an aircraft, pulling behind it a plasma trail in the kilometers of length.

“Yeah, probably to be expected. I had a similar reaction when I woke up in this body, but at least I still have one. I’d offer you a Full-Body Prosthesis of your own if the base had any left, but you probably already know we don’t. However, Gamma-Site One is the largest military research site on the planet, so if you look long enough you’ll probably find something”, Nix said while the plane he was sitting on stopped in front of a gate set into the wall. The gate opened, revealing another heavy gate fifty meters back, and the aircraft drove into the gap between them. While the gate closed, revealing heavy radiation protection plating on the inner side, Aurelia spoke up again, announcing, “I actually already have found something that may be of use. Are you aware of the RNLATV Program?”

Aquila perked up, obviously recognising the name while the chamber his aircraft sat in filled with the sound of air compressors, removing the air tainted by the large amounts of background radiation. Unperturbed by the almost complete vacuum he now sat in, he continued on, answering, “I have, yeah. I was actually the primary tester for the prototypes before I got transplanted into the FBP. Though, most of the prototypes have pretty glaring issues, and the one prototype you could use is missing the most expensive parts. I guess Model C could be usable, but that maintenance time is atrocious. Did you consider Model B? It's got a few issues, but as far as i know those are pretty much already fixed and just need to be implemented.”

Aurelia was taken aback by this, not expecting Nix to have that much knowledge on the program. Him being a former test pilot for the program should have been expected, she supposed; he was Anthrazica’s chief aircraft tester on almost all official documents.

“Model B? I was… under the impression it… suffered from its own movement system destroying itself during combat… The issue of the melting magnets is not something easily fixed, no?”, Aurelia asked, to which Aquila answered “Luckily for you, it’s already been solved. The research guys recently developed something they call Ultra-High-Temperature Super-Conducters, or UHT-SC for short. It's a neat piece of self-cooling electromagnetic engineering, and has no thermal limit on its main EM-field generator. It needs some external power for the cooling system, but it really ain’t that much if you put it into comparison.”

The gate on the other end of the airlock lurched, hermetic seals disengaging, then slid open smoothly as the air hissed back into the chamber. The electric motors in the landing gear whirred back up, and the plane drove into the empty hangar beyond. While Nix parked the aircraft in the center, Aurelia thought on his words. Not only would these UHT-SC’s fix the problem of melted electromagnetic circuits, they would extend its engagement time to well over an hour, just barely fifty minutes if used at constant maximum power. Yet it would only worsen the interference the EM-fields inflicted on its own electronics due to the far higher power limits.

She relayed this to Aquila as such, stating “While that would… alleviate its primary issue, it would only make the… remaining problems worse. How would one fix the… multitude of other issues which would be… of far higher severity with UHT-SC installed?”

The pilot stilled for a brief moment while his jet finished parking itself, electric motors in the wheels locking up and rooting it in place. Then, while the cable protruding from his back unlatched itself and retreated back into the opening he had pulled it from, he suddenly stood up and jumped off of the wing, walking towards the door leading to the hallway beyond. Aurelia followed through the cameras, asking “Where are you walking?”, to which Nix answered “Approximately two and a half centuries ago, I got implanted with the first working prototype for Pilot Neural Links. PCI X-1 was powerful, but a piece of shit in literally every other capacity apart from direct performance. The self-repair functions mistook a chunk of my neurons for damaged equipment, and completely fucking eradicated them as a result. This did not impact my logic centers, but severely damaged my range of emotion, to put it lightly. It also gave me the first ever and worst ever case of Neural Link Body Dismorphia, or Cerebrum Iunctio Body Dismorphic Disorder if you wanna be fancy.”

Aquila walked through the corridors, the colored accents along the wall changing from dark green to a slightly rosy red, with the word Research printed above a hermetic bulkhead door.

“I spent decades as an unstable sociopath with a vicious hatred for my own body. The minimal degree of adaptive programming the implant had corrected the neuron eradication issue some time in the eighth decade after implantation. I did still retain the CIBDD, but that's kinda a moot point now because I, y’know, don't really have my original body anymore. As a result of this process, I got to know the people in R pretty well because they always had some tests to run to try and fix the problem.”

He approached the door, slotting the cable he had plugged into his jet earlier into a port on the right wall. He stood still for a moment before the cable was ejected from the opening, whirring back into his mechanical spine while the door opened. The pilot stepped inside, bulkhead closing behind him, and the chamber filled with a sterilizing gas, killing the few biological contaminants that had survived the vacuum airlock.

“So maybe I could talk them into using Model B as a field tester for some things Model F’s gonna use”, Nix said as the seals disengaged and the airlock opened, revealing a floor of granite covered by criss-crossed cables connected to large observational machines. Researchers in white lab coats similar to the one doctor Tullius wore stood at the various machines, logging the results while others sat before CAD-terminals and designed improved versions of what was currently being tested. One of them, a woman who wore the same deep exhaustion on her face as doctor Tullius walked up to the FBP standing at the entrance, each step exactly the same as the last. As she got near, the microphones in the camera Aurelia was looking through picked up a slight mechanical click each time her knee bent. Prosthetics, most probably. Nix Aquila seemed to recognise her, as he greeted her like an old friend, uttering “Doctor Cato, long time no see! How’s the power system for Model F coming along?”

Her face briefly twitched into a smile, thin mouth curving upwards ever so slightly before the usual tiredness reclaimed its place. After a short moment, she stated “My first and most recurring patient, Nimbus One. Hey there Nix. It has been a while, hasn’t it? Last time we spoke was when ‘Ducti was still with us, and that’s at least thirty years ago now. The High-Performance-Radioisotope-Generator is nearing operational testing, and we’ll need to find a test pilot soon, given you can’t really provide a point of comparison to standard Anthrazican minds. Nimbus Four may be an Idea, but Belli’s been on basically constant combat deployment for several months in a row now, so she probably won’t have the time.”

She looked at the mechanical body standing in front of her with a clinical gaze, continuing on after a short while, asking “But why’re you here? I can’t really see any obvious damage, and I recall you having your own maintenance bay in your apartment here at base.”

The pilot chuckled, the sound coming out somewhat distorted, before saying “What, can’t a guy visit an old friend with no exterior motive?” Doctor Cato fixed him with a deadpan stare, and he raised his hands before she could respond, answering “Yeah, yeah, you got me. I may have actually found a test pilot for you, if you can tolerate her… slightly medieval speech patterns.”

He gestured at the camera Aurelia was looking through, announcing “Doctor Cato, meet Knight Aurelia Faber. She’s who the Med-Ex team rolled in a month or so ago. Aurelia, meet doctor Aemilia Cato, leading neuroscientist at Gamma-Site One.”

Doctor Cato seemed slightly surprised by this, but she accepted Aurelia's communication request all the same.

“Knight Aurelia Faber, only survivor of Operation Mammoth Hunting. From what I hear, you're also the last remaining member of the Anthrazic Knights, and for that, you have my condolences. Your organization boasted impressive mental stability, considering most of its members were well past the age where mental instability typically begins to rear its head.”

Aurelia was surprised to hear Doctor Cato knew of her order, but what she said triggered a memory somewhere deep within her fractured memories. One of the paladins had once said that the only thing keeping them anchored to reality was the order, providing purpose when they had no other. The paladin she had fought alongside had one time offhandedly mentioned that he had witnessed the founding of the nation of Anthrazica. Considering the founding of said nation had taken place in the middle of the twenty-first century, that meant he had been over two-hundred years old by the time the war broke out. The order had been so incredibly rich in history it boggled the mind, and yet Aurelia could barely remember it.

Another thing the ECC had taken from her. Rage bubbled up from within her at the thought, but she didn’t let it overwhelm her. Instead, she used it to sharpen her focus, adding it to the veritable mountain of reasons to despise the corporate invaders.

Doctor Cato, having paused to give Aurelia time to respond, continued on as it became apparent that a response would not be forthcoming.

“Of course, that’s not what you're here for. The time to grieve can come after the war’s over. You're here because you want revenge, because the Europeans have taken everything from you. Volunteering as test pilot for a few things the RNLATV-program is going to need field data for is what you perceive as the only way to get back to the fight. Being a test pilot may be able to give that to you.”

The tired woman turned to look at the camera Aurelia was watching her through, steel grey eyes conveying a grim warning.

“However, a test pilot also has to be reliable and return from the fight. We can’t have the machine transmit the testing data wirelessly, the euros would trace it back to us in seconds. Meaning, if you agree to become our test pilot, we can’t have you martyring yourself to avenge your dead comrades. Am I understood?”

Aurelia mentally grimaced. While she had forgotten much, she knew that many of their order had essentially sacrificed themselves in the war, holding the line where the lighter armor of an Anthrazic Infantryman could not survive. Last stands had been common in the order since the war started, with most paladins always defending assigned points to the last man, even when retreat was very much possible. Aurelia understood why they did this, it was the honorable thing to do and for the older members of the order, honorable conduct was the only thing that kept them from mental collapse.

But now, she was the only surviving member of her once-proud order and the war was still ongoing. To die in the war would be giving the corporate scum the victory of having wiped her order out completely.

The thought lit a fire deep within the shards of Aurelia’s consciousness, forging the remains into a single unified whole. She would outlive the war, solely to spite the northern invaders. The Europeans had all but killed the future of her order, and she would make them pay. If she could help accelerate the doom of the ECC by testing Anthrazic Mecha, then she would do so gladly. The corporate slaves would rue the day they failed to kill her, for she would bring destruction to their home.

‘I will outlive this war. I swear on everything I still remember. The Europeans will pay for all they have done.’

She accessed the crystalline data storage device hooked up to her brain, and imprinted the thought with absolute will. The words branded themselves in her mind, unbreakable and unyielding. She would never forget now. The crystal would make sure of that.

Aurelia turned her attention back to the camera view, where Doctor Cato was still staring into the camera, waiting for her response. Taking a moment to compose her answer, she replied “Understood. I will survive the war. I will.”

Her voice, even though artificial, resonated with her surety and confidence. Doctor Cato took the words in, deep in thought for a moment before a slight smile formed on her face and she said “There’s that mental fortitude you knights are famed for. Alright, welcome to the RNLATV program.”

For a moment, Aurelia allowed herself to relax in relief, her own iron grip on her emotions loosening just a fraction. Then she reasserted her will, and focused on the task at hand as Doctor Cato continued on.

“Now we have to decide which model to select for testing. Getting the first three up to operational capacity’ll take about the same amount of work for each, so it's mostly up to you”, she stated, turning to look at the room full of engineers.

Aurelia thought through her options for a bit. Model D, though ideal, was missing multiple core parts for which an atomic printer would be needed.

Atomic printers were the most advanced method of manufacturing the nation of Anthrazica had, and by far the most expensive. When given a task, these machines assembled their assigned technology atom by atom, creating a perfect and flawless piece of technology. Anthrazic Neural Links, officially called Cerebrum Iunctio, were solely built using this technology, created as a single unbreakable whole perfectly fitted to its prospective wearer.

However, while the atomic printers created perfect products every time and could create materials impossible to make elsewise, the cost of creating a single item was equally as ruinous. A single atomic printer needed its own dedicated city-scale fusion reactor, and as a result Anthrazica had precious few of them. Energy requirements also increased exponentially with the size of the produced item, and neural links were known to be extremely close to the practical limit of what could be created with the output of a city-district-scale fusion reactor.

According to a document on the development of the atomic printers Aurelia found in the database of Gamma-Site-1, there was a far larger atomic printer capable of producing entire vehicles at once on the dark side of the moon, the power source erased with black ink. Yet, this large atomic printer was equally as inaccessible as the rest of Anthrazica’s extraterrestrial industry, ECC Anti-Orbital Cannons preventing the landing pods from entering the atmosphere.

According to the document, Gamma-Site-1 used to have its own atomic printer, yet it had been moved to another location as a result of plans to have the base be decommissioned. Those plans had been halted by the outbreak of the war, and Gamma-Site-1’s atomic printer was one of the first losses of the war, having been destroyed in transit to mars.

Seeing as readying Model D for combat deployment was practically impossible, Aurelia went over the remaining three. Model C had the least issues of all of the prototypes at her disposal, but its sole problem was one that was highly difficult to fix. Model B had a myriad of issues, yet according to Nix Aquila, the worst issues had already been fixed. Model A was too much of a proof-of-concept to be viable for combat.

“Model B would be optimal for my purposes, if what Nix Aquila has told me about UHT-SC’s is true. Regarding weapons, I have a few suggestions”

…

—

23. 7. 2359

19:35

Anthrazic Capital Latudo

District 232-2

ECC Forward Operating Base

In the midst of a ruined cityscape, burned-out husks of tanks littering unused side streets, a corporate fortress crawling with soldiers sat. Black-clad soldiers patrolled the perimeter in an airtight rhythm, less than a minute between individual patrol groups. Icy pebbles pounded the ground, a result of the antarctic hailstorm currently ripping through the city.

Automated sensors searched across the stormy sky, ever watchful and never tiring. Radiation lenses tracked their every twitch, ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Mines surrounded the base, high-power energy emitters buried beneath the ground at random intervals. Within the hangars sat dozens of tanks and aircraft, bristling with weapons powerful enough to level entire city districts. Technicians swarmed the vehicles, inspecting them for damages and fixing missiles to hardpoints. The atmosphere at the base was tense. The soldiers moved with tight, stiff movements, weapons snapping up at the slightest sign of movement.

An hour ago, an order to begin an offensive had been sent from the central European command structure, and now the base was gearing up to advance deep into Anthrazic territory. Despite the rapid progress the ECC had been making in the war, they had been losing soldiers at extreme rates, as fighting the Anthrazicans in their own city proved to be a tactical nightmare. Ambushes on corporate convoys were common, even when said convoys were deep in territory already captured by European forces. The Anthrazicans still mostly held the subterranean sectors, appearing from the deep when it was the most inconvenient for the invaders.

Deep within a heavily reinforced building, a man surrounded by monitors sat. Every inch of his body was pierced by cables, sensors feeding him comprehensive information on the surroundings of the base. His role was to be a human administrator for the dozens of automated security systems the corporate forces sported. Every algorithm first had to ask for his permission before firing their assigned weapons. To ensure this did not impede defensive reaction time, his brain was hooked up to a constant stream of consciousness-accelerants. Thought processes ran at ten times the speed, and instinctive reactions took less than a millisecond. For all intents and purposes, he was the base. He saw everything, controlled every weapon, and reported every action back to European central command.

“ZB-07682, how long until the assault is ready?”

The voice was clipped, monotone, and utterly professional. It was the tone of a strategic officer used to ordering thousands of people to march into death at a moment’s notice.

“Preparations will be finished within the hour and, Emperor willing, the first squads will move out in the next two hours”, the administrator answered, throat scratching painfully from an implant rubbing up against it. Every movement he made sent waves of pain through his body, bare metal cables pressing against flesh.

“See that it happens so.”

With that, the connection closed, and the administrator turned his attention back to the monitors. Already a sizable quantity of tanks were ready for deployment, crews opening the hatches and entering. Aircraft engines began spooling up, space warping around the nozzle and compressing atoms into a singular point.

Suddenly, the air defense blared a warning, and frantically he switched to the view showing a radar screen, implants burning as they sheared through flesh.

Nothing.

He looked through the last few recorded seconds. For barely a second, it showed a miniscule dot. No velocity, because the radar needed two rotations to calculate speed. Most probably an error of the targeting algorithm. It was currently hailing, after all. Still, he set the tracking radar to that particular area just to be safe. No warning blared, a relief.

The system screamed at him.

His perception of time slowed. A second became a hundred.

The short-range sensors of the base had seen something. Switching to the close-range view, the administrator saw a perfectly streamlined body a hundred meters above the base. The air defense network swiveled with mechanical precision and lit the object up in a miasma of death. It wasn’t enough. The administrator tried to send the data back to central command, but found that he couldn’t.

Electromagnetic interference.

With a supersonic scream, the thing hit the communication center of the base, the same one the administrator was imprisoned in. The last thing he ever saw was the ceiling ripping open.

—

Climbing out of the drop-pod, a mechanical titan rose to its full ten-meter height. A quiet yet piercing hum emitted from its pale gold chest, a radioactive generator providing a steady supply of power. Multiple stories of destroyed communications equipment filled her view, sensors piercing through the smoke and some of the thinner walls. No surviving targets.

-=]deployment successful[=-

-=]communications jamming active[=-

-=]commencing combat trial[=-

The mech’s knees bent slightly, and with titanic force it jumped out of the ruined building. As soon as it emerged from the hole in the roof it had just made, four blindingly bright beams of radiation slammed against it from multiple directions, air defense weapons tracking their target with cold, mechanical precision. In less than ten seconds, they would have melted through the armor plating and destroyed the mech’s inner electronics. Ten seconds were more than enough time.

Lifting her left arm, revealing an assembly of four cannon muzzles fixed to her forearm, she spun in a full rotation. The cannons boomed once, twice, thrice and a final fourth time before stopping. The air defense weapons had fallen silent, large pale golden spikes having torn through them with hypersonic force. Taking the small reprieve for what it was, she surveyed her targets.

Soldiers scrambled across the base, running around in chaos. Without their central command structure, they had no objective, no one who told them what to fire at. They would adapt shortly, falling back on psychically imprinted response tactics, but none of those had an answer to what she was. Aurelia chuckled, massive plates behind the featureless warmask shifting into a predatory grin. ‘Corporate battle doctrine at its worst. Without a handler, the dogs do not know where to aim their bite’, she thought disdainfully before stepping off the edge of the building she stood atop of. Hitting the ground with titanic force, she activated her mech’s speakers, her voice shaking the soon-to-be battlefield.

“CORPORATE DOGS HEAR ME. YOU DIE TODAY.”

The base stopped. Silence descended. The soldiers near her collapsed, lungs rupturing under the sheer volume with which she announced herself.

“THE COLD OF DEATH WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU”, she recited, and with it, the slaughter commenced.

One group of European soldiers was ripped apart, a twenty-five meter long blade cutting through body armor and concrete alike with mechanical ease and leaving red stains on the floor.

Another squad collapsed as one of the cannons on her arm boomed, small pale golden needles piercing through their helmets with ease and utterly obliterating their skulls, coating concrete in viscera.

A fighter jet attempted to lift off from the base, but Aurelia had anticipated this, and with a sharp clunk followed by an electronic whir, Silas’ blade shot out from her right arm, followed by several dozens of nanowires attached to it. It hit the accelerating aircraft square in the fuselage and stopped it dead, hooks emerging from within the blade and anchoring themselves deep within its entire body.

“NONE SURVIVE THE SLAUGHTER.”

With a mighty tug combined with the winch in her mechanical arm she heaved the twenty-ton fighter jet into the air, spinning it above her head like a flail before sending the plane flying into a European battle tank that had just started moving.

Aurelia pulled the destroyed remains of the European fighter jet back to act as a makeshift shield for the trio of radiation beams that burned the air a split second later, destroying what remained of the aircraft with nuclear force.

Letting the few molten pieces that survived the assault crash to the ground, she shifted her massive body ever so slightly, allowing a shot from a European tank to hit the armor on her shoulder rather than the joint beneath. The piercing hum of the generator spiked. Leaving behind deep craters in the ground, she leapt towards the vehicle, twenty-five meter blade automatically shortening to less than five, massively increasing structural durability.

“DREAD IT.”

The compressed blade cut through the inch-thick armor effortlessly, piercing through the roof and splitting the focusing lens of the turret in twain. Power systems strained, and the sword ripped out of the ruined tank with inevitable force, leaving the tank almost split in two.

At the far edge of the runway, Aurelia caught sight of multiple teams of soldiers setting up a massive weapon, an armored lens of absolute darkness aimed straight at her chest. Her predatory grin gained a grim edge, left arm rising up with all four cannons shifting a few degrees. The hum of the generator increased in volume by almost double. Her targets, seeing her aiming at them, descended into panic. Most turned to run away while a small few frantically tried to get the massive weapon to fire.

“RUN FROM IT.”

The air split open with the sound of mechanical thunder. The anti-tank weapon exploded violently, massive pale golden javelins punching through bunker-thick armor as if it were made from paper and utterly eviscerating the highly explosive energy storage units within.

The explosion bathed the base in fire, heat igniting the very air itself and setting it ablaze.

“IT DOES NOT MATTER”

A trio of European air defense missiles sped through the smoke, space distorting around them and increasing their acceleration to impossible degrees. They hit Aurelia with devastating force, a sphere of bright plasma launching her forty-ton body back into the ruined command building, collapsing it on top of her.

Hundreds of soldiers ran towards the rubble, weapon muzzles pointed straight at the center, where the rubble began shifting ever so slightly. A battalion of tanks aimed their massive focusing lenses at the same spot, light disappearing around them. If the attacker could not be killed through standard tactics, then sheer firepower would bring them down. The tanks prepared to fire.

The pile of concrete exploded outwards, Aurelia flying straight upwards faster than the eye could track. While some of the tanks were crushed by supersonic slabs of concrete, most survived and automatically adjusted their aim upwards, honing in on her airborne body.

A microsecond passed.

The generator screamed. The tanks exploded into brilliant spheres of plasma, every light in the base fizzled away and the weapons of the soldiers underwent complete failure, energy magazines cooking off as the coolant systems broke down.

Aurelia hung in the air for a short moment, her titanic form lit up by the dozens of explosions on the ground, before her left arm moved once again.

“DEATH ARRIVES ALL THE SAME.”

One shot, fifty soldiers exploded into crimson viscera.

Another shot, fifty more.

A third shot.

A fourth.

Aurelia slammed into the ground like a force of nature, crushing a small group of remaining corporate forces underfoot.

For a second, she stood still, surveying the battleground. Sensors pierced through the smoke, looking for any sign of the enemy. Nothing remained in the open. The buildings still showed movement, ECC personnel scurrying around like rats. Yet, Aurelia did not move to smash the armored buildings to the ground. Instead, she fixed her sword to her back where it folded in on itself, then turned and left the vicinity of the base, sprinting hundreds of meters in less than ten seconds.

European military bases had very powerful manually engaged self-destruct sequences for each of their larger buildings, and the fanatics were certainly zealous enough to detonate it while they were still within in a desperate attempt to kill her.

Aurelia opened a communications channel.

“Iudicium to Nix Aquila. Combat trial has been concluded. Area marked for tactical targeting,” she announced.

A snort answered her, the pilot’s voice responding drily, “Copy, EMHEW missile now in flight. Make sure to stay clear of the blast zone”

A small star appeared in the sky while her vision filled with a red circle indicating the blast radius at which her new form would take noticeable damage. She stood fifty meters from its edge, far enough away to remain unharmed yet close enough to feel the heat of the flame.

The small star rapidly increased in brightness as it neared, heading for the European base without any beams of radiation shooting it out of the sky. A hundred meters above the ground, the missile detonated, expanding into a large ball of flame and death. The explosion tore away the remnants of the base that remained standing, ripping open a hole in the dozen-meter thick floor and revealing the dark industrial sector beneath.

Aurelia stood still as the shockwave flew towards her, mechanical face morphing from the predatory grin she had worn in the fight to one of exhausted satisfaction. This wouldn’t be enough to sate her need for revenge, not by a long shot, but it would hold her over until the next deployment. Spreading her massive arms, she basked in the force of the destruction unleashed on the European forces. When the effects of the explosion had died off, she let her arms drop back to her side, content to remain standing there for a bit and watch the smoking rubble.

“Nix Aquila to Iudicium, approaching for extraction in T-fifty, be ready,” the voice of Nix Aquila sounded out, shaking her out of her reverie and grounding her back in the present.

Pale golden frame shifting, she surveyed the surroundings for suitably elevated and reinforced ground. A transport helicopter pad on top of a goods distribution center caught her mechanical eye. She made her way towards the building, hands flexing in preparation. When she was near enough, she leapt at the building, sharpened claws emerging from her fingers and hooking into the wall. A flex of her magnetic muscles, and she flew upwards, three stories crossed in the blink of an eye. Grabbing hold of the edge of the flat roof, Aurelia threw herself up, landing on the helicopter pad with as soft a landing as she could manage. Her feet left a half-meter-deep imprint in the ground.

“Nix Aquila to Iudicium, approaching for extraction now, establishing co-ord procedure.”

A moment passed, and suddenly Aurelia could feel the aircraft as it neared, turning towards its exact approach angle and readying herself. Then, when the craft was less than a hundred meters away from her, it suddenly faded into view, optical camo systems disengaging to reveal a stealth aircraft almost eighty meters wide. Aurelia jumped upwards with all the force she could muster, generator screaming electronically. Reaching the plane, she grabbed onto the hand holds within the opened bomb bay, pulling her massive frame into the bay and allowing the electronic clamps to hold her there while the bomb bay doors closed.

Now on the way back to Gamma-Site One, Aurelia allowed herself to relax just a tiny bit. The mecha had exceeded all her expectations regarding combat speed and durability. Yes, this body would do nicely as a vessel for her vengeance.

Amidst the hailstorm ripping through the city, the stealth aircraft faded from view just as quickly as it had appeared, leaving behind the wreckage of a European military base that had been gearing up to kill thousands only half an hour earlier. Icy pebbles pounded the ruined concrete, hissing when they touched still-hot debris from the explosion.

-=]combat trial successful[=-

…