Zanma had the Gunners continue firing, with the Swordsman in front, just swinging away and twirling its sword as quickly as its underbuilt frame could manage; it mattered little that it was an ineffectual maneuver, the showers of sparks from the occasional bullet deflection were still a potent demoralization effect. At the same time, he tried to maneuver all three puppets as one unit, walking them sideways to circle around to the pirates’ flank, as narrow as it was. Though the deluge of accelerator fire from the Gunners pushed them back a touch, the pirates’ shields held up. They were clearly designed to hold up against common weapons among sailors, meaning ballistics and particle smashers. Each pale-white streak of light from the Gunners ablated a bit of armor, and slowly, painfully slowly, the suppressing fire was chewing away, but it wouldn’t get through before the rifles overheated even if he were to focus fire. Attempting precision shots to get at the gaps was out of the question. His best bet right now was to dial down the fire rate to the lowest setting, a thumping 400RPM, or 6.66 shots per second; this would enhance the power of each individual shot by around 10-15%, but most importantly keep the heat buildup down. It was aptly named the Suppression Mode, and despite striking with “115% power,” as the guns’ manuals advertised, it was in fact a slight loss in total damage output per second from the default setting of 750RPM, which was 12.5 shots per second.
One of the shield members detached from the wall, falling back as the men to his left and right closed in to reseal the wall. He wasn’t quite dead yet, but his wounds would bleed him dead soon enough, considering the blood seeping out beneath the shield wall. The crewmen who had reached the top deck by now moved to spring into action and take advantage of the opening, but no such luck. They took cover at the left-hand side of the superstructure in the effort to flank the enemy, but the Tilters were a trained boarding crew and responded faster than the sailors, adjusting their shield formation just in time. The sailors' bullets and the white arcs of their particle weapons fell like raindrops against the Tilter shield-wall. With two vectors of suppression, it would be harder for them to advance, but that was all.
Zanma had never killed; not an animal, let alone another person. He had fought, certainly, but even that had been against other disciples in his master’s puppet theatre, under that old man’s near-omniscient oversight. Even scuffles in hidden corners were, in reality, well within the old man’s awareness.
But… Even so, he didn’t feel any sort of mental barrier to the idea of killing to defend himself. He had thought on the matter many times, he had discussed it with his peers, and had come to the conclusion that shying away from violence would only get him killed. He had long concluded that, in order to be a peaceful man, he would need to be able and willing to employ violence at a moment’s notice, otherwise he would just be harmless, not peaceful. This had all been with the logic of a teenager, of course, and Zanma had always been self-aware enough to realize that he wouldn’t know for sure until he really encountered that situation. This entire time, he had been prepared for the possibility that he would just crumble and puke his guts out the moment the realization hit that he had killed a man. Even if it was just a Hand body, killing a Tilter’s Hand was tantamount to quite literally dismembering a non-Tilter.
There was nothing. No impulse of disgust came, and neither did any disturbance. In fact, the thing that bothered him the most at this moment was the small pool of his own blood that had built up where he sat, and how sticky-slippery it was.
Zanma liked to think of himself as a man of reason. But, at the end of the day, he was a man; a thin, androgynous man, but a man nonetheless. At this moment, faced with a gaggle of pirates leering at his puppets from beyond an alloy shield-wall, Zanma wasn’t thinking of how to resolve things cleanly and quickly, and he certainly wasn’t considering whether he might be able to capture any of them alive. It was as if all his male ancestors and their four-billion-year history of violence had come awake in his blood; there was no consideration of morality in his mind. His only impulse was to make his assailants regret they had ever set their sights on this boat, and to then wipe them from the world.
As far as he was concerned, they had forfeited their own lives the moment they set their eyes on the Etsutensoku with dark intentions. Had he been able, he would have sunk them long before they could have pushed him to inconvenience himself to this extent. In the end, he only considered the matter of what he felt as a result of killing — or rather, didn’t feel — for only a few seconds.
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The Suppression Mode… It would buy him time, that was true, but not much else, and he wasn’t blind; he could see, through his spider puppet, the second group embarking on the boarding boat. It was four men, not tilters, and all wearing far superior equipment. The largest among them had a presence about him that, despite his enormous coat, betrayed him as an evolver. Zanma could just feel it from looking at him, even indirectly: The pirate captain was one of Zanma's kind, an individual who had stepped onto one of the many paths of individual evolution, and had, in the endeavor, become something not quite "merely human." That was an evolver; it was a path with a hundred names in a hundred different lands, but fundamentally the same. Become something more than human, transcend your limitations, avenge the murder of the spirit, undertake the heroic sublimation — and it meant fighting the pirate captain would be a pain in the ass.
There was still time, but he couldn’t afford to waste it. He could send the Swordsman into the fray, but, even being very optimistic about how much damage he had caused, the Swordsman would still be severely outnumbered and outpowered. One of his purpose-built melee puppets, if operated properly, would’ve been able to slaughter the lot of them, but this was a Hollow Man with a vibro-sword.
There was no getting around it. Despite preparing for it, he had hoped to avoid actually using this technique. It wasn’t forbidden or harmful to the user; he simply disliked it for what it was. With his gun, he could reasonably pick off one of the Heads, but he wasn’t fast enough to get the second or third before they scattered and took cover behind the Hands. The course of action already took shape in his mind: Kill whichever Head was easiest to hit, have his puppets take advantage of the opening created by the Hands going berserk, and use the resulting deadlock to buy himself the time to charge and release his psionic attack. Anything beyond that point was too far ahead to plan for in his current state.
He raised his gun.
“Self-ranging mode. Maximum output,” he muttered.
With two faint clicks, the weapon adjusted itself. It was just that, now that he’d raised it, another problem presented itself. Swaying to-and-fro, his hand was not nearly stable enough to hit a headshot at this distance. Zanma gritted his teeth and formed a thread inside his own body, leading it down from its origin point within his head, through the neck, down the shoulder and arm. The usual sensation, what was usually mere discomfort, had been rendered into searing pain by the poisoning and all he’d done to himself to alleviate it. Nonetheless, the thread’s scarlet glow traveled just beneath his skin, and with its merciless passing the flesh was rendered as a puppet to the mind, and his hand became perfectly still. This was the Puppet Body Art, its name self-explanatory. While it had various secondary benefits and advanced techniques, at a fundamental level it just allowed the user to treat his own body as a puppet, with a side effect of causing a faint sense of body detachment when used.
Zanma forced himself up, swaying on his feet but his arm stone-still. Droplets of blue fell from his chin. Bracing himself against the railing, he raised the gun and took the shot. Click. There was a brief pause, a drawing-in of energy, glowing particles flowing into the muzzle of the gun; a quirk of its operation at maximum output. There came a flash, faster than he could see, and a faint shove traveled up Zanma’s arm. The next moment, Monocle just toppled over backwards, folding over on himself very much like a puppet with its strings cut, his joints stiff. It was the unsettling and unmistakable appearance of instant death. By the time he hit the ground and the two other Heads even began realizing what had taken place, it was over. After the fact, the shot appeared to be a beam of pale white with a bluish core, as thick as two fingers, but in reality, this was merely the wake of the real particle-cluster projectile. By the time anyone saw such a “beam,” the shot had already landed.
He tried to swing the gun to Nobody’s head, but he and Goggles had already dropped to the ground. He settled for a potshot at one of Nobody’s Hands before he himself also fell back. Zanma’s potshot struck the side of the Hand’s shoulder and tore out a fistful of his flesh, forcing him to drop one of his two pistols. Nobody was screaming something, presumably another string of slurs. Zanma couldn’t tell. He wondered if he was bleeding from his ears, too; it would explain his impaired hearing. He dropped down, backing away from the edge as bullets struck the wall above him; the beam had blatantly exposed his position.
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