The Wurger’s pilebunkers had left gaping holes the width of fists where Shellhead’s shoulder joints had been, annihilating bone and ligament and chitinous exoskeleton without distinction or mercy. Immediately after, the Wurger disengaged, kicking off from the pirate’s chest to pull its pilebunkers free. With the rods’ retraction, the remaining musculature pulled the arms upward and partly sealed the wounds, even as a waterfall of blood poured down.
With Shellhead’s arms out of the equation, others might have decided to go in for the kill, but Zanma knew better — and more importantly, he held his own superstitions as to the wild variety of abilities Eaters could pull out of nowhere in an emergency. War memoirs abounded with accounts of Eaters who, when faced with certain death, supposedly triggered violent transformations that rendered them into rampaging mutation-beasts. Shellhead did no such thing, but he did lunge out with a sharp sideways knee kick using his damaged leg, pivoting on his heel with explosive force. His kick struck the Wurger’s legs, sending it spinning uncontrollably through the air. Besides the brief disorientation on Zanma’s end, the desperate riposte had inflicted no real damage. If anything, it had harmed Shellhead more, driving the Wurger’s thorns into his flesh and chitin; not to any real depth, but wounds were wounds, and a thin trickle of blood now ran down his leg. The pirate lowered his leg and recentered himself, leaning forwards on his good leg, knee bent far, posture low. With his entire body coiled into a living, slowly-dying spring, his arms now reached the ground.
Each of the Wurger’s pilebunkers could fire at full-force under the puppet’s own power exactly once. Solid metacarbonate tapered to a point the width of a single molecule, self-sharpening down to their particular crystalline structure, the allotrope. Each impact, each firing, whittled the rods down an infinitesimal amount, re-sharpening them, such was the nature of metacarbonate. It was a truly remarkable material. Besides its mechanical properties, it also had superb heat resistance; it could strike sparks against itself, but it was impossible to ignite by any direct application of heat. However, there was one method of igniting this incredible material — that was the application of an igniter compound formulated specially for the specific allotrope of metacarbon, this to prevent enemies from igniting your own rods. All this, the result of hundreds of thousands of years of incremental refinement by pilebunker users. It naturally had other uses, but armor was not one of them. Everything seemed to go wrong if you tried, almost as if the material didn’t want to be armor.
And now, Zanma reaped the harvest of eons of materials science. While the rods reset, having no better thing to do, the young puppetmaster spoke through the Wurger. His voice rang out through the stage-grade reproductor with a darkened distortion, but otherwise crystal clear.
“Look at you. This was a foregone conclusion. Your combat style contains elements of swordsmanship. Your right arm is a shield and a sword with some peculiar characteristics, that’s all. This puppet, the Wurger, was built to cripple and defeat swordsmen. My Wurger prevailed in the face of a swordsman puppet built and operated by a genius, a genius who knew my Wurger’s characteristics, a genius who had taken precautions against it. What chance could you possibly stand?” the young master scoffed. The beak-faced puppet even tilted its head in apparent derision. His words were two-thirds truth. Shellhead’s combat style shared some characteristics with swordsmanship, which he could counter in the same way he would an actual swordsman’s moves, but it was no more than any other bladed weapon of similar length would share, it was inevitable that there would be similarities in the technique. He purposely distorted and exaggerated the truth for showmanship, to craft a better implement of taunting and demoralization. It was also because it made for a better story if the pirate, the villain, had been doomed from the start by making the mistake of going up against him, the righteous puppetmaster. Zanma was already planning on dissecting Shellhead’s corpse and using his exoskeleton for a puppet, to immortalize him in a play.
The Wurger raised its right arm.
Its four claws shifted, a fifth emerging between the lower two. Click. Click. Clack. Clockwork snapping into place. The fifth claw's shape was all wrong; it was too wide, and the blade wasn't a single piece of resonant alloy like the others. Instead, it was set into a socket, its surface gleaming with an oily sheen. It drew back with tension, then locked open, its tip barely in the rod’s path. An oily sheen gleamed across the fifth claw’s surface.
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Something unlocked inside the pilebunker. Something heavy, heavy enough to slightly sway the entire limb with the movement of its release and the shifting of its weight, almost as heavy as the metacarbonate rod.
That was when Shellhead realized.
That noise had been the rod retainers and counterweights releasing, and the fifth claw was a disposable striker of polymerized igniter compound for the rod to scrape against as it emerged.
He knew what metacarbonate did when set alight. He’d seen it. Seen the corpses, turned inside-out by the heat of their own entrails flash-boiling. It was infamous. It was one of the reasons the beating heart of this land, the grand citadel at Axis Fulcrum, was reigned over by psionics.
Shellhead had held out hope that he could drag this out and eventually secure a victory, or at least a retreat, knowing that his body was resilient and redundant enough to withstand far greater wounds than he already had. Multiple hearts, multiple lungs, a cardiovascular system with built-in compartmentalization to prevent excessive blood loss. As he was, if he were transported to his ship, given the proper nourishment, he would fully recover in two weeks.
But it was all for naught.
“You- No! You jumped-up little-” Shellhead seethed, breaking through the pain by sheer anger. Jets of curdled blood burst from his side and the gaping holes in his shoulders, and, in the effort, he spat up a gelatinous-black hemorrhage from his mouth. He swung his right arm through brute force, twisting his entire body on his heel, treating the limb as a flail. The Wurger ducked, bending over backwards once again, the wild snapping of Shellhead’s pincers throwing sparks as the blades shaved off the surface layers of the puppet’s shield-like forearms. It nimbly ducked out of the way, even as the cybernetic left arm reloaded the smasher gun and immediately fired it. The twist of Shellhead’s torso, even now, had been precisely calculated to account for the limb’s limpness and thus “pull” the smasher gun into firing position. Only by the virtue of his deception, of pretending to be intoxicated by a perceived impending victory, did Zanma evade the gambit; obviously a cornered foe would lash out in any way possible, only a fool would expect them to sit there and let you monologue.
The pirate charged, disregarding his damaged foot crumpling under the force of his footfalls, jetting bloody steam from his back as he accelerated into a blur. Perhaps the Wurger could outmaneuver him at every turn, but he could go faster than it in a straight line. Perhaps he had lost the use of his arms, but he still had over two-hundred kilos of body mass to work with.
The Wurger met the charging Shellhead head-on, at first glance, only to hop sideways, strings flaring from its back and arms, plainly visible, tracing paths to Zanma’s head, just for a moment. Its legs had not moved, not nearly enough for such a fast movement, and there had been no hint that it would move, because it had not moved under its own effort. Zanma had simply yanked it by the strings. Zanma wasn’t satisfied with the dodge, it was only natural that he could dodge that, instead he was irritated that his threads were leaking enough to become visible with such a small power surge. Wasteful. Absolutely unacceptable, it embittered the taste of victory on his tongue. But it couldn’t be helped. It was good enough, good enough for this Zero Phaser.
The Wurger’s clawed feet dug into the decking, and it shot out, catching up to Shellhead even in his charge, its mobility briefly amplified by the surge of psionic energy coursing through it. It jittered forwards, seemingly skipping from one pose to the next, moving more akin to a steel lightning-bolt than a living thing or a robot. Finally, it caught up, and with one more stutter-step leapt upon the pirate’s back, feet digging into his back, left hand's claws digging into his left shoulder for purchase. It brought its arm against the side of his head. Vibroblade claws dug into chitin. The strings showed themselves again, and a geyser of red flared from the Wurger’s head. THOOM. A shower of sparks, the rod scraping the igniter, and the Wurger tore its fist free, leaving four grisly marks in the flesh. Deep-orange sparks speckled with blue spewed out of the wound, soon joined by a high-pressure geyser of flash-boiled gore. Shellhead was dead before he hit the ground, why, he was dead even before Wurger even jumped off of him.
PILEBUNKER ROD IGNITION
CERTAIN-KILL MEASURE
REFULGENT IMPALER
Silence, finally, descended onto the deck; the only sounds were the blood-sea's crashing waves and the hissing, screeching, gurgling noise of the burning pilebunker rod. Shellhead's face was unrecognizable, bubbling, boiling viscera pouring out of his mouth. All four of his eyes had exploded. Upon the superstructure, Zanma’s face had twisted into a pained grimace; not from the pain that he was in, but in dissatisfaction with himself. For all the psionic momentum he had poured in and stockpiled in that flywheel, barely half had reached the Wurger. All the rest — pretty lights.
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