This was the deepest he had ever been into the Bleeding Mountains, and yet, not the region proper even still. It was a basin at their base, a crater left here untold ages ago, filled in by people, and then emptied once again in the War for Axis Fulcrum. It had been the site of a battle; a brief yet devastating battle between Eaters and Becomers. Here, in this place, two near-demigods of the Third Phase had laid down their lives, and so had hundreds of their Second and First Phase subordinates.
The Becomers had fought to claim something that now laid at the heart of this zone, to claim it for themselves and their Puppetmaster allies.
The Eaters, having inferior forces, had fought not to claim that object for themselves, but to simply deny it to the Becomers.
The Becomers had lost this battle. And this entire sub-region was left desolate for it, the land itself slaughtered, speckled by persistent craters spewing out both ordinary and exotic radiation, moving zones of radiation that would spring up and subside at random, bizarre weather phenomena, even rare ruptures in the substrate, windows into other dimensions. Besides old buildings, the bones of megabuildings, and ordinary landscape features, the crippled battle-forms of these mighty evolvers now stood as chief navigational points. One such corpse of a Second Phase powerhouse, in the south-west of the zone, was Old Man Slaughter, a one-legged, one-armed “macro-blank” battle body of meta-alloy and synthetic muscle, ten meters tall, still slumped against the frame of a caved-in building where he had died. The living core that was the evolver had been shot out by a fusion cannon, the masterless macro-blank stripped of weapons and its main reactor in the post-battle scavenging. Nonetheless, Old Man Slaughter remained capable of detecting and striking down any fool who wandered too close.
The death of Old Man Slaughter’s opponent, with the great gushing of transcendental mutagens and life-giving blood, had painted swaths of hostile plant life across the area, turning even the trees blood-red, thorned and poisonous, and it had altered the animals in the same manner. Despite drawing its waters from a blood-river, somehow, the resulting “Blood Swamp” was filled by red water that could be made drinkable with only simple equipment. In the zone’s eastern region, there laid a chitin-armored, six-armed war-god of the Third Phase. The corpse was three hundred meters tall, its head severed, only the stains of its bleeding still remained on the stones, and even many of these had been scraped clean. It had blocked passage due to its precarious location, and so a tunnel had been carved through it, forced open with enormous stents, lest it heal shut. The evolver was gone, the body inert and being eaten by beasts, but it kept trying to heal, siphoning nutrients from a nearby blood-river. It had become a part of the ecosystem, a source of food and valuable bio-compounds, a giant refinery, and so it was left alone, protected even, an outpost built atop its chest with probes drilled into the organs.
In pursuit of longevity, of freedom, of ascendance, later-phase evolvers had cast away their naturalborn privilege of ordinary death, they had extended their death throes to the point they could no longer die in a conventional manner. They could only be destroyed, have their minds rendered inert, for long enough that the psychoid dissolved, leaving an empty but still functional body.
The corpse of a higher-phase evolver was often more dangerous than the evolver had been in life, because without the mind and soul, the terrible power they had locked within themselves would now run rampant.
This was one among the many reasons why the evolvers of Equilibros rarely undertook full-scale warfare, why even duels were often performed in already desolate areas.
At the “heart” of the zone, there was a basin surrounded by megastructural fragments, a rock quarry, and within it, a perfect golden sphere waited, over 6 meters across, having a radius equal to pi. It was something of a “wish granter,” after a fashion. The men who marauded in this place, those who scavenged the artifacts of that ancient battle and constantly struggled against the mutants it had birthed, they believed it to truly grant your deepest innermost desires. Zanma knew — or rather, Old Taisei knew — what the sphere truly was: a psychometric mirror. An invaluable diagnostic and therapeutic tool, the true reason for that battle, capable of showing you your own true desires, your own true character, of breaching the mire of self-delusion. The issue was that this process often killed those who underwent it; for those who truly needed its counsel, the mental strain of being forced to confront reality was often too great. And then, it would wring you out like a wet rag; so commonly did this annihilate the subject that it came to be known as the Grinder, believed to be a defensive anomaly to prevent you from truly reaching the sphere. It would take from you all that made you your deluded self, transmute you into who you truly were; it was a Becomer artifact of the highest order. Of those who survived this ordeal, a third committed suicide within a month. Those who survived six months were reborn as new, greater men. Any Becomer group that held it would be able to mass-produce genius-level prospective evolvers of their pathway, and it would be desirable to any other evolver group, albeit to a lesser extent.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Taisei’s writings on this zone had described the sphere as “Delta Technology.” Something capable of affecting change with no observable chain of causality. Zanma didn’t understand this beyond the name and description; or rather, he understood the concept, but didn’t feel he truly comprehended it.
In this place, this Beach-head Zone, countless sagas and odysseys had been written, never to be learned of by the wider world. Due to its remote nature, the zone and the nearest settlements formed a microcosm with its own mythology and societal norms. The evolvers who dwelt in this place wielded experience and ocean-deep wellsprings of tricks that would allow even those in Late Zero Phase to fight on par with Zanma at his full strength.
His entry into the Cordon proved to be less smooth than anticipated, in part due to his choice to go in through the front door. Based on Taisei’s records, he reasonably expected to just be let in, at least into the stand-off zone; the local governments had formed an alliance to close off the zone on the basis of its danger, but had allowed most evolvers entry so long as they seemed competent, at most demanding bribes that were easy for an evolver to cover. This time, however, despite seeing him approach atop the White Serpent, the guards at the outpost gestured for him to halt, and even dared aim their turrets in his general direction; not at him, but close enough to escalate to that with a simple adjustment.
“Halt. State your business and affiliations in the Cordon,” said one of the guards. Seven feet. Light-medium cybernetics, one arm replaced, the other more muscular than it ought to be, and with claws. His lip hung a bit low on the left, a fang poking out. Fairly strong bioenergy, but lacking solidity. He hefted a large-bore c-prop gun like a personal rifle; belt-fed, each shell was perhaps 13mm diameter, with a belt bin in place of a magazine, labeled as “Carapace-Piercing Anti-Materiel.”
As he sat there, he watched another guardsman wave a group of gas-masked unevolved past.
Zanma decided to play a character; he donned the masque of the Mad Puppetmaster, a common archetype in plays. He’d played this character many times. It came naturally to him. His facial features naturally distorted if he grinned just right, just a bit more than a normal smile, a squint while also trying to open the eyes to create a half-moon shape, and he needed only to exaggerate the natural characteristics of his laugh a little to arrive at a mad cackle. When he had been younger, he would slip in and out of this character just for fun, because the others found it either creepy or hilarious. It had also been one of the few avenues in which he completely surpassed Houkou, who couldn’t act with his face to save his life, to the point he resorted to using articulated masks.
“Eh-eh… C’mon. Y’can tell I’m a puppetmaster, can’t you? Need I burst a head or two, maybe lift a wrecked tank out of a swamp to prove it to you?” he questioned, tilting his head so far to the side it was actually painful, feverishly touching his left hand’s thumb to his fingers in a stereotypical “mental calculation” gesture. He purposely released a bit of his tight yoke on the Serpent, allowing his giant steed to become a touch unsteady, just enough to be visible — and it really didn’t take much given the puppet’s previously stone-still stability. With his right hand, he gestured wildly as he spoke, and purposely fired off an exotic particle cluster from his implant, timing it just right to detonate the dried skull of an animal that lay in the open field nearby.
Receiving only silence and alarmed looks, Zanma waited a moment, observing as the outpost commander backed off for a moment and exchanged several sentences worth of dialogue with his subordinate in the form of a few stern glances and understated gestures. Zanma was so pleased with himself he had to hold back lest he break character; he soon interrupted them, pointing towards the cannon-toting cyborg mutant, “Heh-heh-heh, alright, what’s the toll boys? I can take you to your wish granter, if you so wish. Just don’t blame me if it wrings you out like a wet rag!”
The soldiers, it seemed, had decided he was too much of a nuisance to try extorting a toll out of and too much of a legitimate threat to bother strong-arming, so they resignedly waved him into the bleak, desolate strip of civilization that was the Cordon.
Read ahead on ! Five advance chapters now available! More to come!
Please consider rating and reviewing. It really does help a great deal.
