One rarely considered how little space a human body took up.

  Even then, it took witnessing a scene such as this to truly comprehend it.

  Tens of thousands of bodies, all gathered in this place, merged into the base of this spine-spire, and they barely, if at all, distorted its shape. Forget piles of corpses reaching to the sky, forget mass graves going on for hectares and hectares. From where he stood, the spine-spire seemed almost endless, almost as if it could reach the ceiling and breach the next stratum of the greater world. Almost. He’d seen it from outside, and knew it didn’t reach even halfway to the arcology’s ceiling, let alone that of Equilibros itself.

  All around its base, the spine-spire possessed enormous doors placed such that they each faced one of the eight directions matching the city’s spokes. Zanma could just about make them out; all but one were partially or wholly obscured by the mass entanglements of eternalized humanity. Hands reaching out to hands reaching outward, some faces serene some blank some screaming others grimaced in expressions of emotions that he neither hoped nor wished to understand. Right there, in front of the gates, and in some cases further off, there were corpses. Not calcified, nor rotting, but actual corpses, mummified the same as the cyclops, some whole and others scattered, killed in combat with forces far beyond any ordinary human, perhaps even beyond low-level evolvers. Sizable statues stood guard, two at each door, some pristine and resembling giants wearing bone-wood-wrought hardsuits, while others had been twisted and consumed by the growth, having varying numbers of calcified bodies fused into them. Numerous long channels had been scraped into the road, and a smaller but still noticeable number marred the paths leading up to the spire, some in the open and others clearly having bisected one of the corpses that lay about.

  He sensed flickers of psionic activity within the monument, but nothing remotely familiar; it was most akin to the psionic signatures of psionic fungus colonies. A gestalt, of sorts, but not aware, not any more than a fungal colony. Though alive in the strictest sense, these were no longer living humans.

  Though he was briefly transfixed, he soon enough noticed smaller masses fused into the spires surrounding the central square, here and there, growing like tumors, with clusters of a few bodies each dotting the spaces between like pustules. The most extreme were those who weren’t quite fused, frozen in postures of final struggle on the ground level, each seeming to have been forced into the surface, struggling in their final moments against something that was now absent.

  As he approached the spire and made his left turn towards his path out of the city, the psionic activity picked up. Subtly at first, only to surge with… Something he couldn’t discern. It was an emotion, but none he had ever felt or observed, none he could comprehend. Something between terror and ecstasy perhaps, yet altogether apart from these two, for it was nothing human. It built and built, spilling out, a great shroud stretching across the whole city center and beyond. Perhaps out of curiosity or foolishness, or both, Zanma reached out, ever so tentatively, in the attempt to read it, it was in the air after all.

  The world a wheel, turning about an axle. An eight-horned king. A black cube. The Soltern, smashed and remade. These visions came not in words nor concrete images, but thought and sentiment. Zanma shut his senses, blinded and deafened himself to these psionic emanations, and continued on his way. It was delirium. Black, sticky pitch wrought from the extremes of fanaticism and extreme emotion, of joy so great it became terror and grief so abyssal it numbed and inured one to the world’s cruelties.

  He knew of the Horned King, of the Axle and its Chosen, and he suddenly noticed that this very city was an eight-spoked wheel, but he chose not to ruminate on the matter, instead rousing the White Serpent into a full-on sprint as he made for the spoke which was his escape route. Looking ahead through the puppet, he whipped his head to-and-fro, scanning his surroundings, his hair dragging behind him half-weightless and strobing with light as it struck the Serpent’s armour.

  More and more rubble made itself known as he moved; only the immediate surroundings of the spine-spire were semi-clean, after all. Something felt wrong; Zanma felt a stir in the spire’s psionic emanation, and it collapsed inward. That was when a realization hit him, and he willed the Serpent to smash its arm into the ground and perform an about-face anchor turn.

  Just as he’d sensed.

  One of the statues had turned its head in his direction, tracking his movement ever since he had rejected the psionic emanation’s visions. It was walking towards him, and soon broke into a sprint, trailing a path of dust and fragments as it broke up the sections of shell around its joints, dragging its overgrown right arm against the ground. It had been formed into an immense, bladed bludgeon, vaguely resembling a cleaver, and as it closed the distance, the cleaver’s shell, too, scraped away, revealing a solid blade beneath. It was no alloy, nor pearlescent shell like Gokaku’s, but a razor-edged mass of strange bone. Dragging against the ground quickly became to reaping through it like a plow through dirt, unimpeded by even the great slabs making up the road, indeed it carved a channel into them as it passed, and Zanma recognized it as one among many.

  Zanma wasn’t concerned. Not yet. He adjusted his footing on the serpent’s left shoulder, leaning back to keep himself out of the way, adhering to the surface by co-opting his connection with the puppet. Pulling the strings taut, so to speak. They flared for just a moment. True “wall-walking” techniques were somewhat tricky, but with twelve threads, keeping himself attached to the puppet proved trivial. It was at this point that he noticed the larger statue wasn’t alone; one after another, individual bodies and even smaller gestalts of two or three former individuals were detaching from where they were interred, sprinting with far greater agility than their twisted and ruined bodies ought to permit. Naturally, they came not from a single, convenient direction, but from all around, as if the greater gestalt had already pre-planned this encirclement. They were faster and undoubtedly tougher than any ordinary human, but their auras — or lack thereof — spoke volumes. In every way that mattered, these creatures were dead matter animated by the strange psionic gestalt. The smaller among them had only numbers and sheer bodymass; on an individual level, only the blade-armed statue was a near-peer threat, and even then, its psionic emanation was barely late Zero Phase equivalent.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  It was no surprise to him that the Serpent could be outran. He would just have to eliminate this larger pursuer and then bulldoze all the chaff on his way out. If the spire dispatched another such statue-gestalt pursuer, well, he would burn that bridge once he got to it.

  For now, he reached up to his ear and drew his accelerator pistol, manipulating the Serpent all the while. He exactingly angled its arms into a grappling-ready posture, adjusting its stance. It was perfect, exactly from the design specifications, maximizing the potential firing angles of its onboard accelerators.

  He could see them; the accelerator array’s cones of fire and each unit’s current angle of adjustment, lines extending outward in his mind’s eye alone. This was the union of puppet and puppetmaster. No operating system, no processors, no latency.

  He waited, and waited. One second, two, three. Within this moment, he extended threads throughout his limbs to better stabilize himself and began shooting. The Serpent was too much to pilot a second puppet alongside it, but the Puppet Body Art’s internal threads didn’t push the threadcount limit. He still had himself. One after another, shining spears, cutting down the sculking, sprinting, crawling things that had once been humans. Bone shattered, root-flesh torn asunder, crystalline internal structures sprayed out in showers of glitter. It was too much, too many. He could keep them at bay for now, but more were detaching from their spots, and his gun… There was a gap. The gun wasn’t part of him the way the Serpent was. Even with the Puppet Body Art, he had to dedicate additional effort to maneuvring its weight, to estimating the time between shots.

  But, even so, the pieces fell into place and the Serpent’s prey had arrayed themselves all in order, both the blade-armed statue and over a dozen bone-armored gestalts had unknowingly formed up inside the Serpent’s angles of fire. One barrage. That was as much as the Serpent could pull out. After that, it would depend on psionic bleedoff from its movements. But it would be enough.

  A brief pause. Air drew in, as if each accelerator aperture were taking a breath. One after another, in sequence so rapid it would seem instant to any outside observer, lines of subrelativistic death pierced the air and whatever laid in their path.

  A curtain of pale iridescence, countless lines drawn through the air. One second. Two. Three. Four. Moments. And yet, an eternity. Angles of fire adjusting, pulsed particle clusters smashing into their targets in rapid succession, cleaving shell from quasi-muscle and wrenching joints apart. In this timespan, Zanma fired twice. One shot burst a single-body creature’s head, the next smashed its thigh.

  The Wyrmkaiser’s ranged battery consisted of mere Type-1 and a few Type-2 accelerators.

  Even so, even so — all who were in their path fell. Scattered, riddled with holes, those caught by Type-2 fire shattered and torn asunder. The technical limitations of a handheld firearm were one thing. Mounted on a puppet the size of a building, one could stretch these limits. Not heads, nor torsos, but limbs; each shot was placed precisely to dismember and cripple these strange things that had become of the corpses of humans. Only a handful of beams struck the larger statue, and even then, only in the head, a gambit to see if Zanma could blind it. It didn’t stop or even flinch when its “eyes” had been shot out.

  YOU WILL FIRE THE GUNS

  UPON MY COMMAND

  WYRMKAISER MAIN BATTERY

  UNLEASH FULL BROADSIDE

  There was no time to waste. Before the accelerators could even vent their coolant fumes, he bid the Wyrmkaiser to charge forward, meeting the blade-armed statue openly.

  The Wyrmkaiser smashed into the blade-armed with its left arm held up as a shield, digging the mouth of its right arm into the form’s side, wrapping it with its “fingers” — for they were no fingers at all. They were manipulators. From a mere grab, it became an entanglement as the manipulators surged out of their slots and wrapped around the statue’s torso, their ends receding to allow vibroblade anchors to emerge. This was the true reason for the puppet’s name. As the blade-armed statue’s slaughtering edge scraped and failed to find purchase in the Wyrmkaiser’s tower shield of a forearm, Zanma prepared the first blow to be struck. The Wyrmkaiser possessed no distinct “hands” because its forearms were nothing more than armored weapon bays.

  To Zanma’s great shame, the Wyrmkaiser’s main armament, hidden within its arms, yet laid beyond his reach, requiring the third gear, a full sixteen threads, to operate. There was nothing stopping him from employing the secondary armaments. There came a dull thump. Loud, yet not thunderous. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a crack spread across the statue’s stomach, faster and faster, until its shell burst open from within, mercurial silver spewing out, crawling outward and forcing the fault open wider and wider.

  TAISEI PUPPET THEATRE INHERITANCE

  WYRMKAISER SECONDARY ARMAMENT

  GRIMA BRAND

  A canister of polymorphic psi-resonator alloy and a psi-amplifier array for manipulating it; the substance doubled as the operational mechanics of the arm when folded away, animating the manipulators and moving the mechanisms within. The manipulator-tendrils retracted and the liquid silver, all at once, snapped into the shape of a huge blade, its axe-like form mirroring the statue’s own, only superior in every conceivable manner. With a mighty heave of its left arm and a pivot of its body, forcing Zanma to hold on tighter, the Wyrmkaiser forced the statue’s blade-arm to the side and crushed it to the ground, with sheer weight, wrapping it with its manipulators just below the edge. At the same time, the puppet raised its right arm in an executioner’s manner.

  The axe fell with a singsong resonance. Just like that, the statue no longer had a means of attacking, nor a means of moving.

  Zanma ignored his slowly settling-in headache and forced the Wyrmkaiser to spin on its heel, kicking the cleaver-arm as far as possible before he forced the white puppet into a full sprint, its axe-arm regressing into its arm as he went. The Grima Brand was fantastic, versatile to the point of nearly feeling like cheating, but he couldn’t maintain its weaponized state for any length of time. Not yet. Feeling his gun heat up in his hands as he peppered the encroaching swarm of lesser gestalts with accelerator fire, he pushed his puppet to carry him as far as it could conceivably go. Sprinting and leaping like a gigantic ape, the Wyrmkaiser smashed the road and crushed bodies and bone-shelled cars underfoot, while Zanma held on for dear life, bracing for impact each time he had to jump, reducing the g-force as much as he could with how little psionic bandwidth he had to spare.

  Corpse after corpse. Shoot one down, two more appear. Meter by meter, both swiftly and yet painstakingly, he made his way through the city. At one point, he had no choice but to traverse the rooftops and leap from building to building in an ape-like manner befitting the Wyrmkaiser, with a good third of the buildings partly collapsing from the puppet’s great weight.

  In the space of half an hour, and having added a trail of carnage and destruction to the already wrecked city, the young puppetmaster breached the arcology from within. He continued fleeing well beyond the point of developing a splitting headache, until he was certain he was not being pursued.

  Read ahead on ! Five advance chapters now available! More to come!

  Please consider rating and reviewing. It really does help a great deal.