The Hyperschizoid Stage. The next step after this. Zanma had become certain that completing the Pillar Centurion would be the moment he was ready to move on from the Schizoid Stage. Perfecting its armor, evolving its design to fully incorporate TPR plating, and truly elegant weapons integration; Zanma was sure he could not complete that endeavor without attaining at least five degrees of mental division. Not only was it a matter of actually executing the physical assembly, but also one of calculating everything; machines couldn’t help him in this, or rather, even if he miraculously outsourced the psi-resonance calculations, if he didn’t truly comprehend them, he couldn’t properly use the puppet. Besides the literal barrier of how many ways he could split his thoughts, there was an element of visualization. He couldn’t see himself moving on to the next stage without fulfilling that goal, and, therefore, he wouldn’t be able to.

  That white hair kept coming to his head, time and again. It bothered him that, for all his mental and sensory advancements beyond the limits of an ordinary human, he still hadn’t picked up on the presence of another First Phase evolver right there in the crowd. The alternative, that he had seen something where there was nothing, was even worse. He decided to distract himself by throwing himself to his work once more. The Endeavor tempted him, as did a bottle of shiny pills tucked away in his storage, each a mental accelerator cocktail that he couldn’t readily replace. Taisei had purposely given him just enough to have for an emergency, but not enough to use them with any regularity, lest he become reliant on them.

  Two days passed. He’d spent them prototyping a miniature, simplified version of the Pillar Centurion and setting up an obstacle course in the generous empty space that was to be found anywhere off the main thoroughfare in Spillway. Such miniatures were a common practice tool in the early stages, and he found them useful for practice and testing out designs that would be painful to attempt and get wrong. The Pillar Centurion moved along, firing low-output shots from its accelerator at targets, maneuvring through the maze that he had set up. For this testing, Zanma had attached a weak Type-1 accelerator to the Centurion’s right arm, to conserve the precious caseless micromissiles of its main armament.

  Meanwhile, Zanma manipulated the miniature through a set of increasingly more complex motions, whilst also running through TPR psi-resonance calculations and orbiting a cluster of pebbles around himself. All this, naturally, in the attempt to push himself towards the next Degree of Division. It was a brute-force method, but this stage was also one of the few for which brute force, pure effort and grit, would be sufficient. For now, at least. At some point he would run up against diminishing returns so severe he couldn’t reach the next Degree of Division through training, and that would be the point where he would fully dedicate himself to perfecting the Pillar Centurion for the final push.

  He sensed an approaching presence. It was, naturally, Baikal, wearing a grim expression and a hard-shell envirosuit, angled plates of oily blue alloy. The sight — that of Zanma floating a few inches off the ground, hair whipping about like a nest of fibre-optic serpents — didn’t seem to discourage his guest one bit, at most it only gave the man a bit of pause.

  Two pebbles fell out of his grasp and clattered over the ground, each rolling along and coming to a rest on one of its several faces. His focus still wasn’t perfect stretched this thin, at least not enough to keep up his major tasks and hold half a dozen pebbles in orbit.

  “The dice have been cast,” he muttered, almost enjoying the trite grandiosity of that statement. To say ridiculous things with utmost seriousness, it was a skill far more vital for a puppetmaster than many could imagine. “To either perceive or conceive of the truly absurd, and to then treat it with the utmost seriousness,” Old Taisei had said, “is a life-saving ability far too many learn far too late.”

  Zanma, at the time, had taken it seriously because he had been a child, but he had only come to regard it as greater and greater truth with the passing years. There was no limit to the absurdity of what one could encounter in the wider world, even as one of the unevolved, let alone as an evolver actively seeking to surpass the natural order.

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  Glancing, smugly, up at Baikal, Zanma noticed that his faceplate had been mended.

  “And here I was going to offer to repair it for you,” he remarked.

  The stalker’s expression changed, almost as if he was suppressing the urge to vomit. One, two, three steps towards Zanma… And a kneel.

  “You, my superior, made the choice to intentionally make it appear as if I had a chance, rather than expose the truth, that you could have struck me down at any moment,” he recited through gritted teeth. Zanma could tell there was something more, but just as Baikal drew in a breath to continue, he interrupted.

  Zanma sighed, and the rest of his pebbles clattered down. “That’s enough. Had I wanted a kowtowing sycophant, I would not have attempted to contract you. I must cross the Blood Swamp, thus I require a guide who is familiar with it. I must, thereafter, go south, past the Golden Sphere. I can detect anomalies, but the Beachhead Zone holds far greater and more numerous dangers than mere anomalies. Hence, you. Do you believe yourself qualified?”

  Still kneeling, albeit far less stiff now, Baikal ruminated on Zanma’s words. Were he not psionic, Zanma wouldn’t be able to make out what the other man was thinking, his eyes and upper face being motionless and without expression, and his lower face almost as stoic. The response was a shallow, though determined nod.

  “Good, good,” Zanma nodded. At his will, the Pillar Centurion emerged from the building across from him, within which most of the obstacle course had been set up. Baikal instinctively rose to his feet, turning towards the figure, only to turn back to Zanma at the realization of what it was.

  “...Just a puppet.” He caught himself, apologetically adding, “Not that I doubt-”

  “No sycophancy, please,” Zanma dismissed again. “I don’t need to be reassured of the capabilities of my own creations. However, speaking of them, I assume that traversing the Blood Swamp is not a mere matter of navigating the shifting paths within a limited time window. Otherwise, the path would not have as severe a reputation as it does.”

  Baikal, after a few seconds, brought out a boxy PDA and with the click of a button made it project a landscape map. Zanma naturally willed his Oculoid to copy it, the spherical device doing so without even moving from its spot several meters away, atop the White Serpent.

  The projection started out showing immediate surroundings, zooming out until Spillway was no more than a vague series of lines, the Blood Swamp sprawling out in one direction. Its vastness could not be underestimated, despite the fact its actual landmass could be considered somewhat humble. It was a labyrinth of invisible walls, the paths evershifting.

  “The only viable path is this one, over the Morass of the 607th Fusilliers. There is just one issue,” Baikal said, glancing towards the White Serpent. He need not explain further, the map made it blatantly obvious that the giant puppet couldn’t traverse that path. It was not only narrow, but the map noted that it consisted of floating debris, and not just that, but floating debris that couldn’t bear even a heavy man in armor, let alone the White Serpent.

  “What of this path, almost straight through? I’m sure there’s a reason to avoid it, but I am not aware of it,” Zanma pointed at a much shorter route that seemed to have no particular barriers.

  “Here? A battalion of autonomous weapons sunk in the swamp. It’s full of iron ogres lugging all sorts of heavy weapons, anti-fortification type stuff. If we can pass undetected or muster a sufficient battleforce to register as too dangerous to attack, it would be the best choice.”

  “What sort of battleforce meets that criterium?” Zanma asked.

  “It only matters for large supply convoys. There are two good outcomes; either the force is large enough that the Iron Ogres simply do not attack, or the force is attacked, but fights off the first wave, after which point the Iron Ogres back down.”

  “What’s the ogres’ rating?” Zanma asked, without even thinking. It just slipped out matter-of-factly, with the same tone as asking for the price of something at a market.

  “What?” Baikal questioned.

  “The name “Iron Ogre” doesn’t tell me anything,” Zanma half-lied. He knew Iron Ogres. Autonomous weapons, something akin to robots, only a step above conventional robotics, almost halfway towards synthetic life. The problem was that there were five dozen variants of the venerable chassis, spanning a vast swath of danger levels. For every grade, every tier, Orgun Superheavy Industry had produced enough Iron Ogres to fill a grand imperial armada. Thus, the term “Iron Ogre” had passed into myth and become a colloquialism, describing an archetype of autonomous weapon more than a specific model.

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