“Sagara Etsutensoku, son of Tojima Etsutensoku! You motherless bastard, I’ve finally found you! Come meet your death like a man, by the hand of I, Tsukamoto Gokaku!” Shellhead called out as he tossed his trench coat aside. Even as Shellhead made his shouting proclamation, Zanma set upon him with his puppets, probing his ironclad defenses. Frankly, trying to harm this wall of meat and shell using the Hollow Men felt a fool’s errand, but he persisted, if only to maintain some semblance of pressure.
Wait, Zanma knew what this was. This excessive self-introduction and call-out. It was a custom from the War for Axis Fulcrum, the three-decade evolver conflict that had established psionic evolvers as the dominant force, leaving bodily evolvers scattered in small groups. Independent combatants would loudly announce themselves to make it easier to claim rewards for the kills they made in the field of battle.
A dense, oppressive aura of malice rolled off of Shellhead, but, just like his callout, it wasn’t pointed at Zanma. It was pointed at the Captain, who, aghast, stood with his mouth wide open. Nonetheless, the sailors around Zanma all crumbled beneath the pressure, some forced to their knees while others held onto the railings. Even the Captain wasn’t unscathed, stumbling back in the face of such concentrated malice. The collateral effect just washed over Zanma, dispersed by his own psionic territory without issue. This was the difference between him, who had painstakingly qualified to be his master’s representative in the wider world, and someone like Shellhead or the Captain, it was the reason the Captain, his senior by age and possibly even brute strength, still referred to him as young master. Merely becoming stronger didn’t suffice to be acknowledged by the Soltern, the world itself. Even if it was a passing acknowledgment, barely a glance, Zanma had earned that acknowledgment.
One gunshot rang out, aimed at Shellhead’s head. He shifted his body just enough that it ricocheted off the smooth surface of his dome and went flying off into the distance.
“You made of yourself a scourge of the Sea of Blood just to chase a stupid grudge? Just in the hopes that you would happen to come across my vessel?! I will not fight you, you rat fuck sack of offal!” bellowed the Captain. He was incandescent with rage.
All along, Zanma had been caught up in a century-old blood feud between these two Zero Phase old men.
It was so asinine as to make him burst out in laughter. At the same time, he was infuriated. He, too, would have preferred it if it had been ordinary pirates. Somehow, being a side character in someone else’s feud felt humiliating.
“Have you two had encounters such as this one in the past, Captain?” Zanma questioned aloud, to ensure the Captain heard it. If it turned out the Captain had lied by omission, by failing to inform him if he had known who the pirates were, then naturally Zanma would feel slighted.
“No. It took him until today to find me, though I had hoped to die without ever knowing what malformed abomination he had made himself into in our years apart,” said the Captain, sliding one round after another into his gun’s magazine as he spoke. It protruded from the weapon’s underside like a slab of metal, the individual shells far too large for a tubular-style magazine to hold more than three or four.
“If I claim his head, I claim all his possessions,” Zanma said.
“Feel free, young master. Give the worthless bastard the warrior’s end he’s been chasing across half the Sea of Blood. I’ll support you, should you so wish. I only hope to deny that bottom-feeder the fight he seeks, a duel with me,” the Captain said.
Somehow, Shellhead seemed alright with their conversation. He strutted up and down the rear deck, eyestalks swinging every which way, left arm darting up and down as he defended himself from the Swordsman, but otherwise, he was calm. He didn’t even take the three Hollow Men seriously, despite them surrounding him. The battle had indeed already begun; even as Shellhead spoke, Zanma had continued pelting him with occasional bursts of fire from the Gunners while trying to get at him up close with the Swordsman, he had just never realized that it was him doing it, so faint was the psionic tether between him and the three Hollow Men, because they required so little to operate. The Swordsman’s blade could bite into Shellhead’s armor, even chop out small pieces if it got a good angle, but that wasn’t enough. The man’s enormous body mass was matched in equal measure by the thickness of his armor, and the countless scars that marred its surface served proof that he had no fear of being struck. Thus, the Swordsman was not enough of a threat to focus on destroying, but enough of a threat to merit keeping an eye on. It would distract Shellhead well enough for when the real battle began.
“You, Tsukamoto Gokaku, have beset this vessel, interrupted my journey, and endangered my life, all for a personal grudge?! I, Zanma Taisei, take offense at this!” Zanma called out. His last name wasn’t Taisei, and he in fact had no last name at all; he had simply co-opted the name of his master to fill in the empty space.
“No matter how powerful you become, no matter how much you twist yourself with mutagens, a lie will remain a lie! You are a worm that has learned to jump, thinking itself a bird!”
It was an entirely unreasonable taunt, its sole purpose to irritate Shellhead and throw him off. Zanma knew well that, more likely than not, Shellhead had been improving all this time, gradually, linearly, because it worked, because he had never hit a bottleneck, and had thus never needed to go for the long-term endeavor of chasing a qualitative breakthrough that would qualify him for Phase Transition, the breakthrough to First Phase, which Zanma held as his greatest achievement.
Both Shellhead's left eye and left eyestalk twitched in anger. “My evolutionary path is true and battle-tested, unlike yours, you loud-mouthed brat! Phase Transition this, Phase Transition that, how about I Phase Transition my pincers up your ass! Talk about your stupid classifications all you want, I'm stronger than a hundred little girls like you!”
“I'd hope so, else I would have to assume that you didn't survive the War for Axis Fulcrum by your own merits!" Zanma prodded again.
Wild-eyed, Shellhead broke into another tirade. “I loved the war! I thrived in it! I earned my stripes, earned my rank, earned by gene-auditor and my agelessness! And they just tossed me aside, an immortal wretch, they thought me unstable, too dangerous to be given the chance to evolve! So I made my own way alright, I carved my own path, as an honest warmonger! The path I walk now is nothing other than the natural extension of what I am, what the war made of me, what those bastards in Axis Fulcrum found to be inconvenient once I wasn't needed! They've made me, so let them suffer from my continued existence! What could a coddled brat like you know about war? About struggle?!”
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Zanma laughed. He readily acquiesced, “Nothing. I am a child; by the standards of this, our world, the Soltern, I am a mediocre nobody who has barely glimpsed the other shore by the auspices of my far-sighted teacher. I have been walking the path for thirteen years, and have lived for nineteen. You, a mighty man, a pirate of the high blood-sea, you who have plundered for untold decades, tell me — how does it feel? Greed and power, they taste mighty fine, don’t they? How bitter, then, is it to know that you will die at the hand of some snotnosed young master, fresh down the mountain? Why, you’re among the first outsiders I’ve met since I boarded this vessel!”
He was stalling. And, as he spoke of greed and power and their taste, he finally felt it. The Wurger. He had set the intention to connect with the puppet as soon as it came into range, and his mind simply performed the task with about as much thought as one would give to catching a falling bottle. A single thread couldn’t move it, not by far, but the connection had formed, and the arcane mechanisms of its gearbox began spinning up, even as the hands of three sailors gripped its panels and continued hauling it up the stairs. The Gunners’ accuracy waned as Zanma retracted one thread, then the second, making it appear as if they had simply stopped firing. Their naturally stiff stance was an advantage here, while their guns cycled their heatsinks it wouldn’t be suspicious.
The only thing that could possibly give away the ploy was Zanma, as the moment he made contact with the Wurger, a shiver took hold of him, an involuntary twitch. He wasted no time, extending five more threads right away; six threads in total, that was the operational threadcount for the Wurger. Three for core operational mechanics, for basic movement, two more for its weapons, one for each arm, and one just for its sensors.
The Hollow Men, in their current configuration, were truly just puppets, tools. The Wurger stood a world apart. It was infinitely close to being “another body,” yet still distinctly separate. “He” stood up, as the Wurger, and sensed that all was right. The puppet moved smoothly, all joints were lubricated to the utmost extent. Both the quantity and quality of sensory information flooding in from the Wurger completely drowned out the sum total of what he received from the three Hollow Men and Spider combined. Sure, the Spider’s sensor array had greater capabilities, but it was just the one. The Wurger’s body carried multiple sets of varying sensors, allowing Zanma to nearly completely incarnate into the puppet if need be. Zanma felt its arms, its legs, its center of balance, saw through its “eyes” and heard through its “ears.”
And then, seeing the sailors around him clearing away, he ran; first up the remaining stairs, then around the superstructure and headlong towards his prey.
It was just a shame that the giant crab-man had the foresight to defend himself, turning the Wurger’s high-speed dropkick into a bounce off of the shieldlike mass of his right arm. It was too bad that Zanma wouldn’t get to claim he ended the battle before it could even begin. Next time, perhaps. The Wurger landed on its feet, around ten meters from Shellhead.
“And you’ll be among the first outsiders I’ve killed, too," Zanma continued where he had left off. "How much money is on your head? How much stolen wealth have you hoarded away to fuel your doomed pursuit? All of it, I’ll make good use of, I assure you!”
The young puppetmaster poured his full strength into the Wurger. It raised its fists into a close-in boxer's guard, its frame bristled with armored protuberances in the faint illusion of spiked feathers, and a geyser of plainly visible, scarlet light erupted from its head, resembling a ponytail. It was no exhaust nor energy, but a power bank, a kinetic capacitor, vitally necessary for its weapons, the all-piercing exotic alloy spears within its arms; pilebunkers.
Tsukamoto Gokaku had fought puppetmasters in the past. In fact, their ability to “have multiple bodies” was the reason he chose to go through the trouble of employing Tilters to begin with. He had encountered puppetmasters who used a single puppet, multiple identical puppets, even those who used tiny single-thread puppets.
He hadn’t encountered this. That puppet — that gangly, bent-forward shape of thorns, with its hooked claws and shield-like forearms — was staring at him. He recognized the basic design elements. A human base frame stripped down to a lightweight build, producing a skeletal appearance, then armored up to a certain minimal defense standard. That didn’t stand out. It was reasonable. Normal. The same went for the bulkiest part of its build, the forearms, which each had four vibroblade claws around a hole, presumably for some kind of high-powered short-range weapon. Their bulk and status as the puppet’s main weapon necessitated protection, thus they had the largest armor plates. From this, it followed that the puppet would take on a boxer-like stance. Its head was patterned after that of a straight-beaked bird, and had a two triangular sensor clusters. There was just one design element that Gokaku didn’t quite understand at first. All those protuberances. Everywhere. Every line of the design led into a spike or strut or rib, all of them shining with the gleam of hardened armor alloy, contrasting the dark-grey of the rest of the frame. It seemed a miracle that it could even move without getting stuck on itself, but it also seemed like a purposeful design choice.
When taken separately, it was an unremarkable design. Even he, an outsider with only surface-level knowledge, could get a general idea of the puppet’s character.
And yet he couldn’t help but feel that his reading was wrong, somehow, or at least that it fell severely short of grasping the truth. Looking at that thing, he felt captivated in the same manner as one might be when staring overboard into the depths. It seemed pristine at first glance, but, as he observed, countless nicks, scratches, and even gouges in its strange armor revealed themselves, whereas its true structural frame was unscathed. Gokaku realized that this puppet’s armor was meticulously, to a psychotic extent, designed specifically to counter cutting weapons, to be “invincible against swordsmen of the same tier,” and that included unconventional blades such as his pincers. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t visualize an angle at which he could get a good cut on the puppet. The spots were there, by the grace of the laws of physical space, but even if he was so lucky as to find such a spot, he couldn’t trace a path by which he could reach it.
The manner in which it stood, how it moved in place, how it held itself. It was unreasonable, it was obscene. It was staring at him. He could sense the intent from it, the burning desire to see his pincer-blades break against its spikes, to wrench the armor from his flesh. Meeting that thing’s gaze alone equaled facing down an equal. This puppet, this mere object was equal to a Zero Phase evolver by itself.
How could a brat “fresh down the mountain” have such a battleworn puppet, one so steeped in obsession, and no less have such a strong connection with it as to have it move like a living thing? This had to be an inheritance of some kind, the only way this made sense was if the kid had been trained specifically to use this very puppet. The only alternative would be if he designed and built the puppet himself, and that was just beyond consideration in the old pirate’s mind.
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