Soon enough, the scarlet haze on the horizon solidified into the dark silhouette of land, and the Etsutensoku found its way into the estuary that marked the end of its journey, approaching a beach of bone-white sand littered with unnaturally angular black rocks that refused to be worn down by the waves.

  Prior to the pirate attack, few among the crew of the Etsutensoku had seen the puppetmaster, nevermind his puppets. Fewer still had actually spoken with him, and several had thought him a puppetmistress instead.

  The Hollow Men were one thing; their skeletal frames were not so far off from robots, and so they were not so unfamiliar.

  The Wurger, on the other hand, fully embodied the semi-mythical image they had of puppets; it was in line with what they had seen at Taisei’s island during the brief time they were permitted ashore to hand off cargo to the island’s puppetmaster acolytes or to have it loaded by them. After the puppetmaster had retreated into seclusion, it was inevitable that someone would find an excuse to question the Captain, whose experience in the War for Axis Fulcrum was a treasure trove of tall tales and real knowledge in equal measure. In accordance with his word, the Wurger was “a conventional design that had been made into something new by the builder’s obsession.”

  What, then, could they make of the white giant that emerged beside the puppetmaster when they made landfall? The Etsutensoku unfolded its feet and dug them into the beach, dragging itself ashore before it opened its cargo bay and released the great slab of alloy that was the loading ramp. The white puppet was truly enormous, the size of a small building, beyond the sailors’ conception of what a puppet was or could be. More importantly, how had they not seen it being loaded? Some recounted witnessing a strange smear, and the Captain knew the answer; active camouflage. The crew had been the first test subjects for it.

  Out of the crew, only the Captain and a trusted few who could be counted on one hand had gone through this before, the disembarkation of an Itinerant Disciple. There had been three in the Captain’s tenure as commander of the Etsutensoku, including Zanma; the sailors knew not of their fates, only that they had each been tasked with lengthy journeys to far-off lands, beyond the edges of the known world. Beyond the borders of the hammer-smashed land that was Equilibros, which despite its vastness to its inhabitants, stood as a mere subsector among myriad others.

  The sailors gathered at the edge, even the gunnery crew came up to the top deck. The gunnery chief, gut wobbling, raised himself atop his six mechanized legs and leaned forward, and closed his remaining organic eye so the ranging apparatus in his right socket could zoom in unhindered. The puppetmaster turned around to look back, raising a hand in goodbye, and the puppet followed suit.

  It possessed an aerodynamic torso with a wedge-like shape, the lower armor plates layered like a ribcage; one could see tangles of purple muscle atop the torso, unprotected by armor. Its shoulders resembled concrete anti-tank hedgehogs with the proportions altered; they stretched skyward for over a meter, and there were dull-ended spikes projecting to the sides, forward, and back, the tips connected by smooth concave armor plates. On the inside, the armor was completely flat, as if they were made from one object sliced in two down the middle. They were anchored to the torso by enormous bundles of muscle, and equally gigantic trunks of artificial flesh hung down from their undersides, the upper sections of the giant’s arms, and what arms they were, with forearms clad in ridiculous towering slabs of armor as long as the Captain was tall. There were no distinct hands, just four fingers and a single hole in the center for whatever weapons were hidden inside. In the middle of it all sat a humanoid head, seated amidst a tangle of that purple flesh, sculpted to merely imply a human bone structure and no more than that. It had the vague shape of a nose, a powerful jaw and sharp cheekbones, but no mouth nor hair, and in place of each eye it had triangles of empty holes, burning with red light.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The cargo ramp retracted, and the cargo bay’s great bulkheads sealed shut.

  With an immense exhalation of blood-red steam, the Etsutensoku walked back into the Sea of Blood.

  The Etsutensoku had long vanished into the scarlet fog.

  He was alone. Really, truly alone, with no living soul in sight or reach.

  Zanma looked to the sky and drew in a deep breath, as he tended to do.

  A part of him had feared this. To be truly alone, out for himself, in some ways exiled and condemned to the wild winds of fate, to the whims and cruelties of this wounded world and its people.

  But, as he stood there, looking out over the Sea of Blood, the edge of a nearby cliff taunted him, called to him. A faint impulse stirred inside him. He climbed atop the White Serpent, standing between its enormous shoulders, and walked it up the muddy beach, up to the top of that cliff. A gnarled tree of bones and fleshy leaves grew there.

  From atop the White Serpent, Zanma looked out over the Sea of Blood, and the weight of true solitude smashed into him just the same as the waves smashing into the cliffside below. The mists of the unknown roiled before him, just as the blood-sea’s mists roiled below, threatening to swallow him whole, just as those scarlet waters.

  Any lingering regrets he had held up until this point died in his stomach at that moment. Zanma had never liked politics. He wasn’t suited for social maneuvering and managing alliances. All along, he had been right; both he, and Old Taisei. This truly was his calling.

  The sole traveler, journeying into the unknown, traversing the wasteland between civilization, destroying evil and unearthing long forgotten treasure wherever he goes. The suffering, the struggle, the constant possibility of death, even long stretches of mundane travel and piecemeal work, that was all a foregone conclusion.

  All of that, with all its ups and downs. The four billion years of history carried by his blood spoke to him and said this was his nature as a man. In the same way, the past thirteen years also spoke to him.

  The vast histories of the world sneered at him, an insignificant little worm thinking itself a dragon because it had learned how to jump. The raging rivers of blood that coursed through the land, both literal and figurative, awaited his arrival to swallow him whole, to drag him down and drown him. But he was prepared. He, a man, and he, a puppetmaster, was prepared; four billion years of history had readied him as it did any other man, and thirteen years of ceaseless toil and learning had readied him as only bitter effort can. Had he not been ready, the Tridacna Leviathan’s venom would have had him suffocate to death in his own workshop. Had he not been ready, Shellhead would have scythed him in half or turned him to a fine mist with his smasher gun.

  Had he not been ready, his Wurger would have lost its battle against Houkou's swordsman puppet, and though he would not have been cast out for it, he would never forgive himself. It would become a festering wound to haunt him for all his years, perhaps skewing him from the rightful path. Zanma, sitting here, overlooking the waves, couldn’t help but reflect. His stay aboard the Etsutensoku had been an inconsequential journey, hardly an odyssey, but, even if they had not encountered pirates, it was still a complete upheaval. His life for these past ten years had been that island, that puppet theatre, the other puppetmaster acolytes. All of it, behind him, for that was his lot, to go out and carve his name into the world with what he had been given. And what had he been given? It was an undeniable fact that some among mankind held greater gifts than others. Whether they were passed down from ancient times through bloodline, resurfaced through sheer fortuitous chance, or perhaps arose anew as a beneficial mutation, some were simply born chosen.

  Zanma was not among the chosen few.

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

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