Chapter Text
Acht stares at Mohnblume as the EULR unit hitches up her new frame backpack, packed with everything she needs for the long journey with that Hishadi Gestalt woman.
She still finds it hard to believe even though Mohnblume and Hishadi have mentioned this many, many times for the better part of a season now: that they were going to leave and travel the land–both in the Nor-ah “Säkred Landz” and in the Kard-za “Sonne-dom” to be merchants. Acht had heard and understood, yes, but those are two very different things from actually seeing it. Even now, she doesn’t know what to feel about it…only now that it’s actually happening, she doesn’t want them to go.
Even Hishadi. Her biting wit had annoyed Acht at first as the Gestalt merchant got better and better at speaking Eusan Standard Language, but after Acht had returned fire with some biting sarcasm of her own, it had felt like she had been connecting with the merchant just a bit.
Only, even that will soon be gone along with Mohnblume.
Yes, Acht will miss Mohnblume’s cooking. There is no way she can possibly replicate Mohnblume’s level of cooking skill, honed over years of practice. Her only consolation is that she’s now not entirely helpless when it comes to cooking, thanks to that same Mohnblume teaching her the basics of it. It had rankled Acht at first to have to learn a Eule’s work, but over time, the chore–made even more difficult with only her left hand to work with–had become…something she doesn’t mind doing. She probably will never actually enjoy cooking, but at the very least, she now knows how to boil a decent stew and roast a decent skewer of meat.
And when Mohnblume had actually praised her for doing a good job…Acht had felt something. Something warm within her blooming that she had never felt before. Something which she had tried to stomp down, insisting that she shouldn’t feel good about doing a Eule’s work.
Only, now that is something Acht will never get again.
Mohnblume looks up at Acht now, staring up into ocular modules as equally as cerulean as her own.
“Yes?” Mohnblume asks.
Acht blushes, realizing that she had been staring, and jerks her gaze away to keep Mohnblume from seeing what lies within. “Nothing.”
Mohnblume is silent for a few moments, and then she bows to Acht. It isn’t a deep bow of apology. It is just a slight tilting of her back: a bow of politeness, from one Replika to another as equals, before she stands back up straight to once more look up into Acht’s still side-cast gaze.
“I hope you find your happiness in this place, Acht,” Mohnblume says. There is not a trace of sarcasm in her words. “Along with your name. You deserve happiness.”
Acht stares down at the EULR unit in disbelief. How can she say that? How can she still say that after all that Acht had put her through? How can she still offer…forgiveness for that?
As if reading her mind like a KLBR unit, Mohnblume smiles up at her. “Because everyone deserves to find happiness, and although you may not believe it: even you deserve that.”
With that said, Mohnblume makes one more polite bow at Acht before turning around and following after Hishadi. Hishadi spins around, giving a jaunty salute at Acht, before spinning right back around to face the setting sun along with Mohnblume.
Leaving Acht behind with Marea, who had given both Mohnblume and Hishadi a friendly nod and wave at their leaving.
And yet…despite Marea being literally right next to her…Acht had never felt so alone in her life.
*
“Come on…come on!” Acht mutters to herself as she works on the task she has prepared for herself.
Said task is simply putting her breastplate back on. However, there are two problems with this seemingly simple task.
The first is that putting on the white STCR breastplate normally requires two hands. Acht had solved this by simply laying down supine onto the back half of the breastplate. It had taken quite a bit of wiggling on a large rug to get the position right, but Acht finally managed to click the back half of the breastplate into the specially made slots on her back.
The second problem had come when Acht had attempted to fit the front half of the breastplate back on. Normally, this would be a simple thing to do: just fit the breastplate onto the slots on the back half to lock it in place. However, as it turns out: it’s very hard to do this when there is a big fucking crater on the upper half of the breastplate front.
The result is Acht trying to force the breastplate back on, even as damage reports to her biocomponent skin there start trickling in from her system in her vision. As it turns out, a crater that big in the breastplate produces sharpened edges that prick and cut at that skin. So much so that drips and drops of bright red oxidant run down Acht’s chest to her belly even as she tries to force the breastplate on, but she ignores both the oxidant and the pain as she tries to get the stupid, fucking piece of steel on.
She can’t be a Storch if she doesn’t look the part, and to look the part, she needs that fucking breastplate. The pain doesn’t matter. At least the pain is keeping her from feeling so fucked up, so get! On! Already!
Then there’s a brief screech of metal on metal echoed by a just as brief scream of pain of a STCR unit as a sharpened bit of broken breastplate scratched a line of grey on a carbon steel rib through the blue-dyed aluminum coating.
“Fuck this!” Acht screams in combined pain and frustration as she rips the front breastplate off of herself and tosses it away.
The steel breastplate sails through the air at speed, impacting the rock wall of the cave with a loud CLANG, before clattering to the just as rock floor as dust floats down from where steel met rock on the newly damaged wall.
Acht is not crying. She isn’t. She’d deny it to everyone and beat the shit out of them for even thinking it.
Then a familiar dark-skinned Gestalt face shows up in her vision, interrupting Acht’s view of the cave ceiling with her just-as-familiar stare.
“What do you want?” Acht says up to Marea, pushing herself off of the cave floor to stand back up–
Only for Marea to lay a hand on her shoulder, stopping her ascent.
“Stay,” Marea says in Eusan Standard Language.
That tone…it is a tone of command. Acht would recognize it anywhere anytime…and it annoys her to no end.
“Who do you think you are–”
“Stay,” Marea continues to say in that commanding voice, interrupting Acht’s own words. “Sit. Now.”
Almost against her own will, Acht sits back down on the cave floor, huffing as she does so. She watches as Marea simply kneels down, staring directly at the cuts on Acht’s chest, the oxidant trails having dried in bright red streaks since the cuts were made.
Marea looks up into Acht’s eyes. Acht has to turn away. She can’t bear to look Marea in the eye right now.
In fact, Acht only looks at Marea again due to being forced to. Courtesy of Marea literally grabbing her chin, and pulling her gaze back to her, revealing that Marea is now holding…a pale pink berry in her free hand?
“Eat,” Marea says.
Acht groans in disgust. She remembers that particular berry: something the Nor-ah call “Salv-brasch”. It had been one of the weird, primitive herb things the savages had fed to her or slathered onto her wounds in place of actual medicine after they’d gotten out of that Revolutionary-be-damned minefield. Most of it either hadn’t work or had just left a red, itchy rash on the corner of her mouth when the savages touched the stuff to there.
That stupid pale, pink, wrinkled berry was one of the only ones that had worked, and thus why Marea is holding one out to Acht. That doesn’t mean she likes it though. She still remembered that awful taste: bitter as fuck with just a hint of sourness in a vain attempt to distract you from the bitterness.
“Fuck, no!” Acht insisted, both to Marea and the stupid berry. “I’d rather die than eat that–”
“Eat. Now,” Marea insists…no, orders.
Grumbling, Acht takes the dried berry and tosses it into her mouth, chewing it and withstanding the awful taste like a National bunker under attack from an Imperial combat Synthetik.
It’s while Acht is chewing ferociously that Marea reaches behind her and pulls the back half of her breastplate right off.
“Hey, what the–“
Before Acht can fully stand up, Marea places a hand on Acht’s shoulder and shoves her back down into a sitting position.
“Sit. Stay,” Marea orders again.
Still grumbling, Acht is forced to watch as Marea takes out strips of thin, soft leather, and ties it around the wounds on her chest.
“How?” Marea suddenly asks as she continues tying.
“Huh?”
“How? This?” Marea nods at the partially bandaged wounds to make it extra-clear what she’s referring to.
“None of your fucking business,” Acht continues to grumble.
Acht grumbles even louder as she watches Marea’s gaze scan around the cave even as her hands continue bandaging on autopilot. She recognizes the exact point Marea sees the cratered breastplate front lying against the cave wall, and by extension, the damage that wall sustained when Acht had thrown her breastplate against it.
Marea’s gaze narrows, and that gaze then turns up to Acht’s eyes, who had to turn away. She doesn’t like it in the slightest. It’s like having an older STAR unit peer into your soul. In some ways, it’s worse than having a KLBR unit do it. At the very least, you know that a Kolibri can dig into everything you’re thinking of and hiding in your mind. With an older Starling, you can’t tell what they’re guessing about you.
“What? Leave me alone already!” Acht practically shouts at Marea, still not daring to look into those pale brown Gestalt eyes.
Finally though, Marea gets up. But before Acht can breathe a sigh of relief, Marea then says: “Get up. Follow me.”
Acht stares at her in disbelief. “Why should I?!”
To her surprise, Marea doesn’t bonk her on the head. Or even touch her. Instead, she just gives Acht a look that makes the STCR unit fidget on the inside.
“You want…to be alone here?” Marea asks in slow, halting ESL. “No? Then follow.”
As Marea turns and walks towards the cave entrance, Acht takes a look around the cave.
Once, it had been the cave she had shared with Mohnblume. The cave where Acht attempted to impose the Eusan Nation hierarchy upon the EULR unit. The cave where that attempt backfired horribly and nearly led to her own death.
Then it had become the cave she was imprisoned in, with Marea as her warden, and on pain of being hunted down as a bandit if she ever tries to flee. But…at least Mohnblume and Hishadi had shared that prison with her. At least they spoke with her, worked with her, and had even teased her…and in the depths of her soul, with no one but herself to judge her, Acht has to admit that she had liked what was growing between her, Mohnblume, Hishadi…and even Marea.
But now…with Mohnblume and Hishadi gone…now the cave is just a cave. A prison of herself and only herself…so why the fuck is she trying to stay in this prison when her warden is offering to let her out, even if it’s just for a walk?
…Fuck it.
“Alright, alright!” Acht yells out as she scrambles to her feet, dashing after Marea out of the lonely cave. “I’m coming!”
*
Even before arriving at their destination, Acht had known perfectly well where Marea had been taking her. There is no way Acht would ever mistake that fortress of wooden walls and bridges as anything other than the place the Nor-ah calls…as far as Acht is concerned: Mother’s…Hat? Helmet? All Acht knows is that its name sounds like “Matherz Kraun”, and she’s all too familiar with this place because it’s where she had been tried and sentenced.
Indeed, while following behind Marea across one of the bridges into the northern entrance of the fortress, Acht gets the distinct feeling that she isn’t welcome here.
A feeling that is only emphasized by another Nor-ah savage warrior marching up to Marea and talking to her, stopping their progress just before the watchtower-flanked gate.
Or rather, yelling at her, all while pointing a finger at Acht.
Acht still has no idea what the Nor-ah man is saying. She can hear her name repeated several times, as well as Marea’s name being repeated a bit less, and a few words here and there that almost but not quite sounds like Eusan Standard Language, but otherwise, she has no idea what they’re saying to each other.
‘Revolutionary, this is annoying!’ Acht thinks to herself, rolling her eyes. ‘Why can’t these savages just speak our language? ESL exists for a reason, you know.’
Eventually though, the Gestalt man gives a somewhat satisfied-looking nod at Marea and leaves them to walk past the gate, but not without giving one last pointed, suspicious look at Acht.
All Acht does is stare back at him with an annoyed frown until he backs off. She will not let herself be intimidated by a Gestalt nearly 60 cm shorter than her, no matter how sharp those arrowheads look. She still has her pride to think about even as she finally follows Marea into “Matherz Kraun”.
The inside of Matherz Kraun is still exactly as Acht remembers the last she had been brought here. The whole place is basically a semi-circle of high walls and watchtowers, with the only accessible entryways being a pair of bridges in the north and south, both looking like they can be easily dropped at a moment’s notice. The very mountain itself cuts off the circle into a semi-circle, forming a high, nigh-impassable wall, as well as an additional firing point to rain down arrows and stuff onto approaching enemies if the watchtower on top of that mountain is any indication.
Everything is made of wood, and bound with wires taken from those weird mechanical beasts. In fact, there’s so much wire wrapped around the wood that in some places, especially at more vulnerable parts of the walls and watchtowers, it’s more wire than wood.
A big three-story building made up part of the wall, with numerous outwards-facing windows that look perfect for firing out of. It also appears to function as an impromptu courthouse. Acht knows this because she had been basically tried and sentenced in the big main room on the first floor there. With Marea as the judge, no less, so she figures the Nor-ah Gestalt woman is some kind of big shot here.
Indeed, Marea leads her right back into that building with that familiar courtroom, so Acht figures that she’s about to get another trial and sentencing or whatever.
But no, Marea then motions for her to follow her into a side room, which turns out to be the bottom of a stairwell. Which of course, means following Marea up those stairs to…wherever the Gestalt woman wanted to take her.
The ascent is only up two flights of stairs, but it feels longer than that to Acht. Mostly because said stairs are so tight, winding, and (worst of all) short that she has to crouch-walk up them the entire time. If it had been more than just two flights, Acht felt like she would’ve gone mad trying to follow Marea up them.
Indeed, she’s ready to strangle and kick someone to death by the time she reaches the top of the stairs, and is standing in a very small room with a pair of doors on opposite ends of the room, with a ceiling just as uncomfortably low as the rest of the building. The small window leading outside only just barely makes it better, and Acht feels something akin to relief when Marea opens the door to the right, and motions for Acht to follow her inside.
The room Acht enters is…just as low-ceilinged as the rest of the place, but at least it was decently large horizontally…more or less.
There’s a bed tucked into the far corner of the room. It looks like it’s basically a wooden frame with…the skins of a whole bunch of dead, furry creatures draped onto it to serve as bedding. It simultaneously looks comfy and disgusting to Acht. She had no idea how many germs it has, but she can already imagine them crawling around in those furs, making her shudder at the thought.
Immediately to Acht’s right and thus in front of the foot of the bed are weapons. Many weapons, all lined up neatly in wooden racks against the wall. There are bows and massive barrels of arrows for them, crossbows, very weird crossbows, spears, axes, and other primitive weapons Acht can’t even begin to identify. Honestly, as much as Acht wants to sneer at how crude and primitive they are, even she can’t help but admire the sheer quantity of them, as well as the well-honed edges of the arrowheads and blades.
On the far end of the room next to the bed is a space for a wooden chair in front of a big wooden chest, decorated with…holy fuck. There, bound to the top of the chest with wires dyed in a riot of colors, is the head of the fucking “Stahl-ker” that nearly killed her. Its eight eyes were still as deathly grey and blank as it had been when Marea had separated it from its body, but they still brought another shudder to Acht. She refuses to admit, even to herself, that it might be out of fear, and tears her gaze from the Stahl-ker’s dead eyes to look at the rest of the room.
Acht looks to her left, and sees…windows. Along the wall are tiny, thin slits for windows: perfect for firing arrows from. The way to those windows are unobstructed too, as though the occupant of the room means to be able to bolt from her bed to the windows to fire down at enemies at a moment’s notice.
Indeed, Acht can easily imagine Marea doing just that, especially with the Gestalt woman actually sitting on the bed. Said Gestalt woman then points at the chair, clearly meaning for Acht to take it.
Which she does indeed, if only to avoid half-standing there crouching the whole time. Even then, she still has to sit with the chair backwards, with her arms resting on top of the chair’s backrest and her legs stretching out to keep from having to rest them on the floor. Marea raises an eyebrow at Acht, but the STCR unit ignores her.
‘If she wants me to not sit weirdly, then maybe she should’ve provided me with a taller chair…or a higher ceiling,’ Acht mentally grumbles to herself.
“Well, what the fuck do you want?” Acht asks out loud. “Why bring me here anyways?”
Marea doesn’t answer at first. Instead, she pulls out from one of her many pouches…a notebook? Wait…no…it’s like a crude replica of a notebook, with a pair of carved wood panels for covers, something that resembles brown-colored paper for pages, and a coil of machine wire threaded through those covers and pages to bind the whole thing with. Acht would’ve laughed at how silly the whole thing looks…but Marea’s serious expression as she studies her notebook’s contents makes any amusement Acht feels die in her biomechanical voice box.
Indeed, Acht is tapping a hoof on the floor in nervousness by the time Marea looks up from her notebook, gazing into Acht’s eye, and asks: “Why?”
Acht blinks in confusion at Marea. “Why what? What the fuck are you even asking?”
Marea pauses for another couple moments before replying: “Many things. But first: why that?” she asks, pointing directly at…Acht’s chest.
Acht knows exactly what answer Marea is asking for…but she won’t give it. She can’t. Just the thought of it fills her with shame, remorse, and hatred aimed at her own heart. All of those emotions mix together, and assemble themselves into anger. Fury. Rage.
“None of your fucking business, you got it?!” Acht yells at the Gestalt woman in front of her.
And yet…none of that rage seems to move Marea in the way Acht wants. No cringing fear like the Gestalt prisoner-workers she’s used to. Not even reflexive rage in response to Acht’s own, like a mirror hoping to see its own reflection.
Instead, Marea simply nods, a look of…something in her eyes that makes Acht want to punch her in the face, and then go crawl under a rock and never come out.
“Why steal from Hishadi?” Marea asks in a complete change of tack.
The rage dies down, and Acht now stares at Marea in disbelief. “Listen, I know we’ve been over this already at my trial, so why are you asking about this again?”
“Then this should be easy answer,” Marea replies, a corner of her mouth rising up in an amused smirk that annoys Acht to no small degree.
“Fine,” Acht growls. “I needed the cauldron and cups. Mohnblume couldn’t cook without a cauldron of some kind, and I can’t drink soup or whatever she cooks with my bare hands.”
“Then why not pay?” Marea asks, her tone more curious than accusing now. “You can hunt easy. A Watcher’s parts or a whole boar could pay for all that very easy. So why not pay?”
“Because I didn’t know how your stupid money system worked back then, and I didn’t know how to ask for it,” Acht admits with no small amount of shame. “So I just flashed my Protektor ID to requisition them, wrote down a promissory note for Hishadi to redeem at her local Protektor office, and then I just took what I needed. But then Hishadi started yelling at me when I tried to leave, and I thought that she was interfering with approved Protektor business. How was I supposed to know that this place is so backwards that you locals don’t recognize a Protektor ID or even legal fucking tender?”
The whole time Acht is talking, she notices that Marea is simply sitting there. Neutral. Unjudging. Just like she had been during Acht’s trial. Acht has no idea if that’s a good thing or bad.
After she says her piece though, Marea simply raises a finger and asks: “Your…Eusan Nation? They allow Braves to steal from people?”
“What?! No! Didn’t you hear what I just said? I left her a fucking promissory note! How was I supposed to know that she didn’t even know what it was?!” Acht blasts out.
“What is…’shoold-shine’? Is that your Eusan Nation money?”
“No! It’s just a note saying that the Eusan Nation will pay you X amount of Rationmarks for the requisitioned goods. That’s all!”
Marea blinks slowly at Acht. “How will your Eusan Nation pay Hishadi? We don’t know where Eusan Nation is. How can they pay Hishadi if no one knows where to find them to make them pay?”
Acht opens her mouth…
…and it stays open for quite some time as she thinks about Marea’s question.
“W-Well…once I get off this stupid place then…then…the Nation can…,” Acht trails off as she thinks some more.
‘Exactly when do you think you’re going to get back to the Nation, I wonder?’ a small, nasty part of Acht’s mind mocks her. ‘Is that going to be before or after you get yourself killed? Oh, and even if you do, do you really think the Nation is going to honor a promissory note from a backwater region of wherever the fuck this is? Face it, you’re every bit the bandit everyone says you are. Either that, or you’re a brainless moron who deserves to get Decommissioned for defective incompetence.’
“Shut up!” Acht yells out, covering her plastic-reinforced ears, only to realize where she is. She looks up to see Marea looking at her with…concern? Is that fucking concern?!
“Nothing! It’s nothing!” Acht insists to Marea, desperate to not be seen as…persona degraded.
To Acht’s relief, Marea simply nods. “You made mistake, and you paid Hishadi in full long time ago. Now, you are not bandit. But now…what do you do?” she asks.
Acht opens her mouth to answer that question.
…But nothing comes out.
Nothing…because she can’t think of anything.
Mohnblume is gone. Even Hishadi is gone. There’s nothing waiting for her back at the cave beyond simply ensuring her immediate survival…and she finds that a goal by itself not worth striving towards.
“…I don’t know,” Acht quietly replies, the words emerging from her mouth like the tinny, scratchy noise from a broken cassette player.
Marea slowly nods, and then stands up from her bed. “Come then. You will help me hunt. We can always use more food at Mother’s Crown.”
Acht now stares at Marea in disbelief. “Hunt? With what? My bare hands…hand?”
Marea replies not with words, but by striding over to her wall of weapons, plucking one of those weapons–a familiar-looking long-bladed spear–from a rack, striding back over, and holding it out to Acht. “Here. Your weapon.”
When Marea drops it into Acht’s outstretched hand and the STCR unit gets a chance to examine it, she realizes that it is indeed her spear. It’s the same crude weapon she had fashioned out of a sturdy-looking stick with that small, bipedal mechanical creature’s lower leg and foot tied on at the end with its own wiring. The twin talons at the end of that foot was what had given Acht the idea of using it as a blade in the first place, and it had been surprisingly effective no matter how crude or ugly the end result had been, and still is.
“You’re just giving this back to me?” Acht asks, still disbelieving in both voice and facial expression.
“You are no bandit anymore,” Marea simply replies. “And you need weapon to hunt. Now come, show me how a ‘Storch’ like you hunts a beast.”
Acht continues staring at her crude spear in disbelief, before her mouth closes, and then the corners of her mouth rises up for the first time in a very long while.
*
The moment Acht sees her prey, she immediately goes for the kill.
No bothering with hiding or any kind of fancy maneuvers. The moment she sees the boar herd, she immediately dashes straight towards the closest boar. It sees her, yes. It even has time to run off, but with the aid of a STCR unit’s long, white legs, it doesn’t get far before Acht plunges her spear deep into its back.
It still isn’t enough though. The boar is huge; its weight has to be in the hundreds of kilos, and even that deep spear wound doesn’t make it fall. In fact, it turns and lunges at Acht with a mouth full of sharp teeth and even sharper tusks.
Which honestly suits Acht just fine.
Acht grins as she lashes out with a kick from one of her long white legs, the clawed hoof at the end impacting against the boar’s forehead with a sickening CRUNCH!
The boar falls to the ground with a THUD. It could be dead…but it could also just be stunned, so Acht plants one foot on the boar’s body, takes hold of the spear still embedded in the boar’s back with her remaining left hand, and rips it out in a spray of blood and fleshy bits. With her spear free, she then rams it down with full force into the boar’s heart…or rather, where she thinks it is. It doesn’t matter anyways. All Acht cares about is how good it feels to plunge that spear deep into the boar so hard, she can feel that spear impact the ground underneath the boar.
The boar gives a single twitch, either out of the last sensation of pain it will ever feel or as the last dying gasp of its nervous system, and then it finally goes still.
Acht lets out a whoop bordering on a holler. All of that just felt like such a relief to the STCR unit. Being able to inflict this level of violence on something after going so long without being able to even so much as hold a weapon? All of it is pure. Fucking. Bliss to her.
Eventually though, the high of the kill comes down, and Acht is left looking down at her own frame, covered in crimson splatters from the boar’s lifeblood spraying on her in its death throes.
“Ugh. I need a shower, and a bath…maybe both in sequence,” Acht groans in disgust. “Soap too. Need to get that from Marea. Revolutionary, what I wouldn’t give for a bar of Lily soap. Guess I’ll have to make do with that homemade stuff these Nor-ah have. Again,” she grumbles.
“If you don’t like our soap, you can just no use it.”
Acht maintains strict control of herself to avoid giving even the slightest hint that she nearly jumped out of her own shell at the sound of Marea’s voice immediately behind her. Marea had done this to her enough times that she knows to expect it…and Marea still gets her every time with how fucking quiet she is. Acht swears that she will find out how Marea does it and beat her at her own stealth game.
“I’d rather take improvised soap than no soap at all, thank you very much,” Acht drawls, slowly turning to face Marea as though she hadn’t been disturbed by the surprise in the slightest.
Marea merely nods, apparently unbothered by either the soap issue or the lack of reaction from Acht. This pushes Acht’s annoyance meter up a tick, but she figures that’s what Marea wants to see, so she clamps down on that annoyance.
Even when Marea notes, “That was a…interesting way to hunt boar.”
And now the annoyance meter ticks just a bit too high for Acht to ignore. “What does that mean?”
The flat stare that Marea gives her only makes her annoyance meter rise some more.
“You just…run at boar and stab it,” Marea slowly explains, as though to a very young Gestalt child. “There are so many things you can do to make you hunting better. Why you no do it?”
Acht in turn gives Marea her own indignant stare. “I killed the boar! I got the job done! What’s the point?!”
Marea throws her arms up. “The point is you can do much more better! Why no throw spear?! If you do that, then boar can’t bite you!”
“If I throw my spear, then if I miss, I have no spear!” Acht counters.
“Then carry many spears so that if you miss, you can throw more!” Marea counters in turn.
“Do you know just how long it took to make this shitty spear?!” Acht shouts back, yanking the spear out of the boar to present its shitty, blood-covered form to Marea. “I’d be spending days of work just to make that many spears for throwing!”
“Then buy spears!” Marea shouts in frustration. “You can hunt! You can earn Shards! Buy spears if you can’t or don’t want to craft them!”
Acht opens her mouth to counter again…and finds that she has no counter to that. At least, nothing that doesn’t sound absolutely stupid when she thinks about it. With a yell of frustration, she stabs her shitty spear deep into the ground.
“I don’t know how to throw a spear, okay?! There’s nothing in STCR basic training that teaches us how to throw a fucking spear! You don’t throw a bayoneted rifle! It doesn’t even fly right when you do! Why the fuck would I know how to throw a spear?!” Acht rants out, leaving her panting by the end of it.
Marea just watches Acht pant for several moments before she nods and says, “Then I will teach you how to throw a spear right.”
Acht stops panting in order to stare at Marea in disbelief. “Huh?”
“I. Will. Teach. You. How. To. Throw. Spear,” Marea says. Slowly. Painfully so. “Understand?”
Acht continues staring at Marea, her mouth falling open ever so slightly before she quickly closes it shut. “Why? Why teach me something like that? Aren’t you afraid that I’ll just use it to turn bandit again?”
Marea smiles at Acht, and the STCR unit feels a chill run down her carbon steel spine at that smile.
“You are really bad bandit, Ahh-kt,” Marea says calmly, with that bone-chilling smile still on her face. “But if you do turn bandit again, then I just arrest you again. But this time, no mercy.”
Acht can’t help but gulp. There is no other way to respond to that.
Then Marea’s smile turns warmer and kinder as she holds out her hand. “So, do we have deal?”
Acht forces a grin onto her face as she takes hold of that offered brown Gestalt hand with her own black polyethylene-skinned and steel reinforced hand, and firmly shook it. “Deal…if you will let me teach you how to speak Eusan Standard Language properly. Your threats lose some of their effect when it’s just broken ESL.”
Marea barks out a laugh. “Deal! Now you first lesson though: you help me gut boar.”
Acht instantly feels a wave of dread and revulsion come upon her. “…Do I have to?”
Marea’s raised eyebrow and knowing look already tells Acht everything she needs to know.
*
As it had turned out: gutting a boar had been many, many, MANY fucking times more disgusting and vile than gutting that long-eared furry creature called a “rabbit”. If only by virtue of the boar being much larger, resulting in much more disgusting stuff in the boar to gut. The massive holes Acht had made in the boar hadn’t helped in that regard.
The only thing that had made the whole disgusting task worth it had been the meal of stir-fried boar liver, kidneys, and veggies that looked like green onion but tasted of garlic on top of mixed-grain noodles that came after the gutting, which surprised Acht that these Nor-ah could be so cultured as to have them in the first place. Fortunately, it had been a pleasantly tasting surprise, so much so that Acht had wolfed down the meal like no tomorrow.
The other thing that made the gutting worthwhile were the combat lessons she is getting right now, which had started with learning how to throw a spear properly by practicing against a wooden dummy under Marea’s watchful gaze.
Her first cycle resulted in her missing the big wooden ‘Grä-zur’ dummy entirely, sailing over it by nearly a meter. It had even cleared the wooden wall of Mother’s Crown entirely, making a bunch of Nor-ah watching the practice session laugh at her in mockery.
The third cycle resulted in her grazing one of the four upright logs on the dummy’s back. The Nor-ah still laughed at her, but a bit fewer were doing so when they saw that the spear had embedded itself deep into the thick wooden logs of the wall. So deep that even Acht had to brace a hoof against that to yank the spear back out.
The sixth cycle finally saw her nailing the dummy…just to the left of the outermost ring of the target. It had still been a shitty throw, but the sight of the spear buried in the dummy up to its crossbars had still been the most satisfying thing Acht had seen in a very long time. Not one Nor-ah had been laughing at that moment. A few had even cheered her. Those cheers warmed her biomechanical heart for reasons she still struggles to quantify, but it made her keep going.
Now she has completely lost track of how many times she has thrown that shitty spear over so many cycles that she had stopped bothering to keep track of long ago, but now every throw hits that tiny yellow circle at the center of the bullseye every single time. That fact fills Acht with a sense of pride like nothing else, adding onto the pride she already feels after seeing Marea nod at her.
“Good,” Marea announces, “Now you are ready for the next step.”
“There’s a next step now?” Acht asks with a grin.
“There’s always a next step,” Marea replies with a grin of her own as she holds out something to Acht. “Here, this is your next step, as well as being a gift.”
Acht has to take a moment to examine this…thing Marea handed to her.
At first glance, it looks like a short spear, being a decently long stick of carved wood wrapped with leather and tipped with a decently long blade that looks as though it had been made out of a fang from one of those big panzer-sized mechanical tigers. However, there is a pair of discs tied to the middle of the stick that seems like an inconvenient place to put crossbars, and the end of the stick opposite of the blade looks like…a whole Watcher foot? Tied onto the end with numerous strands of blue wires, no less.
Wait, no…there was some kind of wooden bit tied onto the foot between the clawed toes. Something that looks like a wooden…nipple. Acht blushes at the thought, but now she can’t get the mental image out of her head.
“Okay, what the fuck is this thing?” Acht asks in disbelief. “The most weirdly designed spear ever?”
“Ah, that is something we call a Spike Thrower,” Marea explains, holding out her hand now. “Hold on, you don’t know how this weapon works. Let me demonstrate.”
When Acht hands the “Spike Thrower” back to Marea, she reaches to a hip holster that Acht noticed a while back was full of…arrows?
It’s only when Marea pulls one out that Acht is able to get a good look at it. It looks like a bizarre cross between spear and arrow, with a long spear blade fitted onto a long shaft that ends in Machine skin fletching. It almost looks like an arrow meant to be fired from a really big bow.
Then Marea takes that oversized arrow and fits the fletched end onto the wooden nipple of the Spike Thrower that Acht realizes what it is.
“Is that…a spear meant to throw spears?!” Acht asks incredulously at the sight.
Marea barks out a laugh. “The blade on this Spike Thrower is just in case someone catches you without a Spike to throw. It has always been made to throw Spikes. Watch.”
Acht watches carefully as Marea grips the Spike Thrower with one hand, her index finger and thumb raised up to grip the Spike and holds the entire contraption up as well, Spike at eye level and pointed right at the side of a dummy.
The moment Marea moves, it’s almost too fast for Acht to follow. Marea’s arm simply snaps forward while releasing her hold on the Spike, throwing the fletched spear in all but name forward straight into the target. It thuds into the yellow bullseye, knocking the entire dummy over from the force of the impact, and very clearly showing how the Spike is buried over halfway up to its blade.
“There,” Marea says, satisfaction filling her voice before she holds out the Spike Thrower to Acht once more. “Now you try.”
Acht does indeed try…and discovers that fitting a Spike to the Spike Thrower is a bit tricky when one only has a single arm. This does resolve itself when she simply stabs a Spike into the ground, fits the end onto the wooden nipple, and then yanks the whole thing out of the ground.
Fortunately, the act of using a Spike Thrower is a lot easier to her, and in fact, seems to be nearly identical to throwing a spear. It’s almost like throwing a spear to throw another spear…and at much higher speeds than can be thrown with a bare hand, no less.
Acht finds this out when she flicks her hand down, and the throwing motion is strong enough to send the Spike blurring into the dummy with so much force that it actually not only falls over, but scrapes along the ground as well. Acht gapes at the sight of the Spike buried so deep into the dummy that there’s little but fletching and a bit of shaft visible.
In fact, Acht is so shocked by the power of this new weapon that she nearly jumps when a hand pats her arm affectionately.
“I think you have found the perfect weapon,” Marea says proudly. “What do you say?”
Slowly, the gape closes, and Acht’s mouth slowly reforms itself into…a smile. A smile that she hasn’t felt she made in a very long while.
“I say…bring them all on. I’m ready for them now.”
*
Acht remembers saying that…but she would’ve never thought this would be what she’s facing.
“This” being the twin tasks of looking for little triangular doohickeys and metal cylinder things in dead “Kurrap-ter” machines in the place the Nor-ah call…as far as Acht is able to tell: “Devolz Greef”. It turns out to be a ruined city in the northeast limits of Nor-ah, or rather, Nora land, drowned by a big lake into a swamp-filled ruin.
Honestly, the fact that this was here at all had to mean that this place must be somewhere deep in the backwaters of Vineta. No other world would even have drowned ruins like this in the first place. Yeah, that makes complete sense.
‘Right, and that explains why you’ve been getting nothing but animal noises when you listen with your radio module,’ the small, nasty part of Acht’s mind sneers.
As much as Acht hates that bit of her mind…she feels it does have a point. No way to confirm if this is indeed Vineta or not though. There’s only the current mission.
Which turns out to be surprisingly difficult. The small triangular doohickeys, which seem to be called a “Fo-kas”, can only be found on long-dead Gestalt corpses, weirdly enough. The problem? Corpses rot, and corpses that have been lying in the open for who knows how long will have long since rotted to nothingness by this time.
Thus, only corpses in the ruined buildings will still be even remotely intact, which results in Acht prowling around inside those old creaking, groaning ruins, looking for small shiny things on the heads of withered, dead bodies.
At the very least, the “Kurrap-ter” machines are easier to find. Big, four-legged machines with scorpion tails are somewhat harder to miss, even in the dense tangle of ruined buildings and vegetation. Actually getting the exact part she needs is the much trickier part, requiring her to literally pry apart the long-rusted machines to see if the so-called “Ovur-reid Ma-jool” is still intact.
“I’m a Storch, by the Revolutionary, not a fucking Ara or Elster,” Acht grumbles.
After hours of looking through who knows how many of these half-sunken buildings and getting so much slimy, gross, and rusty shit on her, she only finds two Fo-kas and a pair of maybe-functional Ovur-reid Ma-jool anyways. Thus, with the sun already visibly setting through the windows of the abandoned miniature Block Sektor-looking apartment building she’s in, she calls the search off for the day. This place will be here tomorrow, barring any surprises in store for her.
Surprises like Marea standing up just 20-25 meters away ahead of her, holding a fully drawn bow made of mechanical beast parts…pointing right at her?!
“Wha–”
Acht watches as Marea releases her hold on the drawn bowstring, and let fly the steel-tipped arrow directly at her–
–No, narrowly missing her by a few millimeters.
Acht is enraged.
“What the fu–”
Then Acht hears the shatter of glass and a metallic thunk from behind her, and all words die in her throat.
She spins around, and there is a fucking Sawtooth not three meters almost directly behind her, madly pawing at an arrow imbedded in one of its four glowing red eyes.
‘How the fuck did that thing get behind me without me noticing?!’ Acht’s thoughts madly ran through her mind. ‘It’s the size of a fucking panzer!’
“Get over here now!” Marea shouts. “Hurry!”
Marea’s words snapped Acht back into reality, and she bolts toward the Nor-ah warrior as fast as her legs would carry her. She puts even more effort into that when she hears an electronic snarl and the thundering pounds of metallic footsteps behind her. Acht really doesn’t want to look back for fear of that Sawtooth catching her, so she just keeps running straight towards Marea.
That’s how Acht sees Marea pull some kind of spherical-looking thing out of a pouch, and throw it right over Acht’s shoulder.
There’s a small POP from behind her, an electronic yowl, and then smoke started to curl up around Acht’s vision before blotting out her view entirely with wisps of grey-white.
Then suddenly, a smaller dark-skinned Gestalt hand took her own hand in its grip.
“Over here!” the hand’s owner hisses, revealing her to still be Marea.
Marea quickly leads Acht into a big patch of red-tufted grass some distance away and several patches of the same grass over, before pulling her down into a crouch. Acht lets herself be pulled down. The ground may be germ-ridden and the grass could harbor any number of ticks and shit, but at least it keeps her safe from the Sawtooth.
Indeed, when the smoke clears, the Sawtooth is revealed to be spinning around, snapping at the dissipating smoke as if trying to bite chunks out of it before it then peers around, trying to catch sight of the prey that had fled from it. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to see either her or Marea, so Acht’s heartbeat only dropped down just slightly.
“Okay, Marea, what the fuck are you doing here?” Acht whispers, trying to communicate without alerting the big, angry mechanical tiger thing. “Didn’t you say that you Nor-ah would get in trouble if you go into one of these moldy ruins?”
“Yes,” comes Marea’s reply.
“Well, how much trouble are we talking?”
“It’s grounds for being made outcast, even if just a little while.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I was worried,” Marea replies, looking Acht dead in the eye as she says that. “You are terrible at telling if someone or something is tracking you, and these…Saw-tooths are good at that. Surprisingly.”
The image of that Sawtooth right behind her appears in Acht’s mind’s eye for a moment before she shakes it off.
“Fine, but…why you? You could just send someone else to–”
“Because I. Was. Worried. About. You.” Marea emphasizes each word with a poke to Acht’s chest. “You are important to me, so I am making sure you are properly helped.”
Acht opens her mouth to reply, and then Marea’s words finally reach her biomechanical brain, and makes said mouth stay open.
“Huh?”
“Now let’s get out of here,” Marea continues without a beat. “Before that Sawtooth starts swiping at the nearest patches of grass–”
“Waitwaitwait! You can’t just say that out of the blue and just expect me to–”
Acht suddenly finds her complaints interrupted by Marea’s hand clamping firmly over Acht’s mouth, stifling those complaints in the STCR unit’s throat.
“Not so loud,” Marea whispers.
As if to prove her point, the distant Sawtooth looks up from its sniffing, and stares roughly in their general direction. The thing doesn’t have ears, but Acht can easily imagine that if it does, they would be twitching in their direction as well.
And then Acht’s heartbeat rises even further when the Sawtooth starts slowly walking in their direction, towards the nearest of the red-tufted grass patches. It stops right at the edge of that patch, sniffs it, raises a steel paw, and then brings it down onto the patch of grass in a bat that makes the earth tremble.
Acht can’t quite see the results at her current angle, but she can easily imagine just how flattened that patch of grass is, and how much she wants to avoid sharing its fate.
But now she wonders.
“What’s stopping us from just killing this thing? There are two of us and one of it,” Acht whispers through Marea’s hand.
Only to get a head shake from Marea as an initial reply. “Sawtooths hunt in packs. I don’t want the fight to be an even one, especially when you don’t know how to fight it.”
“Maybe it’s separated from its pack then?” Acht suggests.
The reply to that question comes not from Marea, but from the Sawtooth as it raises its head high, and begins barking out grunting roars that hammer at the air.
Seconds later, an answering roar echoes distantly through the air. Acht’s eyes widen as another Sawtooth emerges from the swampy forests, padding towards the other Sawtooth on shockingly silent footsteps.
Then it’s the turn of Acht’s mouth to drop open when she watches the first Sawtooth turn to the new one, and nuzzle it in the cheek.
The new Sawtooth then starts sniffing the arrow remains embedded in the first Sawtooth’s dead eye. It then opens its mouth, takes hold of the stub of arrow with a gentleness Acht had no idea that Sawtooths are capable of managing, and then jerks its head back, tearing the arrow out in a shower of sparks.
The first Sawtooth yowls and stumbles back so hard that Acht can feel the earth shake, shaking its head before it then…mrows? It’s a very deep mrow, but it’s still recognizable as a mrow.
Acht watches in even further shock when the first Sawtooth nuzzles the second again. She cannot describe the action of it rubbing its steel face on the other as anything else. The two Sawtooths then lay down together, yawn, and…goes to sleep?! The robot animals sleep?! When did they do that?!
Then the first Sawtooth raises a paw, and bats the top of the other Sawtooth’s head once.
Twice.
Thrice.
Then the other Sawtooth suddenly rises up snarling, resulting in the first Sawtooth sprinting away at top speed, with the other Sawtooth chasing after it.
Acht is so bewildered, befuddled, and just plain confused that she just lets Marea drag her away, out of sight of the slumbering Sawtooths, until they are now both at the southwest edge of “Devolz Greef”.
“Ok, what the ever-loving fuck?” Acht finally says. “These things sleep? They nuzzle each other? They play with each other?”
“You merely have to observe them from a hidden place to learn that fairly quickly,” Marea wryly notes.
“Wha…why?!”
“A good hunter always observes her prey,” Marea states as if it is basic fact. “When you learn more about your prey, then you learn more about how to hunt it better. You would do well to learn this, and better yourself.”
As Acht digests this bit of information, a question rolls around in her mind until it drops out of her mouth in the form of: “Why?”
“You’re going to have to be a bit more specific than that,” Marea replies with a cheeky grin that makes Acht want to punch it off of Marea’s face.
“You. Know. Why,” Acht growls out. When Marea only continues with that knowing smirk, Acht growls out even growlier, “Why the fuck would you say that you like me?”
It’s only now that the smirk on Marea’s face disappears, replaced with a more thoughtful look. “I say what I mean, and I mean what I say. I like you. That’s all.”
“But…but…you can’t just say that out of nowhere!” Acht complains.
“Why not? I prefer to let the person I’m interested in know my feelings in as few words as possible,” Marea simply states.
“But…why me?” Acht asks. Quietly. Forlornly. Despairingly. “I’m just a STCR unit who can’t even do the job the Nation made her for. I’m just…”
‘A bandit,’ the nasty voice in her head accused, loud and furious. ‘A worthless, good-for-nothing bandit who hides behind her threadbare cloak of authority to get what she wants. As bad as the Imperials we fought so hard to get out from under. Nothing more than a robber who deserves to get a bullet to the back of the head for daring to betray the glorious ideals of the Revolution–’
That nasty voice suddenly crashed to a halt as a pair of brown hands took hold of Acht’s sole remaining hand. Through the sensors in her black plastic shell there, she can feel the rough calluses on Marea’s hands, undoubtedly produced by years of fighting.
“You’re no bandit. Not anymore,” Marea insists, looking Acht in the eye, direct and to the point as always. “A bandit would try to lie, conceal the fact that they’re a bandit. It’s the only way for a bandit to survive. If you can admit that you were a bandit, then you’re baring your evils to the world, and that means you’re changing for the better, just like you spear a boil to let it drain.”
“But what if I can’t change?” Acht insists, optic lubricating fluid pouring down her face. “What if I just go back to being the bandit who would just beat the shit out of Mohnblume just to make her cook for her?”
“You won’t,” Marea insists just as hard. “Because I’ll be right there beside you, keeping you in line, keeping you a Brave instead of a bandit.”
A Bräv, or rather, a Brave. Acht knows what that means by now. Is it a name to tell everyone that they’re brave, or to make them so? She still has no idea which is the case. Only that it’s what the Nor-ah call their warriors, the closest thing they had to something that seemed to be a cross between a soldier and a Protektor.
“Now I’m curious though: what exactly did your Nation tribe ‘make’ you for?” Marea now asks.
“To be a Protektor,” Acht answers immediately, only to be forced to think about what that means. Both for the confused-looking Marea, and for herself. “It’s like…a Bräv in some ways. We Protektors are supposed to catch criminals and bring them to justice. Punish the enemies of the Revolution, and keep the peace for the citizens.”
Marea laughs. “It doesn’t sound that different from what we Braves do. The only big difference is that we generally fight Machines and bandits rather than enemies of this ‘Revolution’ thing you mentioned.” She then looks thoughtful. “Hmm, maybe…perhaps since you were meant to be a Brave, maybe you can be our Brave for a little while?”
Acht’s jaw falls open in shock, and then she starts to ask: “What do you mean–”
Then the sound interrupts her: a rapid series of howling shrieks coming from the direction of…“Matherz Kraun”
Acht snaps towards that sound as instantly as Marea does. The sound is…oddly familiar to Acht. She feels as though she has heard it before.
Then she hears the rapid chatter of numerous sharp thunderclaps, and a cold chill rises up her spine, because it’s only now that she recognizes that sound: machine gun fire.
And the sound from before? Rocket fire.
“Why am I hearing this?” Acht asks to herself.
“What is that?” Marea asks Acht in turn.
“…The sounds of a war that shouldn’t belong here.”
*
Marea and Acht stealthily make their way up to the top of a tall, jutting bit of rock that is more mini-mountain in order to get a good look at “Matherz Kraun” (or Mother’s Crown, as Marea corrects her) and its surroundings without having to get too close.
Acht’s jaw falls open at the sight just as Marea’s does.
There, marching in line formation towards the Nor-ah fort, are two…machines. Acht doesn’t quite know how to describe them. They look like massive armored crabs stomping forward on six articulated, pillar-like legs, and standing over twice as tall as a STCR unit, but minus the claws one would normally find on a crab. Where there would be such claws, these things instead had a pair of twin machine guns slung underneath the left and right sides of their massive upper bodies. Machine guns that both of these things were firing at Mother’s Crown in bursts, the yellow-white bolts of tracer rounds pounding the wooden walls of the Nor-ah fortress.
Then one of the things stops in place for a moment, and suddenly, smoke plumes billow out of its front as a volley of rockets roar out and fly into that wooden wall, explosions rippling among the Nor-ah fortress as the rockets deliver their explosive payloads.
The big crab machines aren’t alone though. Smaller, four-legged machines with scorpion-like tails–“Corruptor” machines according to Marea, but functional units rather than the wrecks Acht sees here and there–scuttle and hop among them, stopping only to fire off something on its left side that let out puffs of smoke with each firing, shortly followed by small explosions popping on and above the walls of Mother’s Crown. Grenade launchers, or something similar, although some of the Corruptors have machine guns instead of those grenade launchers that belch out more tracers towards the Nor-ah fortress.
Then there’s a howling shriek from afar, and small shapes launch out of the nearby forest and accelerate towards the Nor-ah fortress before exploding among the wooden fortifications in beams of blue-white light, tearing great, burning holes in the wire-bound wood. Close air support? Artillery? Acht has no idea.
Lastly, Acht can see the even smaller figures of people among those machines, scurrying about and hiding behind them like insects as they advance with the machines, leaning out to point long…rifles. Yes, rifles, or something close, and firing them at the wooden walls with flashes of thunder and puffs of thick, grey smoke. The weird Eclipse cultists she’d heard had attacked the Nor-ah before? They might very well be.
The whole scene reminds Acht of war movies and footage of the ongoing Kitezh liberation. Like Imperial troops advancing under the cover of armored vehicles and Metzgerhunds. As more explosions rain down upon Mother’s Crown, she’s already thinking of those Nor-ah Braves in there. She’s gotten oddly fond of them over the time she’d been training in the Nor-ah fortress. The idea of them dying by gunfire and ordnance detonation felt…painful to her.
Then Acht sees one of the advancing maybe-cultists suddenly fall to the ground, an arrow through their knee. As they attempt to get back up, more arrows embed themselves into their chest, and they fall back down, rifle clattering to the ground. This time, they don’t get back up.
Acht smiles upon seeing that. “They’re still holding out in there,” she notes.
“Don’t know for how much longer though,” Marea notes grimly. “I need to get in there and take command.”
“What, through there?!” Acht says in disbelief. “Those things have machine guns and rockets! We’ll get slaughtered before we can get past them!”
“Someone needs to order the Braves to conduct a fighting retreat back to the Embrace,” Marea insists. “These things aren’t going to stop here, and we need to buy as much time for everyone to evacuate to All-Mother’s Mountain as possible.”
“Can’t you do that from a safe distance?!” Acht madly thinks up, trying to think of anything to keep Marea from getting herself killed by those things. “Don’t you have…I don’t know…some kind of signal you and everyone else in there agreed to?”
That makes Marea stop and think. “One Fire Arrow to stand and fight, and two to retreat. That’s the signal. We just need to get close enough for the Braves inside to see it, and then…we still need to help slow down these ‘Eclipse’ bastards from back here.”
“How?! We’ve got arrows and spears! They! Have! Machine guns and rockets! Maybe grenades and rifles too! We need something a lot more powerful to fight back against that!” Acht argues.
Marea stops once more, thinking just as deeply before her gaze snaps to Acht’s pockets. “Did you find anything in Devil’s Grief? Those Focuses and Override Modules I described to you?”
“Huh? Yeah. Two of each. Why?” Acht asks in confusion.
“Aloy, Vierun, and Pfeil all mentioned that with those two devices, one can tame Machines with them,” Marea says, a glint in her eyes. “They even gave me the…‘codes’ to ‘override’ some Machines they got from the nearby Cauldron.” The glint gets stronger now as Acht practically sees the gears turning in Marea’s mind. “Maybe, just maybe…we have that power now.”