“These bastards are full of…” he began, thinking it over for a mont. “...Machines that enhance the body by being grafted onto it, like new branches to a tree. I know how to salvage and repair them, such that they can be reused. Seeing your steed, and that wheel in the sky, I hope that at least this much makes sense,” he said, eyes tired. It was obvious by now that he was silently praying that he had ended up in a world with at least a passing similarity to his own.
She took pity and decided to make it easier for him. To an extent, she had to admit she didn’t view him as a serious threat, based on what she had seen thus far. The biggest factor was his lack of Wards, even assuming his flesh was as tough as that of those cyborgs. Telekinesis or not, she could easily dive long enough for Barzai to kill him, or eliminate him in a hundred other ways.
“Body modification is fairly common here,” she said. “It’s likely not of the sort you are familiar with, but it exists. Obviously, cybernetic grafts from another world would have great potential value, even if they are common models in your world. Continue.”
It was a self-evident fact; even if many of these cybernetics had functions similar to widely available grafts, they were rooted in a completely different technology base. They were research treasure troves, and thus fantastic bargaining chips even if she didn’t end up using any of them herself. A wave of tension visibly released from his posture; he sighed through his nose, faintly nodding to himself. The calculating motions of his fingers slowed. He squatted down next to the corpse and reached up to his ear, brushing so hair out of the way and gripping between his thumb and forefinger a heretofore unseen stick-shaped earring, about the thickness of a pencil and a little shorter. Then, from nowhere, he pulled out a blade, and a set of forceps followed soon after, both made from semi-matte, dull-grey tal. He began poking and prodding, wrenching cables, cutting away remaining flesh and tendon to excavate a module from the dead man’s forearm, a weapon of so kind by the looks of it. He handled this alien, not-quite-human anatomy the sa way Krahe would regard a gun, curiously picking it apart, swiftly comprehending what went where and did what.
“Let’s take a look here. There’s corrosion burns everywhere, abrasion, but it’s all the flesh or the cables that are scoured away. See? Skin, mbrane, a good four hundred grams of muscle tissue, all gone, but the cyber-modules are fine. It’s like a nanoscourer, a uh, a swarm of tal bugs that tries to disable the target without destroying salvageable components unless necessary. It correctly deed the flesh to be of the lowest value, followed by the connectors and secondary modules. Give a few hours and I can break these down, reclaim a good third of their hardware. If I pick through them for a few days I might be able to make that as much as half.”
He looked up from the corpse at her.
“Optimistic estimate,” he added. There was sothing there. An unsettling shine to his eyes. Not murder, nor madness. Fixation. He was not her kin, no, not even close, but she could see it in him; he shared with her the trait of a specific identity, and of not knowing how to be anything other than that. All the uncertainty and frustration from before had vanished. The him she had observed from afar, orchestrating puppets in a dance of death, and the him which now picked through a dead cyborg’s guts, that was his true identity.
“If you need any chanical repairs, I can take a look, but I can make no guarantees,” he continued. “No loose ends, safety in numbers, we part ways when we part ways.”
“How fast can you travel? For how long?” she asked.
“If I push, perhaps a few hundred kiloters per hour at most, for a few hours at a ti,” he answered, gesturing in the direction of the invisible giant. “You’ve noticed my steed already.”
“Alright. But I’m on a tight schedule, so you better be quick, or use whatever you have under that tarp to carry them, do your work when next we make camp,” she half-lied. She wasn’t on that tight a schedule, and could absolutely afford to give him several hours to dismantle the cyborgs right here. It was a purely gut-feeling based decision to move on from this place and take the dead n if possible.
“I can make that work, sure,” he nodded with no hesitation. He rose from his spot, stowing his tools inside that earring the sa as he had brought them out, and walked to the invisible giant. Finally, with a snap of his fingers, he made it reveal itself. At first, it was just a flicker in the camouflage, the distortion grew more and more obvious, until, eventually, it faltered, and the tarp beca translucent. Beneath it stood a giant shape of white ceramic in a gorilla-like posture. Enormous, tower shield-esq forearms with no distinct hands gave way to upper arms of braided purple muscle, leading into ridiculous, gigantic pauldrons that looked like a concrete anti-tank hedgehog sliced down the middle, with dull-ended spikes forwards, back, sideways, and the longest one upward. Atop its aerodynamic torso was a gordian knot of musculature, anchoring its pauldrons into the torso, and in the middle of that tangle sat a humanoid head with a chiseled jaw, indistinct nose, and no other facial features; two triangular sets of three red lights burned in place of eyes. The shape’s legs and pelvis were significantly more elegant in their armoring, having thinner plates and more muscle showing through.
It was stone-still, but with a brief gesture, Krahe glimpsed glowing threads between the puppetmaster and the giant puppet, circling around its back. Its eyes ca alight with burning red, and it shifted in place with nary a noise. The segnts of its torso slid apart, revealing a grisly array of grinders folded out of the way and alien machinery stretching deeper inward, and the camo tarp was sucked inside, disappearing out of view. anwhile, the four robots folded up such that their armor plating made them appear as though they were solid, rectangular pillars. The tarp was one thing, but Krahe had to admit she was a bit taken aback when the redhead made the pillars float and had his steed “devour” them, their shapes distorting and shrinking as they passed into the maw. Kenoma Storage was one thing, but even if this operated differently, it was still pushing things.
The corpses followed suit in the sa manner. One after another, they vanished inside the white puppet’s “mouth.”
As if weightless, the puppetmaster hopped up onto the puppet’s shoulder, leaning into the hollow of its curves as one would a familiar chair.
“All done.” he said.
“Can’t use the camouflage for prolonged periods?” she questioned.
His calm expression gave way to a pained grimace, “It’s already damaged. I will have to repair it later, at great expense. But such is life, such is life.”
Summoning the Spire Cigar from her Kenoma Pocket, Krahe lit it, and took a long drag. After two more tokes, she gave him a nod.
“Alright, let’s go.”
The next day’s camp wouldn’t be quite so peaceful as they had both hoped, but that was a matter for another day, and a matter of no surprise to Krahe.
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