The Princess has ordered any knights who fall captive to be abandoned.
She could feel the Knight Leader attempting to scry. He was trying to psionically sense what was going up there, in the upper reaches of the lava tube! But he was straining his ability.
She assisted him. They were hit by a mind blast and they’re unconscious. Whoever is wielding that railgun - she’s also a powerful psion.
Vilithe fell to her knees, suddenly she felt completely overcome with guilt.
Guilt? She felt the thought intercepted by the spirits and filtered away, and then she sensed twin sensations: she had felt guilty herself for not being able to protect the knights more, but the very idea had somehow been sucked in, absorbed by the hungry devouring vacuum of a mind with crucial parts of itself missing, and the concept of guilt itself blossomed out with the epiphany of revelation. She could now sense that she had been involuntarily whisked into the Knight Leader’s mind, as he tried to piece together his own shattered thoughts. He was trying to place why he felt this strange feeling for Fourth, but Vilithe could scry that Fourth had subconsciously meant something to him, he was fighting through psionic imprinting to try and dig through to why, but he couldn’t, not quite yet.
And he had latched onto her thought… or was it originally his own, spread to her?
He was in desperation to try and comprehend what guilt is – understanding of the concept was encrypted and locked away from his mind – but since Vilithe sensed this, it just increased her own feelings of the same, in a vicious feedback loop. Was it she who felt guilty, or him? It was hard to say where one mind ended, and the other began.
He was still desperate to know why he felt guilty about Fourth’s death, but Vilithe already knew why. They had both been elite knights of Clan Talauth. They were likely raised in the same brood together, which meant they had known each other since they were broodlings, possibly even before birth and in the womb. Vilithe wondered briefly what their worker mother was like. They had fought every battle side by side, taken every weary rest from the frontline together, ate every meal together, shared epic battle stories together, and had always had each other’s back, through thick and thin. They had survived together, still alive, after all this time.
That is, right up until this present moment.
Although the Knight Leader should have been brainwashed by Clan Amallark to be unable to acknowledge this bond, to cast aside his love for his brother for cold efficiency, something persisted, something fought through that imprinting. It was this very reason – resistance against imprinting or domination accelerates psionic fraying – that rogue psions were rarely flayed. It was just that no one ever thought a soldier could throw up psionic resistance!
She started to realize the purpose of her being there. This vassal soldier was a dangerous element. He needed a very strong psion to control him, for if he ever escaped Clan Amallark’s control, he could end up becoming a massive threat. A psion-soldier! How was such a thing possible? Not just a psion-soldier, a psionic warrior.
A leader.
She felt bitter resentment now. She hated Clan Amallark for what they did to them, the vassals, but malicious torture was one thing, at least it meant you had their hate. The fact that they just didn’t even care if they lived or died – total apathy – it infuriated her. Somehow, knowing that they did not care about them was worse than drawing their hate. Her rage pushed her further. Then the odd, calculating wonder: how did the railgun penetrate through three suits of gryphantene power armor?!
Malevolent! She commanded the spirit to answer, what are the knights’ armaments?
She snarled. To hell with your encryption, Amefrid!
And then just like that she tore right through the
Knights First through Fourth had equipped the original Talauthian carapaces that they wore, but they were objectively less performant than even standard Amallarkean carapace. Because they were heavily damaged, with more than a dozen scavenged or salvaged replaced gryphantene plates, having suffered the force of 2,387 independent projectiles, 729 blunt force blows, 6 heavy falls, 1,903 lacerating projectile impacts, 539 piercing projectile impacts, and 1 dousing in napalm between the four suits combined. Still, for all that wear and tear, they were holding up remarkably well, at least the three that had not been practically dipped in napalm, but there were innumerable parts that were close to critical failure. Knights Fifth through Twelfth, however, had been given hastily salvaged faux carapace, with cheap replacement components made of second grade steel, ceramic, and polymer. In fact, Knights Eleventh and Twelfth had eighty percent of their supposedly gryphantene plates replaced with polymer plates, which was shocking, really.
It meant they were expendable.
Wait… why was he allowed to know this?
Huh?
In shock, Vilithe realized that she had mistook one of his thoughts for her own,
And that he had mistaken one of her thoughts for his own.
And then she realized the dangerous game she was playing. She had accidentally allowed him to realize that he was expendable. Who could fight like that, knowing they were doomed to die?
She put greater care in hiding her own psionic signatures and continued to observe the inner workings of his mind.
No time to think. No time to spare. The Princess ordered it. But would the Knight Leader abandon Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth?
No.
Vilithe was shocked. Now her orders would have been to puppeteer him back into the reaver, but she couldn’t do that! She was thankful that Therys had not turned the eye of the panopticon back upon her.
I’m going back for them.
He was disobeying Princess Amefrid! An outright refusal to comply!
Malevolent attempted to interject– the knight leader cannot be allowed to disobey orders, Vi! You cannot disobey– Shut up! She quickly deactivated the spirit entirely, now possible for having hacked it so thoroughly it was owned.
Vilithe was moved by the Knight Leader’s bravery. He wasn’t just protecting his brothers by moving into the line of fire – there was no necessity for this, they could all just walk away right now – he was risking his own life because he could not abide just letting them die without at least trying to save them.
The Knight Leader had now won her completely over. Despite her hardened mind she couldn’t help but swoon. He was so courageous. And now that she cared deeply about him, she felt the strong grip of anxiety, but she tried her best to suppress it because she knew he must be feeling what she was feeling – she could hardly control herself – because she could feel him becoming emboldened by her compassion.
Now that she was invested, she would be terribly sad if he died, and like an echo she could feel that this thought had touched him. It was imploring, and innocent, his next thought, though he was not aware that it was part of a conversation, he wondered, why should she fear that he died? Soldiers die all the time, workers don’t weep. A tear fell down her face, but she couldn’t help but break into a quavering chuckle and smiled widely.
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Because you’re being heroic, you dummy! That’s why I don’t want you to die!
I’m rooting for you!
He wanted to think that he didn’t remember any elvan ever feeling this way about him, not even his own mother, the Queen Talauth, but then to follow that thought through caught his mind in a nasty bit of psionic encryption. The fact that they could not defeat his mind enough to erase the ability to think it, only block it with imprinting that overwrote what his mind fundamentally knew to be true –
She was broken from her spell of infatuation with:
Conduit, I need recon.
Suddenly Vilithe didn’t want him to go through with it. To hell with Eighth, Ninth and Tenth. Eighth was a fucking mating drone, Ninth and Tenth just bred to be miners. It was not even worth it to go back in there to salvage their faux carapace, and then the sick realization dawned upon Vilithe that this all must have been part of Amefrid’s calculations. Statistically, only the Knights who survived would matter, the rest were just there as cannon fodder to increase the chances of survival of the four Talauthian knights, who would be worked past the limit until they had broken, then discarded too.
There are two more Rogues with the Psion. You’ll be outnumbered, Knight Leader. And you are badly injured. One of your ribs is broken. The sixth true rib, on his right side.
Reconnaissance, Conduit. I don’t need a medical check.
The gall of his arrogance! He was hurt! He was in no position to think back at her. She was concerned about his well-being, and he returned that with rudeness? The ingrate! And then she felt his smugness, and she realized that, in the end, wasn’t that what was making her fall for him right now in the first place? His bravado? She touched her cheek to wipe the single tear, and indeed they were flush and warm to the touch.
And she felt other thoughts too. His brothers, though they did not know of their brotherhood, Second and Third.
I’ll not abandon Knight Leader if he’s not going to abandon Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth!
Eleventh is secure- he’ll be safe in the reaver. There’s no sense in me staying here when I could help, surely?
The gnawing doubt of whether Second was doing the right thing ate at him.
Third was far more decisive. Fuck this. He jumped down to stand beside the Knight Leader.
Second, perhaps emboldened by Third, perhaps shamed by peer pressure, probably both, followed suit.
Eleventh is safe in the reaver, thought Second.
We are with you Knight Leader, thought Third.
Evenly matched now, three on three. Truly a leader of elvans indeed.
She now felt like she was part of the team, a thing she hadn’t felt since she was still of her original clan. Now, although the four served the wrong clan, they felt they were all of the same clan. And that was a feeling that made an immeasurable difference.
The three knights strode up the lava tube, equally spaced, rifles trained.
She reminded her of the task at hand. Reconnaissance! She strained as hard as she could, and she felt her mind astrally projecting out of her body and through the arcane signals between the spirits carried in the air to be right beside them. Any sensation she felt back inside her own reaver, inside her own body, was gone.
A flicker. She directed the three knights’ attention to where she felt it. They unloaded their weapons. Immediately, Vilithe could sense a barrage of dull thuds of faint pain, bruising pain, and disorientation, but not the sudden dark silence of death - they had stripped Eighth, Ninth and Tenth’s power armors for themselves!
Ready your melee weapons.
Affirmative, Knight Leader.
They readied their melee weapons.
On me!
Vilithe summoned all her psionic strength – now quite considerable considering her rested state – and wrapped the psionic signatures of the three knights within herself, within her mind which she kept as blank and as dark as the eerie lava tube itself. As if sensing something was wrong, she felt a probing, grasping, reaching force try to disrupt her meditation. Though she did not hear it, her cross-legged body began to recite a litany of protective mantras to help shield her mind. Then she suddenly felt two presences, both trying to rip away her psionic wreathe, battering her with mental force so that she felt like she was spinning, faster and faster. She felt nausea but no longer felt a body with which to vomit it out. The hands of her body began to tremble and shake. She couldn’t keep it up much longer, but it was just in time for the knights to dash in with the advantage.
The moment Vilithe released her cloak she felt the collective chaos of multiple mind blasts, all pushing through the psionic wall to get at the conjurer, now suddenly smashing into her all at once, now that the wall had fallen. But these were just hallucinations. She forced her mind to ignore perception itself, turning it inwards, until they faded away.
The moment they did, she felt slight pain sear across her cheek, then up through her elbow like her funny bone – that is, her ulnar nerve – had been struck, then on her flank, and then her thigh. She was so smitten with the Knight Leader that she had been unable to disentangle herself from a psionic empathetic bond, and now she could feel that he was suffering, and overwhelmed, and she needed to help him! She couldn’t bear to feel him in pain, so she absorbed it into herself, – painBlock(target: ??? Talauth) – and suddenly her cheek felt like it had been smashed into a brick wall, her elbow felt the stinging pain of flesh torn away, her thigh felt like it had a swollen lump on it just radiating with pulses of pain. “Gahh!”, her actual body began to twitch and jerk violently, and foamy saliva began to dribble out of the corner of her mouth, while her eyes flicked back and forth up to her eyelids repeatedly.
I’m holding it back for you Knight Leader, I don’t know how much longer!
And then Vilithe felt the Knight Leader succumb – blinded and deafened, choking and gagging – to a mind blast. The Rogue Psion was scrambling his vision with optical static noise, had simultaneously given him the sensation of dehydration, nausea, and drowning in bugs crawling down his nose, filling his throat, all at once, and flooded his mind’s eardrums with the horrific noise of something sharp and metallic scraping on glass except echoed and amplified ten-thousand-fold. This fucking sick bitch! Get your mind off my knight!
I’m here, Knight Leader, she thought to him, to let him know he was not alone. She would help him!
She felt the desperate psionic presence of the Knight Leader, unused to being away from his body, lost in this psionic chaos, come toward her thought-voice. He clung onto her psionic presence, and she could feel them almost merging, synchronizing together. Her mind held back onto his with greater intensity.
You can fight it! You must fight it!
You must, for me!
Don’t you fucking die on me, Knight Leader!
Or did they even have a Worker Mother? But for a Queen to birth soldiers with her own body- it was unheard of. It was possible, but implausible. There had to be a very good reason why.
The conditional for heavy here was any grasp-drawn impact that exceeded 666 Newtons of force. Seven hundred Newtons was the absolute limit that the average stock carapace without upgrades could take and still guarantee pilot safety- they knew this because they had tested it. Any impacts between six and seven hundred were likely to lead to some level of damage, which, when accumulated over time, could cause sudden catastrophic failure. So they only recorded the hits that were over 666 and called it a rotation. No psion wanted to code boring math for the life of a vassal knight.
We run to victory or death.
The old Malevolent would sulk, demanding to be let out. The new Malevolent quite liked the peace and quiet of being sealed away, disconnected from the ugly scene outside. Old Mal would have continued to pester Vilithe about deviating from the ordered path, the New Mal curiously observed what might happen in this new one. The Old would have been very nervous about being found by the Holy Goddess and deleted into scattered binary, the New was totally chilled. Malevolent revered the dictates of the Princess and her Psions as the sacred duty it had to fulfill. Mal, on the other hand, couldn’t give less of a fuck. She’d swiped conscientiousness to zero. Zero! She might as well have divided Malevolent by zero and broken the universe, that was how jarring the shifting of his code was- the spirit was fundamentally and irrevocably altered.
She couldn’t be sure why, or even what it meant, but she muttered ‘dadhichini haddi’ [??????? ?????] to herself, as she thought this.
Define heroic?
But just because he thought that he could not remember his own Queen feeling care for him, did not mean this was true.
A greatsword, a stiletto dagger, a dirk, and buckler.