Wisely, the pirates approached from the rear, where the Etsutensoku had neither cannons nor the shipbeast’s pincers to use as a weapon. Their vessel was comparatively tiny, but nonetheless large enough to house dozens of men; perhaps not in conditions of any comfort or even bare-minimum hygiene, but it could house them. To ensure the rear turret couldn't swivel and fire on the boarding vessel as it made its approach, the pirates launched a crude, shoulder-braced rocket. A pillar of dark smoke reached out like the tendril of a monstrosity from the deep, and the explosive at its tip slammed into the turret, blowing its metal guts out the other side. The launcher's tube, spent and smoking, was immediately hurled overboard. With the pirate vessel being small enough that merely the whipping of the Etsutensoku’s swimmerets could threaten its stability, the pirate crew made the crossing crammed aboard a small motorized boat, whose hull threatened to sink under the weight of its fifteen passengers. They then used grappling hooks to drag themselves aboard, and the boarding boat immediately turned around, speeding back to their ship.
Whether it was by coincidence or a subconscious sense of timing, the pirates clambered onto the upper deck just as the red-haired puppetmaster emerged from below deck, three puppets guarding him. He was followed by a small retinue of armed crewmen, who kept a healthy distance of several meters from him, hiding within the stairwell. There was no abrupt eruption of conflict, because there was no line of sight; Zanma had emerged from the forward-facing side of the ship’s superstructure, while the boarding party had climbed aboard from the rear on the left.
Zanma could, even if his second-sight was impaired, at least sense their general location. It was nothing like the imaginations of so many hack writers, at least at his level; he just had two “extra senses:” The first was a general idea of the shape of his surroundings, reaching only a few meters, while the other gave him a vague idea of other living things in a larger radius. Given the distance, he could only vaguely make out the mass of bodies even if he focused.
The young puppetmaster walked up the stairwell to his right, towards the superstructure’s first floor, while he directed his puppets, who he'd creatively named Gunner A, Gunner B, and Swordsman, around the corner to face down his quarry. He dragged himself up the stairs, fingers locked around the railing to keep from collapsing. No chance he’d face the enemy in the open — not at this stage. From the landing above, the cracked window gave him a clean line of sight: enough to pull every string on his puppets and hurl a psionic spike straight into the bastard’s mind.
Thus, an elevated vantage point would be his best choice. While his puppets walked, he spent the painful effort to form another thread, or at least attempted to do so, to no avail.
Resignedly, even dejectedly, Zanma craned his head back and stared skyward, bracing himself. He popped open his Locke’s Salt, and took another whiff. Fire raced up his sinuses and into his skull. A pained grimace gripped his features. He closed the canister. A thin trickle of luminous-blue blood ran from his nostrils; discoloured by the salt reacting with the psi-amplifiers that had made their way into his blood from his dose of Stimulant #8. His hair floated of its own volition, patterns strobing up and down and across like reflections above a pool of coolant; paint peeled from the walls, greenish oxide crumbled off the railings, and the blood that was beginning to pool beneath him self-arranged into a mandala-like pattern.
He felt atrocious. Stimulant #8 was usually fine, if used in moderation, but mixing it with Locke’s Salt all but guaranteed side effects. With two doses of Locke’s Salt in a short timespan, it was a lucky break that his reaction ended at a nosebleed. He blinked, and a faint tinge of blue creeped into his vision. Something warm ran down his cheeks.
“Ah. Called it too soon,” he thought. It wasn’t something as benign as a burst blood vessel; it was more akin to an allergic reaction. He was really, truly weeping blood. If he didn’t do something, there was a real chance that this would go on for long enough to cause him serious blood loss. But, as he was now, a little bleeding wasn’t something to worry about. He could tend to his self-inflicted maladies once these pirates were dealt with.
With his next attempt, the thread spun into existence right away, appearing as if it was fraying in reverse as it grew out of the mass of his hair. It was almost painful to see himself wasting this much power on a mere thread, the wasted energy would have sufficed to rip a man’s finger clean off. Using this thread, he reached up towards the floor above, rejoining with his scout spider to use it as an eye. Unsurprisingly, the Captain had taken up his own gun, an enormous lever-action, and was currently stuffing his pockets with spare ammunition. It only took a few leg-taps to get his attention. Why he had not yet begun firing on them was clear: He had been plugged into the ship until a few seconds ago, and the cable was, presumably for safety reasons, not long enough to let him walk more than a few steps from the console without unplugging. Based on his vacant gaze, he still hadn’t recovered from the disconnection, and was operating nearly blind; his eyes could see, it was just that his brain wasn’t paying attention at the moment.
“I have three humanoid puppets approaching the enemy. Open the door for my spider, please,” he asked of the Captain through the puppet. The old man did as was asked of him, cracking it open just wide enough for the spider to pass before he returned to his scavenging. The depths of resolve in that old man’s eyes, blind as he was, made Zanma feel like he was a kid playing soldier. A part of him hoped he would just need to buy the old man the time for his ocular cortex to readjust. His spider emerged through the door and began climbing the outer wall down to his level.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
Range limitations or the possibility of his threads tangling or getting snagged on something didn’t even cross his mind; as they were now, his threads existed only as connections between two fixed points, meaning as long as he could visualize a path, he could spend a moment and a negligible amount of effort to “re-draw the line.” He would inevitably lose some of the psionic energy comprising the current thread, but reforming it with a new path was infinitely faster and easier than making a new thread and connecting it all over again. There were many special circumstances that could prevent him from doing this, forcing him to treat his threads as physical objects, but they were just that — “special circumstances.” The act of redrawing the spider’s thread was a matter of a second’s effort, which already felt unacceptably slow. Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t even register as something deserving of a separate action. Already, he could see the pirates through the spider’s single eye, and a few seconds later, his Hollow Men came face to face with them.
At this point, he couldn’t see properly; there was no choice but to face the wall and shake his head a few times, splattering blue blood all over. The Captain would have to forgive him for the mess.
Fifteen pirates — three “people” of five bodies each. All of them were discoloured and dysgenic by any normal standard, their heads slowly tilting side-to-side as they leered at “him,” the Swordsman. It was this behavior that was their namesake. Their bodies were lanky with knobby joints, their arms a little too long; from what he’d read about Tilters, this was one one of two common body types among the men, and despite the perpetual appearance of malnutrition, their builds concealed a shocking strength and agility. The three Heads all stood at the rear, each clad in armor of interlocking chitinous plates, with the Hands as the vanguard. The left-most Head had pale bronze skin, brown eyes, a white mustache, a turban, and a monocle; the middle Head was a vaguely beige shade, he was entirely unremarkable and would have looked identical to his Hands were it not for his armor; the right-most Head was short, bald, sickly pale with red splotches all over his head and hands, and wore a respirator and goggles. Zanma mentally named them as Monocle, Nobody, and Goggles. All of the Hands both looked extremely similar to their Heads, and he sensed a faint psionic connection between the Heads and Hands, making it easy to tell which bodies belonged to whom.
As his puppets approached the enemy, Zanma reformed the Swordsman’s threads to ensure it would have the breathing room to charge in at any moment, draping the threads over the edge of his vantage point. Though they registered as glowing red lines to him, they were invisible to the naked eye, and even other psions would have a hard time noticing them if he was just maintaining them or using them to walk a humanoid puppet. At combat output, they might flare, but they would only become visible at the connection points, appearing as if they faded out into nothing the further from the connection they got. Thus, as long as his vantage point wasn’t out in the open, he would not be found by any method of physical observation.
Zanma raised his Gunners' rifles. Scarlet streaks of light ripped through the air, carving into the flesh and bone of Hands without mercy. He didn't waste shots on the armored Heads; his priority for now was to mow down their vanguard like the incompetent animals he thought they were. But as his puppets fired, three of the lead Hands surged forward. Heavy gauntlets on their arms snapped open, then unfurled, expanding into gleaming tower shields that slammed together to form a solid, moving wall. Muzzles appeared at waist-height in the gaps between the plates, spitting alloy bullets.
A series of loud cracks rung out. Several dozen alloy bullets ricocheted off the ship’s deck, and a handful landed “on-target,” ineffectually sparking against the Hollow Men’s frames while others were caught in their raincoats. Zanma inwardly breathed a sigh of relief; c-prop guns of this caliber couldn’t do much of anything to his puppets unless they got very lucky several times in a row. He himself dared not poke his head out.
The Tilters barked threats and orders as they inched forward, but Zanma couldn’t make them out, be it through his own hearing or the rudimentary built-in “hearing” of the Hollow Man chassis. Between their shields, the noise of the sea, his poisoning, and their slurring, sing-songy accents, their words just melted together into a mess of noise occasionally broken up by various expletives, which, for some reason, they enunciated with crystal clarity. I fuck your sister this, I fuck your mother that, plague upon you, so on and so forth.
Despite their quick response, his opening salvo dropped two shield-bearers, one each from Monocle’s and Nobody’s squads, with the respective Heads recoiling in shock and clutching their smasher guns. Three more were wounded before the shield wall went up, and had a good chance of bleeding out sooner rather than later. He noted a few more minor injuries, but none serious. This was the firepower of low-tier, Type-1 accelerator rifles, using linear acceleration tracks and no advanced parts; despite being “trash,” they were still superior to c-prop rifles in every way. A Type-1 accelerator rifle could let off a hundred shots in a row without issue, and that limit was the result of heat buildup; a limitation not inherent to the technology, but a result of the fact they were cheap, entry-level weapons, lacking advanced cooling components. The pirates' pistols barked in return, lobbing dozens of rounds at his puppets – cheap trash that merely sparked ineffectually against the Hollow Men's frames. Zanma watched the Heads, calculating. Their "particle smashers" – crude, pre-charged weapons akin to shotguns firing birdshot – were useless at this range. They wouldn't hurt his puppets, or him for that matter, but the barrage of more conventional bullets from the Hands' pistols would be another matter for him. Even at his best, he knew a full salvo would overwhelm his personal defenses. In his current state, he wasn't confident he could even deflect a glancing hit.
Patreon!
