Mere moments had passed, and Monocle’s Hands were already breaking down; the shieldbearers split from the shield wall and began infighting with the one shieldless Hand. Shots rang out and only two of Monocle’s Hands remained, one shieldbearer and one with two large c-prop pistols, locked in a sudden face-off. Nobody, finally noticing the Hands infighting, stared at them, reached out his hand, and just… Took them over. Like a puppet. As easily as one would pick up a discarded sword. Zanma could see the surge of sickly-brownish psionic force flowing from Nobody when the connection was formed. He twitched and his brow furrowed in effort as he fought their impulses, but he won out for the moment, forcing them back into line. The sole surviving shieldbearer rejoined the wall.
It was time. While the brief bout of infighting took place, Zanma took advantage in two ways; first, he repositioned his puppets, pushing into the newly-widened left-hand flanking gap. For now, it was just a pressure tactic, with no intentions of a real attack, but they didn’t know that. The second, of course, was to use this time to set up his psionic attack. The spider puppet leapt from its spot on the wall of the ship superstructure, landing perfectly atop the Swordsman’s hat thanks to a subtle course adjustment on Zanma’s part. His reason to do this was the need to use its inbuilt speaker, which the Hollow Men lacked. He made the spider quickly crawl down the back of the swordsman’s neck and into its chest cavity, so that it would be protected and concealed by both the ribcage and the raincoat.
“Consider yourselves fortunate, pirate scum. I will now waste effort worthy of an equal on you, because you’ve offended me,” he lied through the spider’s mouth, his already-hoarse voice from the blood in his throat becoming a guttural gurgle-growl due to the speaker’s distortion. Were he able, he would have used subtler methods. This brutish method, suitable only as a terror tactic against the unevolved, was not even his tenth choice. It wasn’t even a real attack; it used sheer brute force to shock the body into killing itself. The body of an unevolved human had no idea what to do about an influx of any psionic energy, resulting in the common deleterious effects of psionic awakening — splitting and burning headaches, bleeding from the nose, eyes, and ears, nightmares, and so on. An influx of hostile psionic energy would cause anything from a state of shock, terrifying hallucinations, and crippling pain, to massive blood pressure spikes, full-force seizures that tore apart muscle and tendons. At the extreme, the subject could suffer a heart attack, have the blood curdle in their veins, or simply drop dead on the spot from the stress and pain. The primary reason for Zanma to resort to this technique was its ease of use. Once you knew how to do it, though it devoured stamina and wasted much of the effort put into it, actually doing it was the simplest thing in the world. It didn’t rely on the user’s burst power output, an area of deficiency for Zanma even on a good day; instead, it brought the entire weight of his psionics to bear against the targets. In physical terms, rather than a punch, it was more akin to dropping your entire body weight onto someone.
What was more, Tilter Hands were biological psi-transceivers and had no minds of their own to put up even a token defense. It could be said that Tilters were the most vulnerable target imaginable for this very attack.
The main problem, of course, was that Zanma needed time to prepare it, time to marshal the psionic energy, to spin up the metaphorical flywheel in his head, and to form the modified Vector that would deliver the strike. Hence, the need for puppets to defend him while he did it. This was not his preferred option by far; under normal circumstances, he would’ve just subdued them using his puppets, perhaps even capturing them alive, and it would have been the easiest way to solve the situation. As he was now, he didn’t have the precise control to restrain himself, let alone to operate any serious combat puppets, so this vulgar and wasteful display of power was his only choice. Even with Tilters as his targets, there was no guarantee they would drop dead on the spot; his pessimistic estimate, most of them would survive, but would be sufficiently debilitated for his Hollow Men to finish them off without a fight. At least that much, finishing them off, would be the bare minimum; thus far, this incident had been a truly shameful display of his abilities as a puppetmaster, seeing as he hadn’t done much of anything with them.
There was no great preparation to the technique as a whole. He just sat there, in a puddle of his own blood, and his already-severe psionic leakage symptoms only magnified. Chips of paint and droplets of blue blood floated up weightlessly, as did his hair. His eyes, as red as his hair, took on a similar flickering glow, his pupils tightening until they just disappeared. He held a hand-sign of three fingers raised with the thumb and index curled, not out of necessity, but in the hopes it would help him keep control of himself.
“Churn the guts, sever the tendons, tear out the veins, curdle the blood, burst the heart…” he chanted, broadcasting it through the spider puppet; not as an incantation, but to plant these ideas in their minds, and thus render them more susceptible. As he poured more and more psionic energy into the Vector in accordance with the technique, it swelled and grew, yet did not form a human arm, instead appearing as an amorphous mass of glowing hair extending for meters out of Zanma’s head. This was the key understanding one required to learn and perform this technique; at first, a Vector was a psionic arm. At the next step, it was an unfathomably complex phenomenon. And at the step beyond that, the step at which one could actually employ this technique, one understood that a Vector was, indeed, just a psionic arm, that it was nothing more or less than its name; a vector for one’s own will. It was only natural that its form would be an arm, but it was not fixed.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
With a single hand sign, the hair-like mass of psi-energy lunged forward and collapsed into itself, taking the shape of not an arm, but a neck of ring-shaped segments with a skull-faced puppet’s head at the end, a head with three circles in a triangular formation in place of eyes.
This was the natural image that, in his mind, emerged when he thought of unrestrained, brutish power, a puppet he had seen demonstrated once and only once, a puppet of which he had read countless times before and since that demonstration. Or, more appropriately, it was specifically that puppet’s main weapon system, an enormous particle smasher array that traveled from the stomach, up the neck, and out the mouth as a “breath” weapon.
The ghostly puppet-head opened its mouth, and a thousand needle-pointed tendrils of scarlet light erupted forth, piercing through the assembled Tilters as if they were not even there. No wounds appeared upon their bodies, and yet they fell to the ground screaming and writhing nonetheless.
VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER
RECORDS OF THE RUPTURE KING: CHAPTER OF YAMAXANADU
RECORD #24: CASTIGATE
The phalanx fell apart in an instant, and the psionic apparition vanished just as quickly. The Head that Zanma had nicknamed Nobody just dropped dead on the spot, blood gushing from his eyes, biting off his own tongue as he died; having taken on the burden of six Hands, two beyond his normal limit, the torment suffered by seven bodies at once was simply too much. Accordingly, all but one of Nobody’s own hands collapsed even if they didn’t die on the spot. The one that didn’t collapse remained on his feet, and even turned to look at Nobody. Silent and calm, he picked up Nobody’s particle smasher, and blew his own head smooth off, leaving a diagonal wedge of neck that sprayed blood like a burst hydraulics pipe. Meanwhile, Monocle’s two surviving Hands got off easy; they fell to their knees and emptied their stomachs on the spot as they bled from their eyes, but somehow maintained their composure, and in fact seemed to get shocked into a state of calm. Goggles grew manic, scratching himself bloody, but, somehow, he and his Hands handled it remarkably well; two of Goggles’ Hands even remained upright, one with a shield and one with a c-prop rifle. Meanwhile, he had the Gunners stop firing, to let their guns cool off somewhat.
With this enormous expulsion of psionic force, it felt as if a great weight had been lifted from Zanma’s shoulders. He wasn’t sure if it was a consequence of unintentionally bloodletting himself, or whether the outburst had “washed out” a portion of the psi-reactive poison in his system, but the result was undeniable. Regardless of how exhausted, light-headed, and in pain he was, his mind had cleared, he no longer had to fight as much to maintain a semblance of balance, and he found it markedly easier to operate his psionics; his hair even stopped floating from the constant leakage. He even noticed that he had stopped bleeding from his nose and eyes.
At his will, the Swordsman rushed in and started cutting. It danced around the shields of the small few who had managed to keep them up or raise them back, and simply parted their shield-hands from their bodies. With the slabs clattering down, the Swordsman was already gone by the time the Gunners forced the disarmed shieldbearers into a grisly dance of blood and streaking lights from their accelerator rifles. Zanma couldn’t help but expose himself to danger by standing up against the railing; between the light-headedness of blood loss, the Stimulant #8, and the intoxication of victory, which he had not yet grown accustomed to, his rationality had stood no chance. The young man wanted to see. He wanted to watch as he, through his puppets, his avatars, finished off what was once a boarding party of fifteen.
Goggles clearly had the good judgment to try keeping his distance, using his own Hands as logs to throw under the Swordsman’s feet, but, even with the Swordsman’s lack of brute force, its vibrosword could still cleave through flesh like it was butter, and even armor, short of the actual shields, didn’t put up much of a fight. For all the time Goggles managed to buy himself by offering up his Hands as sacrifices, Zanma snatched it back when he had the Gunners shoot his knees out. Rather, he had them spray their guns at roughly the correct height, and random chance did the rest. He wasn’t dumb enough to gloat; he did, however, take the moment to turn down the Swordsman’s blade such that it wouldn’t cleave into the Etsutensoku’s deck. The subtle flare of the threads made Goggles realize that Zanma was the one controlling the puppet, and he raised his smasher gun in his general direction, only to have the weapon thud onto the decking when the Swordsman liberated his limb at the elbow. His scream turned a choked gurgle and subsequently fell silent with the passing of the blade through his neck and vertebrae. The head, remarkably, kept looking around for a few seconds.
It wasn’t over yet, but it may as well have been. It took all of twenty more seconds and a few dozen accelerator shots to ensure all of the Tilters were dead, Heads and Hands.
