BOOK 8 - INTERLUDE (1)

It happened behind his back.

He’d been tending his gardens as he always did for a morning routine, when the ceiling of his cozy grove was ripped apart and an exo-suit blasted through.

Two things were rare about this. First, he’d never had anything fall down through his roof, so that was unique in a way. And second, he’d never seen his exo-armors moving around without him piloting them.

Modeling programs were already showing him the full trajectory of that exo-suit when he turned around to look at the source of the comotion. Not that he really needed them, given how obvious the entire crime scene was.

Straight through the biome dome, down into the roof of his house, easily breaking through the top floor before coming to a stop on the second.

Camera systems in his home were still working fine, so he swapped through the feeds until he could watch the intruder, see what he was up against.

The exo-suit’s hull integrity was already below critical levels. As in, the armor could hardly even stand by itself even at full power. Thus, no threat to him.

Which meant the true danger would be the possible pilot within. It could be a machine, or a human who’d recovered his older jettisoned variants.

But more important - whoever or whatever program was piloting that exo-armor couldn't on the side of Relinquished. He had a pillar heart setup in his grove, and that would have fried any machine aligned with that goddess. It's range went beyond the dome hull of his grove even.

Plus if Relinquished had discovered the means to bypass these pillars, then she would have attacked him with an army, not a single crashed exo-armor of his own design.

...

Actually, he was nearly certain she would arrive herself to kill him. That goddess hated him above all other humans in the world, at least according to Grandpa. And Grandpa was always right about most things.

Thus: The crashed exo-suit pilot was either human, or a weak variant of a machine that was unaffiliated with Relinquished - as a stronger machine would have no reason to pilot a suit. In both cases, he was certain he could defend himself against.

So he’d simply taken his blade, staff and lantern, then opened his front door and walked back into his house. If he were honest, he was more thankful that the crashed suit had ruined his home instead of his agricultural garden.

The house he could fix. Plant growth took months on the other hand and couldn’t be rushed. Even the mites hadn’t given him their secrets for bioengineering. Yet.

Still. He kept his blade at the ready as he walked up the creaking steps. He hadn’t lived this long by not exercising the minimum of caution. Humans could prove just as dangerous as machines if they were occult mages of some kind.

On the second floor, he saw with his own eyes what his camera feeds had sent him.

The armor hissed clouds of vaporized lubricant out of the damaged exterior parts. Parts of his house were dangling off splinters, many of which were still in the process of reaching their structural limits and falling off their last held position, clattering on his floor.

As for the exo-suit itself...

One armored hand was currently half-embedded in his dressing drawer. And as his eye examined the arm, he detected interesting modifications. Several of the artificial muscles had been damaged, cut out and replaced by other cannibalized fibers. But the new affixed points were set in an odd pattern.

His eyes zoomed in on those, more curious.

He’d made those easily modifiable of course, so that in post-combat situations he could replace damaged sinew with lesser stabilizing muscle fibers. Harder to pilot from then on, but doable.

The rearrangement here was… adequate. It allowed all standard motions, minus a few extreme edge cases, but without any drawbacks to stabilization. Whoever had tried doing field repairs to his exo-suit had clearly spent months learning how to best make it work if they’d come up with this on the spot.

“Grandpa, is this one of yours?”

His staff began to glow, lights shining through the wood. The lantern mites within began to fidget further, walking in changing geometric patterns. He felt a presence connect to him, speaking directly through his mind.

NOT MINE.

The old soul whispered. NOT KNOW ELSE. STINKS OF HUMAN.

“And why do you believe it isn’t a machine piloting my exo-suit?”

COSMETICS. PAINTING. GAUDY DECORATION. SEE? HUMAN THINGS.

His eyes started scanning. Populating his vision with notification after notification. Huh. He hadn’t noticed the cosmetics, too focused on the suit’s engineering modifications.

Badges, gold decorations, paper scripts written in… latin? Odd choice for a language, but his database returned that as the match.

That meant whoever was within it, was likely human. Grandpa was right.

That helped him fully relax. So this was a human, who had recovered one of his discarded armors, and spent months restoring it to working shape. Excellent, a peer even.

“Thank you Grandpa. I appreciate the advice.”

NOT GRANDPA. IS DUMB WORD. The old soul sent back, upset as usual when he’d addressed him as such. But he’d known grandpa for years now. From the moment he’d picked up the discarded lantern off the side of a roadway, back when he was a starving half-dead child.

Grandpa was always Grandpa. Whispering advice on where to go, where to find food, where to hide. His actual name was not as fitting as Grandpa.

BAH. STUPID HUMAN.

The presence in his mind snapped back into the lantern, brooding.

He shrugged, and got back to the task at hand. If he could feel family love, as the humans in Nadja explained what that was, then Grandpa was certainly the first person he loved. He felt a pang of loss again at the thought of that city, as usual, but he put it to the side, trying to focus.

The exo-suit remained unmoving, the vapors around it dissipating. He looked over the latches and setup, trying to discover which of his prior suits he’d abandoned behind. But then he realized something was off.

For one, it was using a blade… like his own blade. In fact, it was an exact replica. He’d only lost three in the past. What were the chances a human had managed to stumble around that same area in order to recover his old weapon?

Far more likely that the mites had entombed the discarded blades at some point, and then lifted them up the stratas where one was intercepted by this human. So that could be dismissed.

But the other part was not so easily dismissed.

Because this exo-suit… was his exo-suit. As in the same exact iteration he was currently using. Version 41.5.

It had the same latch design updates he’d done to assist him in getting out under crushing water pressure. The memory of having to rip a hole through his own armor, and then slowly pry all the metal apart until he could correctly jettison himself from the sunken suit had made him spend some time on those latches. Plus, as he learned, he had too much metal within himself to float or swim. He had to hold his breath for two hours while he walked on the bottom of the seabed before he got to shore again.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Miserable experience.

He’d done that update only three months prior, and there hadn’t been any other additions since. So only his exo-suit should have that. He walked back to the window, and looked outside down at his grove.

His exo-suit remained untouched there, held up by winches and heavy chains. Ready for the next expedition out.

So how was there a second exo-suit here?

Something was off with all this. He approached the suit, looking over the damages. It remained motionless, its back halfway through the floor to the next level downwards, legs and arms spread out. Lights were flickering on the sides, pressure gauges were all showing loss of power. The suit was dying. The AI inside was following automated protocols now, struggling to keep the suit running by diverting power and systems one after another as they failed.

Which meant the pilot inside was either dead, or unconscious, given no commands were being sent to the armor.

His eyes tracked the damages, and sent him a report. There wouldn’t be a way to recover this suit, and soon the AI would run through its last possible solutions before it ran out of power for itself.

Which meant life support systems would equally die soon.

All his exo-suits were hermetically sealed, like their original schematics. He’d gone down the wrong path early on, and that had taught him some valuable lessons on why things were the way they were. Gas and poison effects had made him certify all versions after 34.8 always remained sealed to the outside elements when active. Which ironically had been the reason 41.5 was even made in the first place, as water was one such outside element.

But that also meant no oxygen would be flowing. And if there was a normal human inside the suit, they would die within three minutes.

Humans were so fragile. He still had trouble believing he’d been even more fragile than that years ago.

He got to work, leaning his staff on the bedpost. His blade would be dangerous to use, as there might have been modifications done to the cockpit of the exo-suit and he didn't have eyes that could reliably see through metal.

That left only primitive means of opening the armor up. He clambered over the mech armor, and began twisting the latches and levers needed to pry open the armor. He got further inside, and then hit the expected roadblock.

After version 21.5, when he’d been caught without power in the hands of a machine that had slowly disassembled the armor to get to him, he’d added a safety measure within the armor that would lock it from being opened up. A key of sorts. It could only be unlocked from within, but it had seven different methods of doing so, in case any of these methods failed.

Right now, the armor was indeed locked. He raised one hand up, and speared it into the metal, cutting through. The outer epidermis of his skin rubbed off revealing the purple silver alloy under, but that would heal soon enough.

With some struggle, he wiggled his other hand inside the open grove, and began to pry the armor apart. He moved with efficiency and speed, knowing all he needed to do right now was to rip a hole in the cabin itself for air.

He made it within a minute, finally prying the inner cabin plate sections apart by the chest.

Blood. That was the first thing he saw of the inner cockpit and the pilot within.

Not a great sign, but since the cockpit itself didn’t seem compromised until he’d pried the metal apart, then it likely was blood from blunt force within. He continued to pry it open, and confirmed there weren’t modifications to the inner cabin, which allowed him to cut with his blade next.

The schematics of the armor superimposed over his vision. He mentally plotted out his cutting path and got to work.

Once he had a better look at the human trapped inside, he confirmed the pilot was still alive. Despite everything.

Unfortunately, the pilot’s internal damage was more severe than anticipated. For one, it was not blunt force trauma. It was parts of the suit’s internal equipment that had bent from stress, and then impaled the pilot near the gut and stomach. The dried blood there told him the pilot had continued operation, likely for an hour or so, instead of attempting to heal himself.

The fresher blood here was caused by glass screens cracking in half, likely exploding outwards into the pilot, cutting shallow gashes just about everywhere. Not fatal, but clearly a rough landing.

The pilot was heavily strapped down with belts all across his chest, legs and shoulders, keeping him highly secured to the cockpit. Those probably saved him multiple times over compared to what he’d fought against.

Fortunately, whatever had chased this human wouldn’t be able to follow behind and discover his grove.

At least, not until the pillar heart shut down for twelve hours, which would happen in six days. He would need to hunt down the aggressor and eliminate them without being seen. Difficult, but not impossible.

He stood up, looked down at his hands and focused. Already most of the skin was regrowing, the fractal of resilience easily healing the damage from prying metal apart. With a better grip on his hilt, he went to work cutting the unconscious pilot free then peeled him out.

Dried blood clung to the back of the seat, compressed, but other than a mild annoyance, it was ultimately cosmetic.

The injury to the stomach was fatal if not treated. His eyes were already showing him possible issues and complications. That the man continued to operate the mobile armor despite the wound only aggravated the injury. Must have been quite resolved to die fighting.

Well. Nothing he couldn’t fix with his surgery equipment. “You are lucky to have crashed through my bedroom rather than my workshop.” He said, cradling the man in his arms as he gently carried him through the broken room and down the stairs.

He already knew he was tall for a human. His self-modifications had been the root cause, leaving him looking gangly at eight and a half feet. This pilot had looked almost tiny in comparison, held in his hands.

So it had been oddly fitting to see a human within the pilot’s seat of his armor for once.

The original templates had been perfectly sized for the average human body, with some range of adaptation. But his body enhancements were far above the standard mean. Which meant he either had to modify the armors to be larger, or modify his own body to shrink down.

Of the two, the latter was far easier.

He was used to tinkering with his body, he knew how it functioned, healed and breathed. The armors were still foreign to him even after five years of working on them. The wrong modification would cause the suit to lose structural integrity in ways he couldn’t quite understand or calculate. He’d gotten far better after the years, but the lessons still humbled him.

Human engineering had been near perfect in the golden era. The original armor’s overall durability was still higher than his current iterations.

If only it hadn’t been so constrained by energy issues. But alas, the schematics he’d found pre-dated the discovery of power cells. Lithium-ion battery cells were simply outclassed in every regard by occult based power cells.

The pilot moaned in his arms, head rolling. Not quite conscious, but hovering somewhere between. Some part of this man was fighting to wake back up.

But within a few minutes, the surgery clean room doors opened and he walked through with the dying human.

Lights flashed open as he slowly laid the0 human on the white table. Robotic arms came to life and began to follow his mental instructions, already carrying suture equipment, sterilized knives and clamps.

It was odd. He could certainly begin working with his own two hands, but all the arms he’d built over time by this bed were more precise and capable. Rather, he felt more comfortable controlling those than he did his own hands.

So he stood by the bed, awkwardly watching the events through redundant eyes. The room’s multiple sets of medical cameras were already doing a better job than those.

His eyes had a spherical volume of 6.5 cubic centimeters, even expensive purchases from the mite forge, there was still an upper limit to what he could fit within. The medical cameras here? One was held right over the human, the entire camera as wide and long as it needed for its functions without any compromise.

So of course observing this surgery with his personal eyes was illogical.

He fiddled with his thumbs to distract himself. Surgery had always been a process where he had to keep his body as still as possible while he worked on himself. Not having to do that at all was… strange. New.

He found himself leaning over the surgery bed instead, just as the robotic arm carrying the scissors started to cut through the blood soaked fabric that clung skintight to the human. A polyester blend of some kind. He held it in his hands, as another medical camera above took photos ran a material composition scan.

Higher quality fabric than what the people of Nadja used. Interesting.

That suggested whatever tribe or city this pilot was from, they had either access to mite forges or had recovered technology capable of generating that kind of blend. And clearly grown well used to it.

The fabric still cut apart easily, peeling off the dying man’s chest like an insect’s molt. His real hand grabbed another discarded section as he continued to pilot the rest of the arms in saving the man’s life. One was already slowly extracting the metal pipe stuck in the pilot’s gut, while the other hands were prepared to begin immediate cauterization and sutures.

But his thumbs and fingers probed around the fabric. And he felt a ridge of some sort. He turned it around, back to face him. A nametag. Sown into the side, where the chest would have been.

Information on the pilot, a good start.

Two names, both written in clearly different languages. Likely being the pilot's name. Was this man in regular connection with multiple human cultures?

Possibly more than one city? Unheard of. How would they have survived any expedition far out enough to discover another tribe?

But then again this human was piloting his exo-suit, or a copy of it. And he had held one of his blades. That already increased this man’s odds of survival dramatically, assuming the pilot was even able to command the suit anywhere near half of his own skills.

But something was going on in the world outside. The nametag may hold clues.

The language model pinpointed the top letters to japanese. A language spoken in the golden era of humanity. Perhaps the mite forges near these human tribes happened to produce items of that kind?

The bottom letters were a more standard roman based alphabetical, one of the more popular human languages of old. Oddly not latin despite all the scriptures embedded all over the armor like graffiti.

This was far more readable to him, since he’d started with that language first.

A short name, all in all. Five simple letters.

Talen.