The doors were slow to open; it wasn't often that they were actually used. As a matter of fact it had been a good two or three years since they had actually been used. "This is Bot. He's a... well robot, obviously. A little drone, apparently back in the day according to what I recovered of his memory chip, he was used to assist scientists in their labs," she gave an unneeded explanation while she waited.
"I think it's about time you came clean with whatever's here, Letitia."
Her eye twitched a bit. He knew something was in there, and she wasn't sure how he knew... but then again if he was a Knight perhaps that was a thing... She wasn't really sure. She had never dealt with any other Reaper before. She turned around and tilted her head before stepping down from a platform. "Very well then.. Since you already seem to know," she sighed and nodded him toward a door to the side, walking through it with ease. "She's... I almost want to say dead... I know she's NOT but she's been inactive since I found her back when I was 15..."
She flicked on a switched and a lot of lights came on, revealing the very Reaper that she had been hiding for ages. "I found her in the same ruins I found all of the servers and computers," she said, walking over to a console that turned even more lights on. "I think she's an older model. Everything I've ever tried to do to wake it up was in vain. No movement, nothing..."
She seemed fascinated with the thing before them, head tilted and eyes on it like a school girl in love. "I've been working with a lot of Old World coding in the past few years to try and figure out what's wrong but... nothing seems to get through. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. And she doesn't seem dangerous... at least the ghost of her that seems to have made its home in the lab doesn't seem dangerous..." she looked at him, probably thinking he found her insane.
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Valentine nodded at the drone - 'Bot' - and he had to admit, it was mildly endearing. That might explain where he'd seen it - working on one of the XK-series projects. Drones were preferred to human beings for physical labour there, to reduce the psychological damage that some of the things they'd been doing could inflict merely by being in their presence. Still, this one seemed harmless enough - almost endearing, in a way.
At the back of the room, eight Tracers filed in, accompanied by perhaps two dozen men wearing body armour and carrying infantry weapons of various descriptions - Valentine's soldiers. The heavy, bulky forms of the Tracers thudded around the floor, their movements decidedly ungainly and slow. They looked decidedly inhuman, with hulking legs and boxy upper bodies, massive autocannons held like rifles in hands attached to powerful hydraulic arms - more like a bipedal tank than a true humanoid weapon. Nevertheless, their movements were precise and deliberate; their pilots hardened by years of battle, the motions of combat familiar to them.
From the mass of soldiers on the ground, Atlas emerged, smoothing over his civilian clothing underneath a hastily-applied bulletproof vest. He nodded to Valentine as he approached, but then halted in place, and started issuing orders for the various Tracers and soldiers to fan out and secure the area.
Valentine spun as the lights went up, the vast chamber suddenly illuminated. Filling his vision, the massive, reclining figure of the very abomination Letitia had hidden. Humanoid and slim, almost feminine in form, its body all sharp angles, blade-like stability fins and razor-edged claws. It was much slimmer than Abyss Walker, its form almost skeletal, its upper body - where the beast's heart was contained - attached to its lower by what looked to be a simple mechanical spine, granted it a distorted hourglass-esque figure. Its large head had two massive burnt-orange sensors, dull and lifeless from decades of deactivation; from its skull, slender, reed-like antennae unfurled, likely an advanced avionics suite.
Gazing up at it, this one was new, different, a later model than he was familiar with. XK-REAPER had laid the groundwork, but its prototypes had been reverse-engineered all around the world, wholly unaware of what had become of the creators of this technology. The hardware was different; the lack of physical armour plating relative to Abyss Walker struck him as particularly odd. He saw nothing immediately in the way of external weaponry, which frankly, unnerved him more than if there had been.
He heard the swift clattering behind him of soldiers kneeling into firing positions, weapons being racked and loaded, all levelled at the monstrosity before them. It lay on its back, half-sitting, almost slouched - as though it were relaxing, taunting them to attack it, daring them to challenge its authority over this domain. Valentine realised that almost unconsciously, he'd snapped his own weapon up to face it, hilariously ineffectual as it would be.
As he gazed upon the beautiful, terrible monstrosity before him, words came to mind - the motto of the XK-REAPER project, a phrase from an Old World writer who said of things that should never, could never, have existed upon this earth.
That which is not dead can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
He observed Letitia carefully as she gazed upon it with an almost religious reverence - no, not religious, more personal than that. Love. An empathic connection with what stood before them; an obsession, a driving desire to figure out how to awaken it. Fifteen years old - perfect time to imprint, when she'd found it. This thing was taking its toll on her, and she hadn't realised for a second. It was a miracle she hadn't figured out how to run a Contact Experiment yet.
"Definitely not dead," he breathed, stepping closer slowly, cautiously. Around him, shadows flickered, walls seemed to shift closer and then further away, individual steps on a flight of stairs changing position slightly. She hadn't noticed. This thing wasn't dead, that was for certain - and it was warping reality itself. He knew that as a Knight, he was more sensitive, but even then, everyone saw it. Letitia must've been hit hard to not see it - it had chosen its prey, and was trying to lure her in.
That, or it was trying to tell him to stay away.
He turned back from the piece of scaffolding he stood on, gazing out at the Tracers and soldiers before him, their weapons all levelled at the monstrosity. It wouldn't do them much good - they knew that, as well as he did. Killing it was out of the question - if they mishandled it, they might simply unbind the Entity inside it, and god knew what would happen then.
Valentine slowly walked back down the steps, having had a close enough look. As he made his way down the scaffolding - with a little more haste than was dignified - he felt an overwhelming sense of relief, and he stepped back beside Letitia. He realised that he'd unconsciously turned the safety off on his gun - or, at least, he hoped it had been him. He flicked it back on.
"Reapers aren't just hunks of metal," he explained, voice more shaken than he'd like. "They're alive. Inside them is bound - well, we're not quite sure. The reports I've read just call them 'Entities'. They can think, and feel - they're not of this world, nor should they be. We managed to keep them bound into the RELICS system - used them to power the 'body' of the Reaper, that massive mechanical entity you see over there. The problem... well, it's not so much that we lost control..." He exhaled heavily, trying to re-affirm his voice. "Our mistake was thinking that we were ever in control in the first place."
He took a few deep breaths, calming himself. He wasn't normally this panicked. Something was wrong - very wrong. He could feel it. "Anyway, they need a human soul to actuate their power - they can't properly affect the physical world unless they're bound to one of us. That's where the Knights come in - when you neurally interface with a Reaper, you control it, and it controls you. You move the Reaper - use the power of whatever's inside to your will."
He turned, staring back at the abomination, gazing into it.
"And in return, it slowly feeds off your soul, until there's nothing left."
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Letitia knew a lot about the world around her. She had made it her job to know ever since she had been a child; everything was worth learning, even the small things... however she could only learn what there was accurate information that was accessible to someone of her station... information on Reapers was not one of those things. They kept that under lock and key where even her brilliant mind couldn't hack into it. However she had a bit of information that most wouldn't know. As she had said, her grandfather had his secrets.
"Feeds on souls? Is that... their lifesource?" she wondered aloud, wandering closer to her monstrosity.
His words made sense though. He was a Knight, he should know these things after all... and it made things in her life make just a little more sense. "Ever heard of a project called Revolution? It wasn't a well known one, to tell the truth," she saw that all weapons were pointed at the Reaper and she wondered if they would have had any effect on it at all. Then again, she was still certain it couldn't move... She... felt it wasn't able to move yet.
"It was short lived... I think I know why, because it was a very inhumane project... I never understood what it was meant to do until now..." she turned to look at Valentine, the light hitting her just right so her face was in shadow. Staring down at her feet, she explained more. "A brilliant scientist about 25, maybe 30 years ago thought that perhaps... just maybe... it was possible to remove a human soul, if not completely, at least partially. Make them immune to Entities influence... a way to create better Knights, even maybe take further control of Reapers... The man realized he was foolish of course. Every case study ended in complete failure; all of his subjects died save one."
"The man was cruel enough to even experiment on his children... and his oldest son offered up his first born daughter for the experiment... she was really sick at the time. Only a few months old. They assumed she wouldn't survive... this was all for the sake of the greater good in their minds... part of the process worked though," she looked a bit flustered as she wandered over to the Reaper, touching it's leg as if it were an old friend. "They managed to displace part of her soul from her body... not knowing what affect it would have in the long run. They found a way to store it, and she grew up. But fate is cruel to those who try to shun her influence. Both men died, but not before the father could pass on his legacy to the half-souled granddaughter of his. He lived just long enough to see how it affected her. Greater focus, less impressionability, a bit ruthless but still caring enough to want something better for the world around her... intelligence, even a bit of advanced healing... It's actually amazing how much souls help and hinder the body and the mind at the same time..."
She looked down at her broken arm before glancing up at the Reaper. "She calls herself Eden, sometimes in the dark when I can hear her whisper..." she shook her head, sighing at her own crazy talk. "When my grandfather thought I knew enough about Revolution, he showed me what a soul looks like without its human body... I didn't find out until about two years ago, I finally figured out enough Old World code to hack into his hidden files that I found out it was mine."
A girl with half a soul? She knew it sounded preposterous but she had the research and files to prove it. "Before you can separate a soul from its body, it needs to be so broken and damaged that the soul is about to depart in the first place. I wasn't that broken though, they only got half of what they wanted out of it."
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"Feeds on souls? Is that... their lifesource?"
A question he himself had pondered often enough. Even after hundreds of years of their use, the fact remained that mankind understood next to nothing about the nature of that which lay at the heart of the Reapers. "To be quite honest, I almost hope so," he said quietly. "Given the other possible explanations, it's probably the most optimistic."
Then she continued, and everything stopped for him. His mind simply stopped processing information properly. None of what she was saying made sense - no, that wasn't it, it made perfect sense. It's just that it was impossible. None of it could've existed. He wondered if the Reaper was altering his perception of reality.
No, it couldn't alter his thoughts with such precision - Reapers were beings of emotion, not of rationale. What she said - she wasn't lying. It stood to reason, after all - the empathy of a human soul, combined with the detachedness and faintly unnerving nature of that which was soulless.
But... how? Human-PLUS was dead and buried, everything from XK was dead and buried. Phase II had never gotten off the ground - not an inch. Yet it all clicked - soullessness could, hypothetically, increase Reaper pilot duration far beyond the human norm, without the crippling Resurgence problems that plagued the last days of the Cultivator project.
A soul so broken that it's ready to be taken.
That would explain it - why the Reapers seemed to be so selective in who they took when in battle. Why some simply became hollow husks where they stood when one of the monstrosities stalked past, and others felt not a thing. After all, a Reaper at full capacity was something to be truly feared - it strained at the conceptual walls of reality, the pilot of its soul not enough to satiate its abominable hunger. So it fed off those around it. An acceptable sacrifice - that was how everyone justified it. That was how the Knights justified it to themselves.
And, most of all, her theory explained the averted, accepting gaze that every Knight dreaded.
The Valravn. The raven that consumes the heart of a child, to become a Knight.
"None of this is possible," Valentine said, stepping forward to face Letitia, her hand resting gently on the leg of the enormous, almost skeletal Reaper. "None of it. Human-PLUS died with Kyoto, Letitia. All the files - all the technology - that could possibly have allowed such a project to proceed - it's all gone."
But she was telling the truth - he knew it, felt it, the truth gnawing away at him. He wasn't great with people, but - a story so outlandish, she wouldn't dare tell it as fiction. But how? Kyoto, and everything within a thousand miles of it, wasn't even a crater - it was nothing, a broken world, reality shattering and shifting in ways he couldn't even begin to understand, a maelstrom of jagged quantum states where dreams and reality coalesced.
The Cultivators were gone. XK-REAPER was gone. The doctors and their mad experiments were gone. The world he'd known - everything he'd once wanted, everything he'd once been told - had been erased. He was subservient to nobody, not anymore. Yet it all broke, slowly, surely, things that he'd forgotten melding back into themselves. Becoming whole, yet reflecting, distorting light - changing mediums bending psychological wavelengths. Some older, denser - others far too new. Words, phrases, jumped through and disappeared. Phonological memories, just looping again and again.
"And so you abandoned mankind, to destroy it?"
Voices. Still there. History's claws, reaching back at him. Troyard. Or not - perhaps his? Or that of the relenting Abyss. The Abyss that gazed back, eyes forever glued to his. Topical anaesthesia for madness, numbing surfaces.
Names, faces, guns and needles. Shadows that shifted in the night, his back always to a wall, a wall he'd put there because - why? Answers that never came.
Selective-fire hearts, heat warping psychology, Ulysses, Leidenfrost emotions. Things he'd sacrificed, too many things. Knighthood, honour, belief, and then all taken again. "Vade Ultra Mortem."
Skin altogether too cold for life and too electric for death. Resurgence, redoing. Words that meant nothing, silences that fragmented and ricocheted. Things that were meant to be comfortable that neither were nor meant to.
Names. Words, traces. Verbal fire-for-effect. Cultivator - 'one who cultivates'. Cultivate - verb. Grow or maintain (living cells/tissue) in culture. 'Culture' (biology, science of that which died-will die); unnatural environment. Controlled conditions. Controlled consequences. Allows reproduction of results.
He spoke; it wasn't him, had too much conviction, too much bravery and self-righteousness and authority and concern. "You have no idea what you're talking to, do you?" Love, loss, yet both fragmented - too many at the table for the deck to handle, and nobody playing for keeps. A Dark (K)night's march. History, absurd myths.
"Walk away from this. Leave. You don't need to. You don't need to. Enough mistakes have been made for the two of us by now, have they not? Learn. Live. Decide what - or not, history, dictates, choiceless again. Who are you, who do not know your history? Learn. Stepping forward into nothing begets nothing."
Words not meant for anyone. Repeating. Consuming cycle. Relevant. Ravings of a madman, perhaps. Or an oracle.
More, a phrase, a sequence. His, yet not his, flashed through his mind as he stared her up and down - the half-soul girl. Didn't know if he spoke the next out loud, didn't know if he'd said it all out loud either. Past caring.
Gave up our bodies. Our minds.
Our souls.
I don't even remember why.
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Letitia stood there, her hand now off of Eden's leg and her mind buzzing with questions and wondering why her grandfather had never discussed any of this with her... of course she knew the real answer... what monster would she have thought him to be if he had told her about it while still living? The fact that he, the patriarch of the de Argentum family had once experimented on humans and Reapers was a terrifying aspect. What was worse was no one in the family knew aout it but her.
"My grandfather... his research was extensive... he was not the first in line to the de Argentum name, he had two older brothers... so he was allowed to choose his profession, and he chose science. It fascinated him greatly. He was good at it, as am I," Letitia had a feeling he was no longer listening in full, yet she felt the need to clarify more. "I don't know much about Revolution other than what his files show me. Assumedly it was the next phase in the Human-PLUS project, sort of a Project III that was being conducted on the side, long before II was even operational. Do you know much of the de Argentum family? In the family typically every male has at least two or three children; two potential heirs and one as a backup plan. My grandfather and my greatgrandfather were not potential heirs until their brothers died. But our origins are in Japan..."
There were so many mysteries she couldn't solve on her own and that frustrated the woman. She wanted to know it all and she wanted to know it all now.
As he spoke she found herself tilting her head to his words. "Walk away from this. Leave. You don't need to. You don't need to. Enough mistakes have been made for the two of us by now, have they not? Learn. Live. Decide what - or not, history, dictates, choiceless again. Who are you, who do not know your history? Learn. Stepping forward into nothing begets nothing."
"But from nothing everything grows. Once there was nothing, and then there was a world. Organism grew, evolved, changed, and when they die they become nothing again, only to reappear as something later in history," Letitia said softly, something her grandfather would often say. "And a soul is all that saves humans from being nothing, though many give up their souls to physical needs; sex, violence, vanity, money... They lose what was never theirs to give. Some give them to Entities. I give mine to no one, not even myself."
Suddenly she stood ever so slightly straighter and prouder. "I have naught to give. My soul was torn asunder before I was even old enough to realize, my body will deteriorate as my father and my grandfather's did, my mind is already warped by the experiments performed on me long before I formed conscious thought. I am what ought to be dead but still I live and breathe. I know not my purpose, what else am I do to but to let fate control me where it will?"
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Lucidity returned slowly to Valentine, the haze of the past washing away distantly, leaving him altogether a little colder than he'd been before. The safety on his gun was off again - or had he forgotten to enable it in the first place? The last few moments were just a torrent of feelings, thoughts, some his, some not.
He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket, scribbling down a note - couldn't forget this. He needed all the data he could lay his hands on. Resurgence Event. 3:27pm. Duration - 30s?
If he understood this, perhaps he could stop what he felt was coming. Almost inevitably a vain hope - but hope, nevertheless. He turned his attention back to her, forcing himself back into reality, permitting her to finish speaking.
Origins in Japan.
No - the name didn't ring a bell, however much he wanted it to. 'De Argentum'. Before his time, or thereafter? Or had someone escaped - adopted the name as their own, abandoned what they once had, but kept what they once knew? There was little other explanation.
"We're both in the same business, then," he said, deciding now to place his handgun gingerly inside his coat. With that Reaper near them - he had no way of knowing what the consequences of another Resurgence Event could be here, and he didn't trust himself to have a gun in hand at the minute. "We're both hunting for answers, it would seem, more than anything else."
Still not quite the whole truth, he mused. He had answers enough. Just looking for different answers - evidence to deny the hypothesis. Talk about scientific bias, he mused, with a faintly bitter smile.
Confidence re-entered him, and he turned away from her, facing the line of his men, their weapons still ever-so-nervously levelled at the monster at the opposite end of the room, its sheer size dwarfing them a hundred times over. He gestured to them. Stand down and exit. We're done here.
"I've been on this earth for quite some time, Letitia," he called back to her. "'Purpose' is a question for you to answer, nobody else. If you want my best advice-"
It was at that moment that Valentine was quite promptly shot.
Blinding pain flashed past his eyes as he tumbled to the ground, one hand clutching his arm, the world spinning around him. Gunfire and screams slammed out from the open doors at the other end of the chamber, the haphazard echoes of soldiers shouting orders and diving to cover.
Valentine's vision blurred and refocused as he tried to stand, collapsing once before managing to make it to his knees. A quick glance downwards revealed a splatter of blood over his dark coat, but nothing else - agony pulsed through his arm, his heart hammering painfully, but he appeared to be largely uninjured. Crimson seeped through the fingers with which he clutched his arm.
Teeth grit, he forced himself back to his feet, staggering drunkenly before charging, tackling Letitia behind the massive leg of the Reaper. His gun appeared in his hand, and he gave her a stern look - stay down - before ducking around the corner, loosing a few shots at the doorway and assessing the situation.
Through the door, the familiar matte-grey armour of the Aegis Police's 'Special Division' forces flashed through, a squad of infantry charging through the haze of smoke grenades; Valentine loosed a few shots off, but missed his mark, his vision still fuzzy with pain. Valentine's men had assumed cover behind servers and crates; one Tracer was little more than a smoking wreck, and another was missing an arm. The remainder moved out from cover in unison, loosing a hail of 25mm high-explosive rounds from the autocannons in their hands, tearing apart the infantry that had moved through the smoke.
Then one disappeared, reduced to a smoking wreck in an instant - Valentine hadn't even seen what had fired upon it, the whole craft just shattered by some unseen force. Then, in the background, he spotted something - a human shape, nearly twice the height of the Tracers, a high-powered railgun in one hand and the blue-sparking glow of a plasma sword in the other. Behind it, more blue glows indicated that it wasn't alone. With a grunt, Valentine wrenched himself back inside cover, turning to face Letitia.
Sentinels.
"Okay," he forced out through clenched teeth, his clutched arm sending sharp bolts of pain through his body. "We... have a problem."
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Letitia was curious as to what was going on in Valentine's head. She couldn't understand or connect his words to his sudden lucidity, but she knew whatever he had been through must have been something. She had plenty of answers at her hands, she just had yet to decode their true meaning. It wasn't like her grandfather didn't leave everything right there for her to access he just didn't show her how to access it... almost as if it were another rite of passage to be able to figure out how to. If he would have followed family tradition and let one of her cousins take over the family business before she had a chance to be heir, she would have had plenty of time to figure it out... but he had chosen her instead.
Letitia felt the shift in the atmosphere minutes before her new found comrade was shot, and was shocked to see military men walking into her lab so casually. She gave a growl before she was tackled into cover behind one of Eden's large legs. "Fuck!" she cursed angrily, slipping her own pistol out. She felt every rumble of the gun fire and her brain went into automatic mode. There was nothing more important to her than her labs. She glanced around her cover to see the smoking wrecks that were some of their Tracers and one of her servers.
"Bastards," she was about to charge out before taking notice of the one thing she definitely didn't want wreaking havoc on her sanctuary. Just as she heard him about to speak she noticed his arm. "Wonderful. Now we both have a bum arm, my labs are being destroyed and they brought fucking Sentinels down here."
Her mind and her body stilled for a moment as she found something moving in the shadows. She knew exactly what it was; her 'ghost' was not happy at its home being threatened. Neither was she. "We have a lot of problems right now, Mr. Valentine. She," there was emphasis on the word, "is less than pleased at the sudden invasion. And if they get a hold of the supplies stores I'm suddenly VERY useless to you..."
She heard more bangs and clatters as the enemy sent off some very high powered ammunition.
"Mistress, we have guests! They seem to want to destroy us!" the overly cheerful Bot came flitting around to her. She rolled her eyes.
"Protocol 7. You know what to do," she said softly before sending the drone off. It had the ability to cloak itself for short amounts of time, and she needed to make sure it got her main hard drive out of the vicinity of the damage. Her options were few, and she found herself looking up at Eden. "Well, times up," she murmured before standing up, still easily hidden behind the leg. "How do I get into her?"
She had no clue how to do this. She just knew that she actually needed to. There were no other options. A bunch of men and a few tracers were no match for the handful of Sentinels filing into the labs. "No matter what the cost I HAVE to protect this place."
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So, this is your play, then, God. Most auspicious.
The thought concluded, Valentine loosed another barrage of shots downrange as he turned to face Letitia, knowing exactly the implications of her words. Under other circumstances, he'd consider this as mad as it was wrong - to become a Knight was no small undertaking, but he knew well enough that they had no other choice.
Half a dozen Tracers and some infantry were child's play for a squad of Sentinels. Even if they managed to get away, if they lost the lab, they lost their supplies - and with them, their chance of escaping this city. From there, it was only a matter of time until Cocytus was found - if it wasn't compromised already.
"Follow me," Valentine grunted, vision still swimming with pain from the bullet - Christ, had they been using hollow points or something? - and feeling decidedly unpleasant towards the world at large. Still, keeping low, he made his way up the scaffolding, sprinting up the hastily-erected flights of stairs; darkness flickered and lurched, and he loosed a haphazard bullet into it, forcing it to recede. Not so much a physical effect as a show of force - proof that he would not suffer its indignities now. If nothing else, it appeared duly informed of the gravity of the situation by his action.
For a second, he found himself pitying her. Whatever was inside this thing - and however much it claimed to like her - there was no turning back from being a Knight. That which was lost, stayed lost - even as a half-soul, there would be no denying the effects of piloting upon her. He mentally apologised as he made his way up the scaffolding. Necessary Sacrifices - that was the phrase he'd always used, now wasn't it?
Eventually, he reached the back edge of the scaffolding, and ducked back inside the shadow of the craft. A smooth black panel at the back of its head concealed the cockpit - an odd design choice - but he saw no mechanical entrance. This thing was far more modern than Abyss Walker, and likely lacked the mechanical auxiliaries that his own craft possessed. Nevertheless...
The second that Letitia caught up to him, Valentine grabbed her wrist with his good arm, and pressed it against the centre of the back panel with a good deal more force than was due. For a second, there was a pause and a pneumatic hiss, as though the monstrous craft were irritated at the touch, and trying to decide whether to permit them entry.
Then the back of the head slipped open, revealing a cockpit; its surfaces were elegant, smooth, the whole space dark. As Letitia stepped foot inside, dim lights went up, illuminating the spartan space - just a few basic control surfaces (touchscreen, not analogue, Valentine noted) and the neural harness in the centre. He followed her, gesturing for her to step in.
Thankfully, he saw none of the familiar neural injectors that the early-model units possessed - it was all done externally via electrodes, rendering null the need for cybernetic augmentations to pilot effectively. Thank God - they didn't exactly have time to issue Letitia cybernetics on the spot, now did they?
"Hook yourself up to that," Valentine ordered, gesturing to the harness, crowned by a menacing-looking headpiece covered in heavy-duty neural reception equipment. "Take it slow; weighing a few hundred tonnes will feel odd at first. Just focus on walking for the first few seconds. First step is to bring your Shadow Field online - that'll absorb inbound fire. From there, work out weapons systems, and open fire."
He stepped closer, to help her with hooking up. As he worked, he continued, "Stay careful of whatever's in here. It will want to talk to you. Do not let it. However friendly it might seem to want to be..." he sighed, shaking his head for a minute. "Just don't. Not if you want to step out that door again."
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Every part of her knew there was no going back. While she had prepared for this eventuality, she never thought she would be in such dire situations as she had been in today. She thought she'd have more time, put in more research, maybe even have a fucking clue as to what she was doing. Now here she was thrusting her life into the hands of a Reaper that she had only vague contact with. There was no part of her that actually felt ready for this.
Fleeing up the stairs behind him, she found herself worrying about what would happen if she couldn't control Eden. At the same time though, a part of her felt like she was meant to control the monstrosity. She believed in fate. She believed that she was here to do something, and if this was the sacrifice she had to make to not only protect her technology, her legacy, but also the people that were now trying to help protect it... then she would do so.
Letitia gave a small yelp at the force of which he grabbed her arm and pulled her to the entrance. "I've check this spot a hundred times and-" she blinked when it opened, eyes wide with shock. How is it that for the last 7 years she had worked on the Reaper and had never been able to find the entrance or even get a glance on the inside? Had it really been inactive this whole time, or had Eden simply not wanted to cooperate?
She looked at Valentine as they entered, wondering what was going through his head. Was this anything like his Reaper? She didn't have time to question or even really care. Now she needed to focus on the goal at hand- protecting what was rightfully hers. "Well here goes our only real hope," she muttered, letting him help her hook it up. Vaguely she remembered something similar in her past, thought she couldn't recall where or when or why. Everything was so rushed right now.
"Got it, don't talk to the voices in my head," the human part of her tried human, despite the severity of the situation. She took a deep breath as finally everything was locked in place. "If I fuck up and everyone dies, I'm blaming God for this..."
She took a deep breath as everything was locked into place, hoping she would do everything right. She felt prickling in the back of her head before pain shot through her eyes. The pressure of it weighed down on her body and her mind and she tried hard to keep a steady breathing pattern. It wasn't as bad as she was expecting... but whatever it was that lay dormant inside the Reaper was powerful... it was only after a second of struggling did she realize that she was still standing and was able to function properly, even if she did feel heavier than normal.
A small caress on her mind reassured her she was fine, but otherwise she was left alone.
She realized that all the training, all the pressure on being stronger, better, faster than everyone was for this very moment.
With Project Revolution's inception, we aimed to make the best of the best Knights. Half-souled men and women that could withstand the pressure of piloting the Reaper without consuming the soul of said men and women.
A contract, an unreserved access the other half of the fighter's soul up front in order to maintain their life.
Passages from her grandfather's logs filtered through her mind, reminding her that yes, she was meant for this. Whether she liked it or not, she was built to be a Knight. But if a Reaper needed a soul to live, then just half her soul wouldn't sate it for long... Eventually it would wear away at the rest of her soul. They were not in control of these beings... and a half-souled human was a dangerous creature.
With shock she felt the entire world around her shift, shuddering when she realized it was Eden standing up. It took a moment to realize she had willed it so. Her brain was moving in so many different directions; she was no longer sure of herself anymore, of what or who she was, of if she was even capable of this, or what this was leading her to. So many memories and faces surrounding her mind's eye, and all she wanted to do was run.
No running.
She looked up, trying to find the source of the other voice, even though she knew what and who it was. She ignored it and tried taking a step forward, finding that it was quite easy to. Another step. And another. "Okay. I got this. How do I get the Shadow Field up?" she asked aloud, or at least she hoped it was aloud. Her voice belied how shaky and nervous she truly felt.
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The second Letitia was properly strapped-in, Valentine dashed out of the Reaper, by no means wanting to be inside once it started up. Inside was the domain of the Entity, inside which the pilot was an ornery guest; he had no place there, no right to challenge its authority where it dwelled. He dashed out of the monstrosity, and immediately took cover behind a few heavy steel crates on the scaffold behind the craft.
He swiftly grabbed his earpiece, flicking it on, praying that it worked. Gratifyingly, he heard the bleep that indicated functionality - whoever was on the other end had, at the very least, not been eviscerated yet.
"Atlas!" he shouted into the device, sounding a little more panicked than he'd intended. "Status report!"
"Pleasure to finally hear from you, Commander," Atlas' voice crackled over - a tiny bit broken with stress or pain, but otherwise, as chipper and sarcastic as usual. "Care to take over? This whole 'command' business isn't anywhere near as much fun as I'd imagined. Trust me, you can keep your job."
Valentine felt relieved at hearing his second-in-command's familiar voice; Atlas was one of the few living individuals with the knowledge to keep a Reaper in combat condition, and was functionally irreplaceable. Nevertheless, this wasn't exactly the time for pleasantries.
"I need you to patch me into that Reaper's comms system," Valentine ordered. "We're deploying it. The de Argentum girl is our pilot."
He heard Atlas pause for a second in shock, and swore that a sigh of acceptance resounded through the channel. "Copy, Commander. Give me thirty seconds, I'll route it through the facility's mainframe."
Valentine realised that there was a decent chance that he wouldn't see Atlas again after this. Hell, if this didn't work, there was no way any of them were walking out of here in one piece. And thus, he said something that he'd often been sufficiently frustrated as to refuse to say -
"Thank you, Atlas."
"Don't go letting me think you care, now, boss," Atlas said, with a slight laugh. Even through the laugh, though, his voice sounded pained. "But can I ask you something? About the de Argentum girl and all..."
"Of course," Valentine said, popping up over the crate and loosing a few shots downrange; the handgun's low-calibre armour-piercing rounds slipped through the armour of the Aegis infantry, dropping two of them.
"Are we still the good guys?"
Valentine was caught off-guard by the question, if only by its relevancy. How was he supposed to respond to that sort of thing? A question he'd asked himself often enough, but in more recent years, had come to ignore. Hope held no further place in his heart - only belief. The absolute belief in what they were doing. In winning.
"Alright, you're patched in," Atlas' voice crackled over. "Try not to flirt too much."
Valentine was about to respond with a reprimand, but before he could, the tone of the channel changed - the static on the line was gone, replaced only by an absolute, oppressive silence. For a second, he thought he'd lost the signal, before through came Letitia's slightly-frightened-sounding voice, somehow off-colour - the sound of someone speaking through their Reaper.
"-get the Shadow Field up?"
Valentine glanced up, watched the massive beast lurch to its feet, unsteady for a second as it tried to find its footing in the cramped space; cavernous as the ceiling of the laboratory was, the Reaper stood almost as tall. It dwarfed the Sentinels, easily triple their height, stabilising fins flickering and adjusting as it made its way to its full height, imposing its presence over the vast chamber.
"Just focus on it," he said; piloting a Reaper was being equal parts philosopher, mechanic and warrior, a difficult task to explain. Fortunately, as a product of Human-PLUS, she would likely possess some natural intuition from the task. "Go hunting through the neural circuits with your mind; ask for it to protect you, and it should guide you to the correct function. From there, just will it to be enabled."
He hoped that the thing was armed with close-quarters weaponry, or failing that, loaded with armour-piercing rounds. It if was packing high-explosive weaponry, this whole laboratory might come down on top of them. Not that the Reaper wouldn't survive -
Just that he wouldn't.
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