Remnant - IX

XxX----XxX----XxX

Official Supporters:

Fanatical Fucking Reader, ScrubLord Yoda

Obsessive Reader, the Lizard

Compulsive Reader, The Impossible Muffin

Adeptus Militaris, Wilger

Commissioner, Gib, Espa Cole, Death Daddy

If you want to be on the Supporter list, PM me for details or join our private server for details. Hope you enjoy reading my stories, please leave me a comment to let me know if you did, or where I can improve. Link here, where able to be seen : https://discord.gg/2UZncAm

Second link here, remove ( and ) and it SHOULD work : D(i)scord(.)gg(slash)kfhkfUb

I have a kofi account now, too, under this name for those interested.

Beta(s) :

XxX----XxX----XxX

Requested By : Gib

XxX----XxX----XxX

"A wedding?" The small woman stalking along the beach beside him murmured, "Seriously?"

"Yes. And why not?" He rumbled, clasping his hands behind his head and hammocking his head back to watch the clouds. They were pregnant and gray, as ever in the humid rainy season. But, for now at least, they kept their burden in check and let them enjoy the beach. "Atlas has been quiet, of late-"

"Here." Sienna rebuked him sharply, "Not on Anima, or Sanus. And certainly not on Mantle."

"Mantle aside, we know that isn't true." Ghira countered, casting the woman a side-eye and frowning. "Atlas has withdrawn quite a bit. They're holding ground, but on Sanus and Anima, it's native forces doing most of the fighting. Militias, hunters willing to fight this fight, police, the like. According to reports crossing my desk, at least."

"You're informed…"

"It's just a little bit my job." He countered, "And you're being catty."

"I hate you…"

"No, no, I know what you do to people you hate." She did use a whip, after all. One didn't do that without a bit of sadism in her bones. Or a serious axe to grind, one of the two, and he wasn't about to address either here. Instead, he asked, "So, you'll come to the party?"

"Depends."

"On?"

"When you have it." She snapped sardonically, "I may be in the field. You know how things go out there, right now."

"Fair enough." He shrugged, "I'll let you know when its decided."

"Wonderful…"

"Kali will be cooking her fruit and meat pies for the party." He smirked when her ear quirked towards him - she adored those things. Ghira was far less fond of the little things, they were too sweet for his taste, but Sienna had a hell of a sweet tooth.

Even if she would take out his throat for saying so.

"We'll see." She finally sighed and came to a stop, and forced him to, too. She folded her arms, cocked her head, and asked, "Now, when are we going to get to business, Ghira?"

"What, old friends can't chat for a while?"

"You and I both know there's a war on. So as much as I'd like to be able to just chat and enjoy a party…" She sighed, "No. We can't. Our people need me out there, leading the fight. Where I'm at my best."

"I suppose you aren't wrong…" He sighed and fished his Scroll out. "Just a second, I'll message him."

Almost as soon as he did, he got a message from the titan. 'One moment.'

"You were very cryptic in your letters, you know. And then you ask me out here, all alone…" Sienna murmured as he closed the Scroll and slid it into a pocket. Turning, she paced away from the ocean, to a comfortable enough gnarl of roots protruding from the sand and clay. She sat on it and eyed him, a spark of mischief and something else glinting in her eyes. "Some in my group suggested you may be luring me all the way out here to kill me, you know."

"I didn't tell you to come alone." He pointed out, "And if I wanted to kill you, I'd need backup, Sienna. We both know you're the better fighter."

"You admitted that rather freely…"

"In you many sins, I would confide. But I am not a man, whose sin is pride."

"Oh, save the poetry for Kali." The woman sighed and rolled her eyes, "You know how much I hate poetry. All that sapy, sentimental, artsy non-"

Her ears perked up suddenly and quirked towards the ocean, and Ghira's brows rose. Cautiously, she rose, one hand slipping down to the whip curled up on her thigh. Then she paused and shot him a narrow-eyed and wary look. He saw something dark glint in her look, and a strange hardness to the way her jaw set.

Then, he heard the water break and chuckled, "Ah, there he is…"

"By the Grimm, what is that?"

"Shockwave." He answered simply as the towering purple titan emerged from the water, sea-water sloughing off of his armored skin in great thundering gouts. He was carrying a slab of decking from one of the sunken Atlesian warships under one arm, thick cables and cords thrown up and draped over his shoulder, and raised the other in a stiff, but friendly, wave that Ghira returned. "I was cagey in my letter because, well… We don't know Atlas knows what the weapon that wiped out the fleet they sent down here was. And, well-"

"And you couldn't risk it falling into enemy hands." Sienna cut him off, "I understand completely, Ghira, of course I do. Gods, if Atlas knew..."

"They'd throw every last man, woman and piece of armor at us." Ghira nodded with a deep and weary sigh. Shockwave was impressive, but there was simply no way he could handle that much coming down on the island. "Not to mention those not on Menagerie. If Atlas grew that fearful, and could not take us, those facing expulsion could soon face eradication instead."

"You think they'd go that far?"

"You don't?"

"Of course I do." Sienna countered as they watched the massive machine step onto land further down the beach to deposit his finds. "I'm just surprised you do, too. You're far more…"

"Naive?"

"Hopeful."

"Hmph." He was hopeful, obviously that was true, but he wasn't a fool.

Even if he knew Sienna thought of him as one sometimes, he knew how fear could warp people. What they believed, what they were willing to do, and what they were willing to have done - fear could twist it all. Push them to new heights of horror and depravity. The Great War had shown one side of that, and now their fight was showing another.

Not to mention the Grimm it would prod into a frenzy.

Enemies they might have been, but would never wish the Grimm on anyone in Mistral, Atlas or anywhere else. Then they'd truly be the monsters the kingdoms saw them as…

The familiar tremble of giant, steel feet drew him out of his thoughts and he looked up as the Cybertronian approached and nodded his boxy head in greeting. "Ghira Belladonna. Sienna Khan."

"Oh, and it knows my name…"

"He knows what is of interest to him to know, yes." Shockwave rumbled lowly, in just about as close to a threatening tone as Ghira had heard directed straight at someone since the machine got to Menagerie. "You are one of the preeminent leaders of the Faunus revolution. I dwell on Menagerie. Every iota of my endeavours for the next decade orient around you and a select handful of others. It would be inefficient to enter dealings with you while ignorant of you."

"I suppose so…"

"As you should, if you wish to be correct." Sienna blinked when Shockwave said that and Ghira almost snorted a laugh before he managed to clap a hand over his mouth. The towering machine turned to him when the woman just stared up at him and he asked, "Ghira, given that Khan has arrived, I presume that my supplies have as well?"

"Well." Ghira grinned and crossed his arms, then cocked his head and looked down on the woman beside them, "Have they, Sienna?"

"Of course they have. Why else would I even be here?" The smaller Faunus snapped sharply and turned on a heel, stalking away with the clear agitation of a woman that hated being surprised. Or serving as the butt of a joke, for that matter.

"Come on," Ghira chuckled, "let's see what she got you."

XxX----XxX----XxX

"These are the standard rifles?" He asked once his drones had hauled the half-dozen crates of weaponry up to his workshop and handed him several examples.

"Atlas doesn't really have one, standard rifle." Sienna shrugged, sitting on one of the crates he'd ordered stacked against the back wall of the second floor, which would one day become his first workshop. He rumbled his displeasure, and Sienna argued, "Look, that's the infantry rifle. Most land forces use it, because it's cheap and simple to use. It's the best you're going to get. Alright?"

"Very well…" He sighed, "It will do."

The Atlesian rifle was a simple machine, archaic even, with a long, solid iron barrel as tall from stock to barrel-tip as from the ground to Sienna's hips. The stock was wide and flat-backed, made of the same aluminium as the rest of the weapon's frame. The firing mechanism was a simple hammer-system variant, which sparked off of an iron spike that ignited the Dust in the rounds that were loaded into a box-magazine and inserted into the weapon's top, just in front of the trigger and behind the textured bottom of the barrel, where a soldier was meant to grip. The barrel itself was solid, rifled inside and fitted at the end with a bracket-cap that seemed able to support a bayonet and offered a pair of raised ridges that lined up with another pait at the back, presumably for sighting down.

On a whim, he sent a signal to one of his drones who stalked forward, took up a rifle, and shouldered it mechanically.

The weapon was long, but not unwieldy, counterbalanced well enough by an iron core in the stock. At another signal, it pressed a small button on the side of the weapon which released a spring which then pushed the magazine out the top of the rifle, where the machine extracted it, and then slid it back in. When it was all the way in he heard a quiet click, and the eject-button was pressed out, ready to use again.

"Simple." He rumbled, "Rudimentary."

"Compared to…?"

"Myself." He answered the watching Faunus frankly. Curious, and more than willing to get something out of her if she demanded to observe him, he asked, "Why is the rifle-frame made of aluminium?"

"Weight?"

"Steel would be only marginally heavier." He countered, "And far more sturdy. An aluminium frame, even held up somewhat by the iron barrel and the brackets attaching it, is far too easy to break for proper military application."

"Atlas disagrees."

"Then they are fools." He dismissed, then turned and met her gaze before he added pointedly, "Are you being bested by fools, Sienna Khan?"

"I wasn't aware I was being bested."

"Failing to win is succeeding to lose, Sienna Khan." He rumbled, antennae raising with his point. Her eyes narrowed and he turned back to his work, watching her from the corner of his optic and sighing charitably, "Though I suppose that it is more likely Atlas and their allies' numbers than anything else. And their generally higher technological base."

"Crap rifles in a gun line are better than most of what my people can make."

"A rational conclusion." Even as cheap as these evidently were - he suspected the aluminium frame was to cut costs even further - six soldiers lined up behind decent cover would likely make short work of anything small. "How much additional weight would be considered problematic?"

"The rifles weigh next to nothing now." She shrugged and waved a hand at him, "Go wild with whatever you're planning. Worst case, we have to trim down the weight for the design we go with."

"That is inefficient…"

"Yeah, well, it's the best idea I have." She shrugged, "And besides, there's always waste in development. Isn't there?"

"I suppose."

"And besides, we don't need the world's greatest guns." Sienna shrugged uncaringly, fishing out her whip and toying with it idly, "But anything better than whatever my fighters can steal and slap together with duct-tape is bound to be an improvement.

She wasn't wrong, but such wasteful inefficiencies ran counter to how he traditionally conducted such experiments. This was merely basic design work, after all. Ideally, such basic work would be concluded at a drafting board, and then the design would see at best a single proto-type before being manufactured for use. But then this was not design in the conventional, typical sense or fashion.

This was salvage more than design, and followed altogether different rules.

Carefully, he ordered a pair of his drones to disassemble the weapon under his watchful gaze. They laid its parts out neatly on a large, flat piece of metal taken from the salvage piles and, further, from the Atlesian navy itself. For a long while, he examined the pieces, wondering at how to harden or replace them with more advanced, more powerful components. But eventually, he decided to keep it all rather simple.

He replaced the frame with a light aluminium-steel alloy, bonded by cyber-matter, with the iron counter-weight left mostly intact bar for an adjustment in mass to account for the weight shifted over the frame overall. He similarly alloyed the barrel of the rifle, this time formed out of steel salvaged from the ships composited by and with cyber-matter for enhanced durability and lowered weight. The cut-out sights were serviceable, but he replaced the ones at the end of the barrel with a small ring sight, and those at the front of the stock with a single ridge lined up with the center of the circle.

The internal mechanisms he left mostly unchanged, beyond hardening and lightening them with similar alloying. Dust munitions, while inferior, would still be the most readily supplied after all. And for the common soldier, such would be more than enough. Though he did deign to add a simple magnetic mass accelerator system, integrated into the barrel, which would accelerate the metal-jacketed slugs propelled by the weapon to near sub-sonic speeds, allowing them to crush those unfortunates it struck whose armor it couldn't pierce.

Severe organ trauma could do, in lieu of actual armor piercing, after all.

"Is that it?" Sienna asked as his drones reassembled the freshly modified rifle. Shockwave rumbled an affirmative and she pursed her lips. "It's… Shiny at least?"

"Hmph…" On a whim, he bent over a section cyber-matter left neatly stacked beside the work-pallet and carved it into shape.

One of the repurposed drones took it and turned, slotting the long, thin bayonet onto the rifle. It pressed a little silver button on the blocky base and the blade crackled to life, edge glowing a dull red. Turning stiffly, the drone brought the blade down on the section of armored Atlesian hull.

It cut through easily, as a knife through butter.

Then it turned the weapon and fired a single shot down, into the decking. It did not pierce, it was not quite potent enough for that, but it did leave a dent as wide as his own fingers in the hull, and deep enough for him to rest the tip of his finger inside it as well.

"It is far more efficient of a weapon." He rumbled as he stood, uploading the plans to his drones as he did and leaving them to begin disassembling the weapons for his coming upgrades. Turning to the woman he added, "If you are satisfied, I have more work to do, Sienna Khan. And I do not enjoy an audience."

"Did someone say you got a choice?"

"This is my tower." He rumbled as he turned away, "Stay if you wish, but I do not have organic concerns such as breathable air."

As he set to work, purposefully venting just the barest blast of the noxious fumes from the cyber-matter refining system into the room, he heard Sienna gag and hop off of the crate. As she left, he did his best not to react, for fear his amusement would bleed through his expression. As difficult as he was to read, others had managed it in the past.

He would be a fool not to expect someone to manage it here, too.

XxX----XxX----XxX