1 A hero is just a man who knows he is free.

He didn't know how he got here. Frankly, he didn't care. When he came to, he found himself in the dead bowels of a small, crashed voidship, his body barely functional and missing the entirety of its left arm. The right arm was a little more intact, but it was still gone up to just below the elbow.

There was almost nothing of use to be found in the wreck; it seemed that everything useful had long been stripped clean. Just some tattered fabric on a few polymer rods for cover from the sun and a few stray ceramic plates scattered around the airlock, though why it was so he had no clue. The ship clearly wasn't designed to use ceramic ablative armor, going by the curves. It didn't look like it was even designed for re-entry in the first place. The medbay was empty, so was the cargo bay, even the containers were gone.

He figured the scavengers would've stripped him for parts too, if the pilot's cabin didn't have relatively good security. Too much effort to crack it open for too little potential reward - either the scavvers didn't understand the value of a 3D printer, or didn't know there was one in the cockpit.

With how beat up his braincase got upon landing, he didn't exactly remember when, where, why, or how his predicament came to be, but at least he knew one thing. He had to find a town and get some stimulants.

A nonexistent chuckle sounded in his head. How fortunate that the crash site of his voidship was within sight of a town. Sure, that didn't mean it was even remotely close, but it was something. It was certainty. And it wasn't as if he could die of dehydration. Overheating, however, was still unpleasant.

So, he did what he thought any sane man would do. He took one of the ceramic plates in his mouth, bringing it to the pilot's cabin. It took him almost half an hour to get it done with half an arm and his tongue, but he got the 3D printer to carve the piece of ceramic into something vaguely resembling a mask. It wasn't pretty, but it fit. It would have to do.

The fabric making up one of the makeshift tents would have to do as far as clothes went. He used his teeth to rip the patchwork sheet in two pieces, then made holes for his head.

It took him a few attempts and mouthfuls of sand to finally get his head through both of them, but when all was said and done, they sat on his shoulders pretty well and covered most of his body.

And so, he began walking.

Left. Right. Left. Right

The sun-bleached, dead, cracked soil seethed with radiant heat, the air shimmering as though possessed by some sort of malevolent spirit hellbent on extracting every last drop of moisture from all those who wish to pass.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The persistent whine of his legs and the occasional gust of wind became the only things to keep him company. He walked on for hours, his sight set stone-still on the town off in the distance at first. Soon enough though, he began looking around the sun-blasted wasteland all around him.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

Desert flats stretching for kilometers on end, with a mountain range off to the north, what seemed to be greenery far, far off to the south, and a whole lot of nothing to the east. The mountains were bisected by a tremendous canyon, one too sheer to have formed naturally. It looked as though they had been cleaved asunder.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The sun had gone down mere hours after he left the crash site. The planet's moons were as numerous as the stars in the night sky, and were only a bit bigger than those distant, cosmic lights. The blasted fields around him were illuminated even in the dead of night, brightly enough that the eyes of a normal man wouldn't struggle to see - let alone those of a creature such as himself.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

By the time he got to the town, the sun had risen high into the sky. It was a typical settler town. Prefabbed buildings. Polymer walls. A bashed-in gate that had yet to be repaired. A pair of massive, tattooed lizardmen clad in little more than… Loose, knee-length shorts. He expected loincloths, but he supposed that civilization held its grip even this far from big cities.

They didn't move from their posts as he approached the gate, though they stepped in to bar his path before he could pass. He could tell they were on edge, but they didn't seem too eager to fight a man who looked like he had barely enough strength to support his own weight.

Gazing up at the pair, he noticed that the tattoos covering their skin were part tattoo, part artificial scar, creating a layer of thickened, brightly colored scales where there would be exposed skin otherwise.

It took a solid eight seconds for his voicebox to boot up, a garbled mess of static bursting out from under his mask before it quickly transitioned into words. He was certain the two giant lizardmen tensed up at that. Probably thought he had gone mad for a moment.

"H̵̨̀̀͡g̢͜͡k̴҉̢͞͡ŕ͡͠͡r͏҉k̸͟͞͏̸-ould you let me in? My voidship appears to have crashed some distance to the east. I only need some stimulants and supplies and I'll be on my way."

For almost half a minute he just stared up at the two titans of scales and muscle, his eyes unmoving, unflinching, unblinking. He could tell they were considering what he said, gauging how threatening he appeared.

Then, they stepped aside.

"Thanks," he said as he walked through the gate.

The town was as he expected. Pre-fabbed buildings, perhaps two or three different shapes. Single-floor ones, two-floor ones, usually some variation of a rectangular cuboid with windows and a slightly customized facade on one side.

It had a single main street running from gate to gate, with stores and businesses running all alongside it, while homes, warehouses, and other structures made up the remainder of the town.

Even the signs above most storefronts were just LED panels in various colors programmed to display something different. A few of the nicer-looking stores even had rapidly rotating bars of LEDs contained in polyglass cases, which produced a sort of faux-hologram effect.

Truly, the spirit of industry and advertising persisted even on the frontier. Not that he was one to complain - thanks to these very signs he had an easy time finding his way to the town bar. On his way there he passed a store that particularly stood out - "Repair and Reclamations" in bright pink. There was a smaller panel just below it with text in garish blue - "Quality Reclaimed Tech at Reclaimed Prices". There was a third sign hanging on the door, a simple rectangular polymer board with "Now also stocking archeotech!" written on its surface in faded letters.

He made a mental note to visit the place, see if he could at least find a functional scrap arm, hoping that whoever ran the store was the kind of person to trade goods for insights.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The bar had a simple sign. Cherry-red rectangular outline, with the word "BAR" in pale blue, blocky letters. It was almost disappointing that the building had completely normal sliding doors, rather than those he had seen in cheesy, low-budget westerns.

He tripped over the precipice after struggling to open the door, as it seemed to slide open of its own volition after he stood in front of it for a few seconds. Either the system that controlled it was particularly sluggish when it came to recognizing people or it was a manual switch, he thought to himself.

A step past the precipice. A glimpse of what the bar looked like on the inside.

A tower of meat and scales, immediately in front of his face.

...He was pretty sure he depleted a considerable portion of his energy reserves trying not to get swatted by that gigantic, savage-looking she-lizard for what felt like minutes. It seemed to shock her, when she finally grabbed at where his left arm would've been, only to pull up his poncho to reveal a distinct lack of any arm at all.

However, it was a quiet voice from the corner of the bar that stopped the onslaught.

"Oi, let 'im go. Can't you see the lad's had enough of a beating from life already?"

A sigh of relief would've escaped his mouth, had he any lungs to breathe with.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The bartender, and, he presumed, the sole proprietor of the establishment, was a surprisingly human-looking lizard. A lizard-man, even. He didn't seem to have visible tattoos, but he had a distinct feeling that they were merely hidden by the lizardman's sleeveless shirt.

"Strongest stims you have, please," he forced out through his voicebox.

He had hoped that the mix would at least not be too toxic, let alone taste remotely good. Hell, he was hoping it would even be properly mixed, given the fact he was asking for handouts.

...Only to be pleasantly surprised when the bartender reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of costly, name-brand stimmix. It was like asking for a shot of flat, piss-tasting energy drink, and receiving a bottle of preserved artisanal coffee.

It didn't seem like the lizardman even wanted anything for it. He slammed the bottle down on the counter as though he was, in fact, giving him liquid garbage. However, he was not one to turn his nose up at good luck. He pressed the bottom of his mask against the edge of the bar, making it ride up halfway his face. He then attempted to get the top of the bottle in his mouth, but it slipped and nearly tipped over. The lizardman looked on with what seemed to be mild amusement in his face.

Another attempt, this time successful. The bottle still had the cap on, but that wouldn't be too much of an issue. It was just a degradable polymer that would break down into various nontoxic chemicals upon exposing the inside of the bottle to common waste-disposal agents.

Still, the lizardman finally broke just as he was about to bite the throat of the bottle and suck out the drink that way. The alien even reached out with a hand as he spoke.

"Hey, I'll open it for yo-"

His hand froze in the middle of the motion, as did the words on the tip of his tongue when he heard a crack and saw the pinkish, opaque liquid inside the bottle slowly start to drain. The armless man before him kicked his head back and emptied the seven-deciliter bottle of what he considered to be horrible swill in four seconds flat.

The bottle dropped onto the counter, the top entirely missing, bitten off. The armless man turned and started walking towards the door, and just as the sluggish sensor registered him and opened, the bottle slowly rolled off the edge, clattering to the floor. He could've sworn he saw the corners of Rika's mouth quirk upwards as the armless man walked out the door, but she quickly drowned any semblance of facial expression in her massive tankard of borderline toxic stim-swill.

Sure, he'd swallowed the top of a polymer bottle. Sure, it didn't go down all that smoothly. But having that sweet, sweet nectar to wash it down was more than he could've hoped for.

It had only been a minute or so since he downed the bottle of stimmix, and he already felt the condition of his body improving. Between the stims and the biogel content, it was the perfect way to kickstart his self-repair subroutines and keep them going for long enough to matter.

Frankly, he was feeling great - being stuck on an assbackwards frontier world and disarmed aside. Hm. Disarmed. Could do as an alias. Disarmed. No, needs work. He disembarked that train of thought as he found himself at the door of the scraptech shop which he intended to visit earlier.

The single main street was seemingly deserted, though he was certain he'd draw a few sideways glances if it wasn't. The building had a much more involved way to enter - what seemed to be the doorbell rack from an apartment block, rigged right next to the door. Instead of different tenants, the different buttons were labeled with… Some sort of symbols he didn't understand. Looked like a runic alphabet. He pressed the top one on a guess. The camera lens of the module emitted a quiet whirr as it focused on him. The speaker emitted a burst of static, what sounded like scrambling and stuff falling over, and the door opened.

Within the shop, he witnessed a scene of purposeful disarray straight from a romanticized, eccentric inventor's workshop. The room was a simple, rectangular floor plan, with a counter splitting the room roughly one third of the way from the back wall. There was a polymer door with a jury-rigged ocular scanner at waist height behind the counter.

He saw bits and pieces of technology strewn all over the place, on the counter, on tables, in boxes piled to the ceiling, on the window parapets, obstructing the view. Everything from indistinguishable pieces of scrap electronics, to what looked like either well preserved or masterfully restored pieces of ancient cybernetic prosthetics and organs.

The nicer pieces were proudly hung up all over the walls. Placed on shelves, some were even in bulky display cases with thick polymer viewports and solid shielding, as though they were some sort of hazmat containment unit. His eyes wandered across the walls, his mind did so through the possibilities of where the proprietor of the store might be, or whether he would be willing to cut a better deal than scraps of info for scrap parts.

"I'm comin', I'm comin', just you wait there!" he heard from the back room. A raspy voice, he'd say it was like that of a heavy smoker, were he to know what one sounded like. He could, however, hear eagerness in the creature's tone.

The backroom door hissed open and then closed, though he didn't see who passed through until a few seconds later - when a diminutive, reptilian biped climbed up onto the counter from the other side. Its eyes went wide at the sight of him, the frog-like horizontal pupils expanding vertically, much like the pupils of a reptile or feline. It reminded him of someone going wide-eyed from a discovery, despite the fact the lizard's actual eyeballs seemed only able to open or close, and nothing in between. How strange.

"Ooh, lookit you! All covered up and masked and mysterious! But I can tell, you's not fully organic. None of the meatheads ever come by my shop, not unless they absolutely NEED a prosthetic. May the archdrakes condemn them, the primitives."

The bitterness in the lizard-man's voice was… Far from subtle. Now that he thought of it, the little alien kind of sounded like the small voice that stopped the giant reptile-woman at the bar from flattening him against the wall. Not quite the same, but similar enough

His voicebox hissed with a bout of static before spitting out the words.

"I need spare parts. Anything, please..."

"I dunno lad, y'look like you're in a good enough state to walk n' talk. Maybe if you'd lemme take a good look at what makes ya tick…"

He lifted what was left of his right arm, leaning back as he did so and exposing the patchwork mess of ancient plating and milky-white synthetic skin, thinly draped over the myriad of components that made up his body. It was in equal parts organic and synthetic, at this point repaired too many times for anyone to fully grasp how it all worked together.

The lizard-man's pupils expanded fully into gaping black circles, and he swore he could see the activation diode of a prospecting-grade deep scanner lens, blinking a staccato of faint blue in the bottomless pit of the xeno's left eye.

He reached up to his eye as though to adjust a monocle, despite there not being one.

"Well I'll be…"

The lizard-man froze mid sentence, staring at the stump of his arm, his gaze moving from it to the side of his torso, the exposed plating and the faint, anemic pink glow of his power conduits. A muffled beeping noise sounded from within the lizard's eye socket. It sounded like a warning, and the alarm evident in his expression only served to confirm it.

"...damned. Armless or not, there's no way you could've lasted long enough to walk all the way here just on batteries. I figured you must've had some way to extract energy from ambient heat or summin' since there ain't a recharge station anywhere nearby, but I didn't even fathom someone could be mad enough to use that as a power source."

"Not unless you're... Show me your face."

"He's smarter than he looks," a thought crossed his mind. He raised the stump of his right arm even higher.

"Right, armless. I uh… Doubt the mask would come off without your input, so I won't even try to pull it off. Most o' the stuff I've got 'round here runs on electric charge, save for…"

He turned his head to look at one of those hybrid display case/containment units on the wall behind the counter, spanning almost half the room. He dug up a small remote from an inner pocket of his jumpsuit, turning a dial. The shielding on the unit receded, exposing fully what was within.

A very, very large gun.

It was a tremendous thing, as long as a grown man is tall. The magazine-like power source unit on the back portion of it glowed with a baleful red light, crackling with red sparks every once in a while. There were small, crimson crystals growing on the inside of the unit around the tremendous weapon's power source. It was a mixture of white and purple, the long barrel crowned with a trinity of pointed, articulated grippers.

The lizard-man's eyes flicked between the gigantic weapon and the stump of his arm. A mixture of fear and excitement became quickly evident to his mannerisms, and the creature stared into Armless' eyes.

"...I need an arm. Not a gun."

"Fine, fine. I'll give ya… That one o'er there. Just let me try an' hook up the big 'un, c'mon."

The lizard hastily used the remote to gesture towards one of the smaller containment/display cases on his wall, this one with a large enough viewport to see into it without necessitating the shielding be retracted. It was a contraption of dark grey synthetic muscle and brass-like metal plates. The shoulder-plate in particular resembled a shielded pauldron, with a stylized lizard-head etched into it. The hand assembly was a solid exoskeleton, the whole assembly a collection of smaller pressure-sensor plates.

It looked like a modern recreation of an antique design, going by the fact it had proper synth-fiber muscles instead of archaic servomotors and hydraulics, but still made use of purely mechanical joints and had visible coolant and lubricant tubes, though skillfully enough concealed that a layman's eye wouldn't pick them out among the mass of metal and polymer.

The lizard noticed him looking at it a little longer than just a glance, and gazed in the same direction.

"Yeah, she's a beaut. But no-one's willin' to have a piece o' blacktech grafted to their hide. 'Cept, of course..."

At this point, the lizard's gaze fully shifted to Armless. He didn't look him in the eye this time, rather staring at the stump of his right arm.

Armless let out a breathless sigh, more a social gesture than anything. "Very well. If you wouldn't mind, what is your name?"

The lizard-man pointed with his remote in turn at both display cases. Each emitted a loud hiss, the bottom plate of either case sliding open. Both prosthetics descended out of their containment cases using some sort of rail system that enabled the display stand they were both held by to move up and down.

So that was how the xeno got those monstrosities in there.

"Vezkig. Just Vez is fine. C'mon then, all my tools are in the back."

Vez jumped off the counter, scuttling into the back room. Armless intended to follow him, but stopped before he could even start walking when he heard a click and a continuous whirr. Immediately afterward, Vez 'wheeled' out a pretty small, flat grav-platform which hovered only about twenty centimeters off the ground. He struggled, and Armless had to help him get the tremendous arm-cannon to sit on the platform, but it had no trouble carrying the weight once the cannon was in place.

After a few minutes of maneuvering it around the workshop, changing elevation and orientation to get the arm-cannon's length to fit through the door, Armless at last followed Vez through that very same door into the back-room of his shop, the lizard's personal workshop.

It was… Bewildering.

The room was a textbook example of ordered chaos. Worktables, robotic arms and mechatendrils hanging from the ceiling, blueprints and diagrams plastered all over the walls to the point of serving as wallpaper. There was a very intentional lack of order to the placement of everything from the outlandish tools to the half-finished pieces of scrap. His eyes wandered across the walls, the diagrams, the dusty speaker in the upper corner of the room...

He was snapped out of the haze by Vez beckoning him towards a plain, metal bed in the corner of the workshop, immaculately clean. The floor below it had not been not so fortunate, the wood soaked with blue blood too deeply to clean off.

Armless sat on the bed and held out his right arm. Vez used the grav-platform to raise both the arm-cannon and himself to a matching height, the whirr now a distinct and very noticeable noise as the platform's graviton manipulator.

The diminutive tinkerer worked fast.

Very, very fast.

The arm-cannon had a surprisingly flexible connection port, capable of changing size and orientation to accommodate attachment at different points. As he lacked some necessary equipment, the arm-cannon had to be lifted to his stump and forced to connect via hardware override, then manually and painstakingly calibrated. Only once the calibration matched up with the end user would it activate and interface with his power grid.

Though he wasn't being completely fair to the lizard. He was doing in a few hours what would take many trained professionals half a day. It wasn't just that he was skilled - he was in a hurry. Armless was certain he heard the hiss of a venting heat-sink at least once while he wasn't looking, and saw the residual off-gassed steam rising from under Vez's jumpsuit.

It went on like this for over three hours. Armless sat there, trying to interface with the arm-cannon, giving Vez verbal feedback, and Vez did his best to not have a nervous breakdown while he worked. He felt the pieces falling into place, the engine of destruction becoming more and more in tune with its intended host. And then, an ear-scraping static blasted through the workshop.

"STAY IN YOUR HOMES AND HAVE A WEAPON HANDY. THE GUARDS HAVE SPOTTED A TRIO OF WARRIOR-CASTE TRUTHSEEKERS APPROACHING THE SOUTHERN GATE. TWO APPEAR TO BE ARMED WITH SLUG-THROWERS."

...And Vez just started working even faster, now muttering to himself.

"Shit, not yet, they weren't supposed to be here until sundown…"

Armless had a feeling this lizard wasn't just a charitable soul.

Seven more minutes passed. Vez was moving faster than a lizard of his size had any right to be, at this point openly letting bursts of steam vent from within and soak his overalls as he pushed his rather well-hidden body modifications to their limits.

Armless felt the connection port tightening around his stump, he felt the slack of the plug-cables tightening and pulling the massive weapon even closer onto his arm. Vez pulled out some mutant abomination of technology from within his toolbox, it resembled a handheld motorized drill with a proprietary battery pack, a PDA jury-rigged onto the back, and a dataport plug on the front instead of a drill bit.

He opened the emergency access panel on the underside of the gun and jammed the abomination into the dataport, muttered a prayer to the archdrakes under his breath, and squeezed the trigger.

An ear-splitting whine sounded from weapon, its connection port locking around his arm like a vice. A baleful, red glow rose from the power source, illuminating seams in its structure, moving towards the connection ports. When the glow reached it and entered its new body, Armless' systems flooded with a level of power output they hadn't experienced in a long, long time.

A high enough power output to bring his true musculature to life, to re-activate subsystems that he'd forgotten his body even had. To awaken vital segments of data storage, restoring some fragmentary knowledge of who he was before all this.

Not enough to form an identity - it was all flashes and fragments of emotion. But it was something. It was enough to grant his shadow of a personality some semblance of substance. It was enough for him to know he was somebody, before all this. To know that he had a life before all this. Not one of grandeur and great wealth, but it was a past.

He still didn't know how he got here. Frankly, he still didn't care.

When he came to, he found himself in a dusty workshop filled with clutter, its walls covered in patchwork wallpaper of diagrams and blueprints.

He had an experimental-looking energy projector for an arm, and there was a small tinkerer looking up at him, grasping some mutant abomination of technology in his hands. Part drill, part PDA, part data-plug. Vez started to speak, just about to say that he didn't have the time to attach the other arm, that Armless had to help his town as he was. That he believed Armless' arrival to their town was a blessing from the archdrakes, that he must have been chosen by fate to be…

"...a hero. A-a stranger from out of town, come to drive off the bandits and save the townspeople."

Armless wanted to laugh, but he couldn't. Not with this little man staring at - looking up to him. He didn't know exactly who he was, but he wasn't any sort of legendary hero. He was no Kuroha, no god-slayer, he wasn't a man with no name.

But then again… He couldn't remember his.

Armless stepped off the slate. His metal feet click-clacked against the wood floor, the synthetic skin not thick enough to hide the bulky endoskeleton. The Gun shifted in response to Armless' subconscious impulses, the connection port displaying its surprisingly impressive level of articulation, rotating around its axis and angling upward like an elbow.

He looked down at Vez. He willed his voicebox to activate, intentionally forcing it to cycle faster than it otherwise would to produce static.

He had nothing here, he was nobody. No ties. No relatives. No debts. No-one who remembered him.

He was free.

"Very well."

Armless turned and walked out of the workshop. He heard the distinct growl-yelling of a warrior-caste lizard-man. It reminded him of the noises Rika made as he dodged her grabs.

He stood in front of the outer door. Though he didn't see him do it, Vez took his remote and pressed the button that opened the front door.

Armless stepped out into the street, the Gun at his side. There they were, the three towering Truthseekers, only some twenty meters down the street. Two of them wore loose shorts similar to the gate guards and bore large, crude firearms in their hands, looking like a replica of an old-world gun built by someone who didn't understand the reasoning behind certain design elements.

The one yelling was a solid half a head taller than his subordinates, and was clad in massive plates of armor. Or rather, he had massive plates of armor physically bolted and sown into his hide. On his head was a strange, wide-brimmed hat, and his left eye was a glowing golden orb. He was yelling at nobody in particular, making statements and promises of how the Truthseekers would bring about some sort of technological golden age and only needed enough workers to excavate a few hundred cubic metres of soil. That the townspeople could either walk into the new golden age as Truthseekers, or be dragged kicking and screaming into it as servants.

The lizard heard the door hiss as it opened, and saw Armless' masked, cloaked visage stepping out of it. A snarl formed on his face, and he turned his full size to face him down, ever so slowly walking towards him with thunderous step after thunderous step.

"What is this? A homunculus fresh out of the metal-womb, dressed up to look like one of the many-limbed ones? What are you, some sort of pretender hero?"

Armless meant to decouple the mask from his face so he could speak with the lizard face to face, but it was stuck. So, he did the next best thing. He opened his mouth. With a horrible noise the ceramic strained, cracked, and shattered, following his mouth in a jagged grin.

For the first time since he came here, his voice actually came out of his mouth, rather than the voicebox itself.

"A̸̡ ͘͟͜͝h̵̵͝҉̴ȩ̸̀͏r̸̢̀̕͜o̷͡ is just a man, who knows he is free."

The massive lizard's snarl faded, turned into an expression of… Pity? Sadness?

"Oh dear. You truly believe you are one of them, don't you. He even built you a replica of the accursed destroyer. I will do my best to make your death painless. I am sorry, motherless child."

Pity turned to anger as the armored giant noticed the diminutive inventor, who was now standing behind Armless, just behind the precipice of the door.

"And you, Vezkig… You will pay. Homunculi or suffering, your choice."

He had enough posturing. Armless stepped forward, brought the Gun to bear on the massive lizard. The inside of its barrel lit up with a baleful purple. A loud whine sounded from within, the light built, and…

He went blind for a split-second. A horrid scream ripped through the air as a burst of unstable, pinkish-white energy burst forth from the Gun, not losing focus immediately after exiting the muzzle, but never having been focused or properly directed in the first place.

It ripped a conical crater into the soil in front of Armless, but the energy dissipated far too quickly to harm anyone. When the dust and the unworldly light cleared, the golden-eyed reptile was aggressively pointing towards Armless. He was yelling something about how Vezkig had committed a heresy of the highest order against all that was holy, that he had tried to falsify divinity by forcing a homunculus to harness the unworldly light of the many-limbed ones.

His two lackeys had taken up firing positions, with their crude slug-throwers trained on Armless' head.

Armless took another step forward.

Brrrt.

A rapid stream of surprisingly weedy gunshots rung out. Where he expected a series of thunderbolts, there came a belt of firecrackers going off in a metal pot. The small, fingertip-sized projectiles took a solid few seconds of continuous fire to even crack his mask. Soon enough, they ran out of ammo.

Once more. The Gun whined. Charge built up inside the barrel, much faster this time. The glow grew, then shrunk. From a floodlight to a laser pointer. And then… Pew. The noise it let off was much less a scream than it was a squeak. A finger-thin beam carved a small indent into the largest plate on the golden-eyed lizard's chest.

That… Was not the intention. In his mind, Armless imagined the Gun focusing a thin beam that would punch through the lizard's heart. It seemed that, after all, his mind still hadn't fully synced with the weapon.

Thankfully, the recommended method of resolving that issue was continued usage.

Both of the gunmen backed off, attempting to get into better firing positions while reloading their weapons, pulling new magazines from the sizeable pockets of their shorts. Golden-eye, however, stood his ground. Grinning. He knew Vez wasn't good enough to build a homunculus even remotely close to anything made by the many-limbed ones, let alone something approaching their kind in its capabilities.

He could've dodged the shot. The charge time for that pathetic replica was all too slow to be useable. But he knew it wouldn't do any real damage. That fireworks display beforehand was barely strong enough to kick up a dust cloud.

The huge lizard standing before Armless lashed out. A forward lunge, teeth and claws flashing, one eye trailing gold. Killing intent in the other.

The Gun briefly whined. A pulse of Void energy entered Armless' system just as the thought of dodging crossed his mind. He jumped to the side, turning his body in mid-air to keep Goldeneye in his field of vision. His subjective perception of time slowed to a crawl, combat calculation subroutines coming online for the first time in decades.

He expected Goldeneye to crash into Vez's shop, but the musclebound giant stopped himself with surprising grace. He used the inside of the crater Armless' first shot created as a jumping off point to make his followup lunge even faster than the first.

Armless willed the Gun to pull back, for it to build up charge inside its circuits without doing anything with it.

Goldeneye lashed out at him as he approached, fully expecting the Gun to fire another weak shot.

Instead, it - and the arm it was attached to - lunged forward.

The three stakes at its muzzle slammed forward with a resounding thunk. They were to hit Goldeneye in the left shoulder, but as the draconian attempted to strike, they were met with the underside of his armored forearm.

It would've been an insult to armorcraft to call what it was encased in a gauntlet - a patchwork of roughly bent metal plates, bolted into scales and hide. The upper and lower right stake successfully penetrated into thick, leathery hide, while the bottom left one met solid metal and wedged barely halfway into a plate of armor, retracting before it could get stuck.

Armless forced the gun to dump all its remaining energy into his power grid and forcefully straightened his left leg, embedding its foot into the soil. It ripped a track in the ground. Immediately afterwards he turned at the waist, using his leg as an anchor. A small cloud of steam vented out of his back as he smashed a quarter-ton of lizard into the ground.

Due to the sheer force of impact, all three stakes were driven fully into his arm, blue blood gushing out around them. He grabbed at the Gun with his free hand, but before he could get a good grip, the stakes retracted. Thunk. Squelch. A geyser of blue began spraying from one of the holes - a major blood vessel severed.

The masked one ripped his contorted leg free of the ground. The Gun's power source glowed just a little brighter as the combination of muscle alignment and self-repair subroutines forced the limb back into a vaguely correct shape. His opponent bit off the claw on his left index finger, then plugged the most severe wound on his arm - though he stretched the hole wider, the difference in size did mean that he effectively stopped the bleeding.

And so, he got up. His gaze was entirely focused on the back of the abomination that so arrogantly dared to harm him. It seemed to be frozen in place, standing still.

A piece of ceramic fell to the ground. Another. And another. The homunculus turned its head, then its entire body. A solid third of what was under its mask was visible, its left eye - emotionless circle that it was - glaring at him from within a gaping, empty hole.

The circle became a pinprick and the homunculus broke into a sprint, cursed light shining from within that fake it had for an arm.

Goldeneye had an exceptional blessing - where others of the warrior caste could bend the world to make themselves stronger or faster, he saw all as it was. And that light, it was no fake. Homunculus or not, somehow, this thing harnessed the power of the many-limbed ones. Even if it couldn't sunder mountains and shape the land as their god-machines did.

With a roar and a one-handed lunge, Goldeneye met the masked fake on his own terms. He met the replica with his own grip, grabbing its muzzle. From this position, even if the three stakes fired again, they would only go between his fingers - and they did. Only… Goldeneye noticed that what he took for cracks were in fact seams, and the stakes had joints.

Joints that opened up, and stakes became metal fingers. Metal fingers with the strength to lock around his hand and dig into flesh, to find seams in his armor and exploit them. And so…

He pulled his fingers out of the wound and let his left arm go. Muscles constricted and blood flow was cut off. His left arm came off from the elbow down. Where some could shed tails, his clan could shed entire limbs. A limb can't bleed if it's been shed. A dishonorable tactic to be sure, but it saved his life many times.

He knew this would give him enough of a window to strike the pretender down. And, in a way, it did.

His right fist met the mask, shattered it with the force of a vengeful demigod. The sheer force would've caused Armless to bend over backwards, were it not for the fact he anticipated the blow and allowed it to land, subtly moving his head back so the strike only hit his mask.

Another piece of ceramic fell to the ground. Another, and another. Piece by piece, his mask fell away, and piece by piece, Goldeneye's expression of righteous anger turned to disbelief. The Gun's stake-grippers let go of his arm.

No skin. No face. A pair of piercing, pink dots, set in gaping holes. A gleaming, metal skull, with a mismatched partial faceplate that looked like… Discolored, grey bone.

This wasn't a homunculus, and Vezkig didn't build a single piece of it.

Goldeneye felt the cursed destroyer's muzzle slam into his stomach. He heard the whine, the three stake-grippers digging into the seams of his armor, into his skin.

He wanted to lash out at the creature before him, but… How could he? The Truthseekers sought out the legacy of those that chained the cursed light to their will, the many-limbed ones. His own life wasn't worth even a tenth of what one of theirs was. He'd already brought dishonor on himself by so foolishly striking against this one.

The skeleton-faced being which he, in his disdain for Vezkig, mistook for a mere homunculus, surged with unworldly power. He could feel the cursed light snuff out his eye. In his moment of impending death, Goldeneye became One-eye.

One-eye heard a whining noise building from within the Gun. It took all the will he had to choke out the words, despite the fact he was practically unharmed. It was that accursed light, it stripped him of his strength, of his second sight, burned it away and salted the wound.

"Wgh… Why defend them? They would not stand for themselves, n-ngho matter what we did, and so we lef to see- seekgh the truth. Thgey use your kind as bogeymen to scare children with, speak of you as though you were inconceivable horrors from beyond the veil of sanity. They will never truly see you as a hero. So why?"

Armless hung his head, the whine dying down for but a second as he thought. One-eye's weight pushed his feet into the soil, yet his posture showed no strain. He raised his gaze to meet One-eye's. His mouth opened, and he spoke.

"A hero is just a man who knows he is free."

The gun charged, focused, crackled with an immense tension and pressure building up within its firing chamber. At that moment, whatever limited intelligence the weapon had became fully synchronized with its wielder's will.

A pillar of pinkish-purple light erupted into the heavens. A deafening scream could be heard for kilometers on end, carried on the wind. Armless allowed One-eye to fall to the ground, and turned his back on him. With slow, deliberate steps, he walked towards Vezkig's shop, ready to have his new left arm mounted. And Vezkig, well Vezkig was more than ready to provide. Word spread through town quickly, and though One-eye wasn't lying, the story that spread wasn't hushed whispers. It wasn't a reverent legend either, but… Armless wouldn't need to worry about getting into bar fights anymore.

One-eye's unconscious body, missing an arm and with a gaping hole in its chest, was dragged out of town and left to the elements. His bodyguards didn't need to be made to leave - they ran away the moment Armless' mask fell off.

The next day, the town guards went to the spot where they had left the body to check on it, but it was gone. All that was left was a distinct lack of blood to stain the soil, and a word clumsily scraped into it.

"FREE"