Remnant - IV

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Requested By : Gib

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It took approximately twelve point two five point one eight standard minor-cycles, or hours, judging from Ghira's Scroll, for him to exhaust the Dust generator's power supplies. Including the generator's secondary Dust crystals Ghira's guide had brought on his orders. It had only generated enough power to fill up approximately forty percent of his secondary energy reserves, counting what he had, but that would do. Such power could keep him mobile and functioning for an additional giga-cycle, or a decade per Ghira's information. At least, presuming he did not need to over-exert his power capacities.

Inefficient though it certainly was, the generator had done its first duty well enough, and now he reached for it so that it could do its second.

Quickly and quietly, he disassembled the generator and categorized its parts. Most were too primitive even to alter without extensive expenditure making them just as useful as raw materials rather than more refined systems like his Spark required. Regardless, its power resistors were useful once he retrofitted them, and the power distribution systems were at least efficient enough to serve a prosthetic, secondary role, taking the strain off of his primary power relay systems and thus allowing the pre-existing Spark systems to focus on power generation.

With that done, he reached for the waiting survey camera.

The camera itself was large, and needed to be mounted on a heavy aluminium quad-pod. The body of the camera was boxy and made of aluminium as well, containing a heavy long-range imaging system well-suited for topographical surveying. It had a large power unit as well, but one which was not suited to his needs - regardless, the electronic components would be more than useful. The lens itself was large and thick, reinforced with an iron bracket and housed in a pseudo-armor system formed up of layers of aluminium plates.

He integrated the camera systems whole-sale, replacing the damaged viewing units in his own head with the camera's and cannibalizing the rest of his head to restore its form and function.

Finally, photo-receptors activated and he could look - genuinely look - around him at the cave he found himself in. It was wide enough, and open enough, with a narrow, ragged entrance a few of his paces away from where he lay. Using his new systems, he retrieved samples of the rock above him and scanned them.

Data registered easily - the stone was a type of granite laced with minute, most typical metal deposits.

"All systems functioning." He mused quietly, "Acceptable."

"I'm glad you're feeling better, Shockwave." He turned, looking down at the smiling man - Ghira, obviously - for the first time with his own, proper sight. He was large for the various sapiens sub-groups, with bright eyes that reflected Shockwave's gaze back at him and told of the man's night-vision.

"I am." He nodded and went on, "My primary systems are functioning at median eighty percent. An acceptable margin."

"I'm glad." Ghira smiled and jerked a thumb over his shoulder, "We're working on a pulley system to get you out of this cave."

"That is not necessary."

"Uhhh…" Ghira blinked, "Why not? You don't have legs. How are you going to get out?"

"My repairs are not yet complete." He reached up and used his manipulators to rip off a large stalactite, then brought his arm down to show it to him. As Ghira watched, he leached the mineral values out of it and let it crumble to dust. "I will spend the next day consuming the mineral value around me and use them to produce limbs sufficient for movement."

"You can do that…?"

"Indeed." He answered simply, shaking the dust off of his fingers and going on, "They will not be up to par with my standard-form limbs and components, but they will suffice. At least until such a time as I can properly upgrade and replace them."

"What will that take?"

"More advanced, refined materials I can integrate into my form." He answered simply, "Vehicular armor, for example."

"Atlas has that."

"Then I will take from them what I need to restore and improve myself." He asserted simply. Normally, such wonton violence had grown to be beneath him - he would fight if forced, of course, but to seek it out was a foolish waste of time and resources. When Ghira looked surprised, he explained, "You are at war with them, after all."

"You know about all that?"

"Enough to form an opinion, yes." He'd gleaned plenty from journals, movements of supplies and transmissions to gauge the reasoning. Regardless, for absolute clarity, he asked, "Will you tell me why this war is being waged while I repair myself?"

"It'll take a minute…"

"I wager it will take many." Shockwave countered, "I predict it will take twenty one hours, approximately, for my repairs to complete. That should be sufficient time."

"Alright." He sighed and turned, taking one step before explaining, "Let me get my camping chair. I'd rather sit while I tell this story. And I want to let Ironbark know what I'm doing, and what you are, rather than just up and vanish on her."

Shockwave didn't respond, simply watching the Faunus depart while he started the process of absorbing more of the minerals around him. He detested doing so, of course - the side-effects were more than merely damaging - but it could not be escaped for now.

His repairs were imperative.

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It took the better part of the day to finish telling his story and then explaining all of the little details to the… Cybetronian's satisfaction. Once Ghira had been finished, the machine had simply nodded silently and paid him no more mind. With its - his? Ghira hadn't asked - face, Ghira couldn't read its emotions. All it had was a vaguely rectangular box with a sort of bulb in the center, so it didn't seem to emote all that well.

Still, Ghira felt like Shockwave had been…

Unhappy.

"So?" Ironbark asked as he reached her and fell onto one of the large rocks Ghira had dragged over beside the fire she'd built. "How'd all, uh, that go?"

"It… Went?" He sighed, accepting the bowl of potato soup she offered him over the small fire. "It's hard to tell. Shockwave's face doesn't betray much."

"You could say that again…"

"It's hard to tell. Shockwave's face doesn't betray much."

"Ass." She grunted, pitching a rock at his head. Ghira deftly avoided it and took a bite of his soup in one motion while she went on, "We can't stay here for more than a couple days, Ghira. You know that, right?"

"I do, yes." Setting aside the obvious, food and water, there was also the Grimm. "The fact we haven't been noticed yet is-"

"We have, actually." Alex cut him off, patting her new rifle and grinning when Ghira met her gaze. "New kid on the block is a lot quieter than you'd think. I've run on patrol a few times already and seen Nevermore, Gryphons and the like. This bad boy here can clip their wings at longer than it should, and the fall kills them."

"I had no idea…" The wind howled through the peaks above them, but he should have been able to hear a gun-shot. To be so silent… "Impressive. If we got Sienna and her guerillas on Anima, they'd change the game entirely."

"We can't just count on night raids." Ironbark agreed with a nod, "Even if the Humans keep falling for it."

"Even if they do, yes." It was a common joke, among the Faunus, that the Human commanders didn't seem the smallest bit informed about what Faunus could do.

In reality, he suspected that the Humans were perfectly informed - and knew that their numbers meant it largely didn't matter. There were just too few Faunus spread out over too much land, divided amongst all the four Kingdoms. Ironically, as the kingdoms' succeeded in their goal, the Faunus only got stronger and stronger…

It was all so self-destructive.

"It makes me wonder what else he can make." Alex mused quietly, "Small arms like this, power generators, maybe even… Maybe even artillery."

"Hmm…" Ghira was loath to look forward to that - artillery was, bny far, the most barbaric aspect of Atlas' war on his kind. Shells raining down from miles away, devastating all life without discrimination.

He'd seen the shattered bodies of villages ripped asunder by it, both in terms of houses and those that lived in them.

"Anyway, we can't stay past tomorrow." Ironbark brought them back around, either because she was worried about the point or just because she could see how unhappy he was about the turn they'd taken. "So…"

"Shockwave said he should be done by tomorrow afternoon." Paraphrased, at least. Still, he reassured the woman, "We'll be moving tomorrow whether he's done or not if we have to have the horses drag his metal rear."

"That would be a pain…"

"Yeah, well." He sighed and paused to sip from his bowl, enjoying the warmth settling in his stomach. "Here's hoping he can regrow his legs by tomorrow then, I suppose."

"He can…" Alex blinked, "He can do that?"

"Apparently." He chuckled dryly, "Insane, ain't it? Like a damn lizard."

"Except… What, forty feet tall?" She guessed, chuckling under her breath - seemingly at the sheer ludicrousness of it all. Shaking her head, she asked, "Lookin' at his arm, that sounds about right to me. Yeah?"

He could only shrug and tuck into his soup. Who could possibly know?

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Shockwave's preliminary, base-line repairs finished at approximately twelve-hundred point four five point two seven hours the next day. He raised his hand first, rolling the five fingers into a fist and uncurling it a few times to appraise the systems. The arm, like his lower abdomen and his legs, was a mere protoform limb - incapable of transformation and barely armored. It would withstand pitiful small arms, like the weaker of the Human weapons he'd encountered or the simplistic heat-based mass acceleration rifle he had made for Ghira's guide.

They would do, however.

For now.

"Shockwave!" He turned from his dark-grey hand to the cave entrance as Ghira came in. The Faunus hesitated in the door, looking up from his legs to his chest and then along the slim, sleek form of his new arm. Then he chuckled, "You, uh, look like you put on some weight."

"Indeed." Shockwave rumbled noncommittally as he measured the exit to the cave. Quietly, he mused, "The entrance is too small for me to use."

"Ah, yeah." Ghira grimaced and turned to look up at it. "We'll, uh, we'll get Ironbark's new rifle in here. It'll take some time, but it should be able to blast the rock off. Open it up enough for you to squeeze through well enough."

"It would do. Given sufficient time." But that would delay them, and he was beginning to get tired of this cave. It was boring, and small, and he had long since categorized it down to the unremarkable, molecular level. He raised his other, superior arm and felt energon and heat flush through it as it came online, "I have a superior idea. Please, make way."

"Uh, what do you-"

"Approximately forty two meters directly beyond the cave entrance." He clarified, "Inside a cone of approximately thirty one degrees. I will forward details to your Scroll. Leave nothing you care for inside the radius specified."

"U-Uh…" Shockwave raised his cannon and turned it on the entrance, and Ghira finally understood, turning and bolting out of view with a snarled, "Oh, shit."

He waited approximately fifteen standard minutes before pinging the man's Scroll, "Are you clear?"

'Yeah.' He responded a moment later, 'And taking cover behind a ridge. Hurry, though.'

"Why?"

'Alex is feeling tremors in the ground. Quiet, but getting louder.' Came the worrying reply, bringing Shockwave to a sudden pause. 'Has to be a Grimm. And a big one. One we don't know if her gun can kill.'

"If its mass exceeds fifty tons, approximate, then it likely cannot."

'There's a handful of Grimm wandering around out here that big…' Ghira messaged, 'Can you kill it?'

He did not, could not, know without seeing the Grimm in question. But his research had told him what emotion - fear, particularly - did in regards to attracting the Grimm. And so Shockwave ran the rather minute risk of lying, on the off chance that the Grimm had not, so to speak, 'caught their scent', "I can kill it, yes."

Shockwave didn't wait for the Faunus to respond, instead firing his cannon. It was a pulse of fury at one tenth power, but ripped through the air and lit the cave up in a bright violet hue. His particle beam carved through the stone over the cave entrance in a long, slow arc, atomising the stone in a spray of powdered stone. As it fell, he measured once more and ripped another short burst along the top of the entrance once more, ripping apart rock and stone in a spray of both as they atomised, falling less as stones and slabs and more as loose dust.

Satisfied, he finally pulled himself free of the rock he had been mired in. It came away easily, shattering into drained particles in the wake of his emergency repairs, and, crawling on all fours, he dragged himself through the entrance.

Finally, he registered the warmth of the sun and stood, rolling his shoulders and servos popped and whirred and Energon dispersed and evened out throughout his body.

He had accessed his two rescuers' Scrolls numerous times, since their arrival. Used their sound systems to echo-graph limited areas around them, and Ghira's had a camera system as well. That had allowed him a, very limited, view of the mountains surrounding his place of involuntary sequestration. It had been enough, at the time, to feed his curiosity.

Now, though, he could look upon the black peaks with his own optic.

He reached out, surveying and scanning the land - the topographical camera's instruments made the work all the easier, easily adjusting to his needs with minimal tweaks to their systems. There were twenty four separate peaks within his visual range, and more beyond, he knew. All of them were denser than normal stone, even the stone he'd been ensconced in beneath the surface. He turned and fired a single pulse up, into one of the peaks, and lumbered forward as the rock fell to pieces and scattered down the mountain.

Kneeling, he picked up a piece and analyzed it more closely.

It was an interesting alloy of many metals, aluminium and iron chiefly, layered and blasted together with what looked suspiciously near to… Cyber-matter?

It was not, of course, but the compositing and molecular structure leant it a near enough likeness. It would need intense refining, there was scarcely ten percent per ounce. But still, "Interesting."

"Shockwave!" He turned at the shout and stood, dropping the stone as the two Faunus came over the edge of the ridge they'd been behind. He felt the tremors as they ran, leaping over the rough terrain and throwing caution to the wind in their haste.

The Grimm that emerged over the ridge was as tall as Shockwave was, and ape-like, covered in bone white plates like a great ape that had donned a coat of plated mail. It watched the two Faunus run and bellowed, hurling one of the horses they had ridden to save him after them. Ghira saw it coming and leapt to the side, tackling Alex out of the way and allowing the screaming animal to splatter across the ragged rocks on strings of bone and meaty ichor. The woman rolled onto her back and raised the weapon Shockwave had made her, peppering desperate shots into the monster as Ghira rose and dragged her away.

Shockwave and the Grimm leapt at the same time. The latter slammed into the slope and shattered the dry, cragged rocks as it slid down while Shockwave came.

His cannon snapped up as his shadow eclipsed the Faunus and caught the downward blow of the beast's armored fist as it came. Red, furious eyes snapped up to meet his optic and the Grimm roared as its other fist snapped out and caught the side of his head. Shockwave staggered back from the blow to make space and force the Grimm to pursue, and flicked a look down and past the monster to catch the two hominids fleeing towards his cave for shelter.

Ironic…

"So you are the creature so feared." He observed as the monster sized him up. Its face was a mask of bone-armor, scarred by decades of fighting. Unsurprisingly, it didn't respond.

Well, it was at least a good place to gather data, if nothing else.

He ducked the next swing and then caught the uppercut with his proto-form hand. It cracked, weak-form metal giving way just the smallest bit, but it held enough. Then his knee snapped up and caught the Grimm's arm on the outside of its elbow, snapping the offending fist's arm inward with a sickening crunch. The beast bellowed and Shockwave took it by the throat and, dragging it, turned to hurl the beast face first into the stone with a titanic tremor. As it pushed itself up on its one good arm, he brought a foot down on its lower back and shattered its spine.

This time, it only whimpered and he brought his cannon around.

"I am unimpressed." He said simply, unleashing another micro-pulse that annihilated the Grimm's head and shoulders utterly. Turning, he stepped off the smoking creature and called out, "I told you that I could kill it."

Ghira poked his head out of the cave, looked at the monster, and then turned to him, "So, uh, so you did! Uh, good job?"

"Thank you." He nodded and gestured towards distant Menagerie, "Shall we?"

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