Week 1 - Migrant

This day just couldn't get any better, could it? The meals ran out, and while I wasn't particularly perturbed by the idea of having nothing to eat, Sunkiss was a different story. I was capable of getting everything that I needed from the surroundings, but her? She was just a dog with an archotech heart.

That doesn't get rid of the need for any of the food subgroups.

(Damn it all!)

My screams were worthless right now. I can't find anything that's easy for her to digest. Not even a fucking snowhare. I'm not terribly surprised. This place seems to be almost impossible to live in, let alone thrive in.

I continued on. Screaming out loud was just a waste of energy for the soul. I needed to get something good or else we're never going to be able to get out of this place alive.

I looked at all of my mechanoids, and hummed softly another little tune from my past. I couldn't recall all of the notes, but I tried as hard as I could to recall it.

My memories sucked me in, while I carried my dog and continued walking.

How many years was it since little Bretta was an countess like her daddy? Thirty? Eighty? The biosculptor pods didn't help to keep my memory perfect, even after all of these years.

She always clung to me, Samantha and Lady, always asking about what anything was. Though I won't deny that there were some annoyingly major complications for having her being taught by Zebo.

That crack addicted bastard was a melee fighter, but goddamn was he one of the worst ones I've ever seen. Needless to say, I respected his skill, but I didn't respect the way that he kept them up.

At the very, she never followed along into the drug abuse aspect. She kept on pestering me for a zeushammer, however. I stopped in my tracks as I listened into the air.

The howls of the wind, the frost threatening to gnaw at anything exposed. Those were some of the more prominent sounds that I heard, but with the help of the archotech ears that I was granted, there was something better there.

The sounds of crackling fires.

(Heh. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! FINALLY!)

I couldn't help but feel complete. A chance at survival.

I walked faster, letting my legs take me all the way over to the sound of fire, hearing the hustle and bustle even more, when I started to slow myself down.

The fire was getting louder, for sure. But it was getting far too loud. Louder than what some basic braziers would have been making, even of there were hundreds of them in a single area.

{No. No no no no no no no no no! This can't just be happening now? Please for the love of god, let there be food at the very least!}

I walked with Sunkiss in my arms, seeing what was surrounding me. It was an outpost, of sorts. Only that everything looked more, well, peculiar. The gates and walls were all made of ice.

The braziers that you'd expected from the sides to help see any visitors burned a bright blue, almost like timbershroom braziers.

And the oddest part of it, was the design of the houses. After the fall of the Sophian Empire, which was the Broken Empire, there were still some different sorts of building styles that retained, even after their origins faded away from history.

This looked to be Eastern. I don't understand why there was a distinction about whether or not something was Eastern, but this was of Eastern style.

That meant that it was likely for the people who made this place to be Eastern as well. The moment I entered the outpost, I could feel it.

There were enemies nearby.

I immediately had all of my mechs drafted up for battle, and slowly began taking stock of the area. Rambo was on vanguard as he was being supported by my scyther.

All of the long range mechanoids were either in front of me, or behind me. And Beelzebub was in the far back, ready to fire off the hellsphere cannon at any single moment that I needed them to.

I couldn't really help but notice that this ice, it seemed odd. It wasn't melted in place, nor was it built block my block. The ice was different. The method eluded me, up until heard something.

A scream. A sort of scream that almost any rimworlder knew. The sort of thing that they taught you when you were still la kid. The sort of scream you pray that you'll never have the misfortune of ever hearing.

That scream, was the scream of a Wraith. A fucking VOID Wraith. I had Beelzebub move up closer, ensuring that their cannon was immediately primed for fighting.

I gripped my charge rifle as best as I could, knowing that it would take a genuine miracle to just kill that son of a bitch while I was so underprepared for it.

I took a deep, clean breath, and readied myself for whatever rate of damage that it was possibly at.

I began triangulating a possible area that the abomination was at, and started to rotate over there, getting into any buildings that were big enough for me to have my mechs take a position in.

There was no doubt about it. There weren't any bodies left over, so I would have thought it was something else. But this wasn't right. If it was a Wraith, doesn't that mean that there would still be bodies?

Was it the right VOID abomination that I was thinking about? Or was it something else? Was I thinking of a different sort of creature?

I bit my lip, and tried to calm myself down.

{In the end, it's from VOID. It's resistant to so many types of damage, and fire wouldn't be as efficacious to these bastards since we're in a tundra.

Water is easy to get around here. My few chances include giving it a case of vertigo pulse, or make it catatonic enough that I could just kill it by getting rid of the vitals.

Wait no! It's VOID! Vitals don't mean anything to this thing. Shit. Death by a thousand cuts doesn't mean anything either if I can't even get through its hide.}

The smell was getting more and more rotten as the sounds got even louder. But something was different from this time around. There was an odd feeling around in air.

Feeling...feeling.....wait a minute. No, it makes the most sense.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and felt the true waves all around me. And once I felt it all, I knew what was going on. There was psychic activity in the area. And not only that, there was a psycaster that was active in the area.

Some of the most common sites to find psycasters were normally consisting of ruins, empirical outposts, and in some of the scarier cases, vaults.

I could almost smell the cryomancer that's been operating in the area. They were fucking stupid, that's as much as I could tell. There were far too many other possible ways to kill a VOID creature, hypothermia was not one of them.

Hell, not even absolute zero keeps those shits down. Heat works relatively fine, but if you find a black variant, it's worthless. You just need to harm them enough for them to be downed, and then you finish them off.

That's how it almost always runs. This cryomancer was going to die. {And I'm just here, waiting for them to do so.}

Do I really want to just leave this person in a terrible state against a VOID creature?

I bit my lip beneath my helmet, while I readied some of my casts. I really do hope that vertigo pulse could something against this little shit. That, and stun.

I carefully popped my head out as I saw them. A Wraith locked in a battle with three women, all of them with white hair, and severely bleeding out in the battlefield.

One of them lost an arm, another lost a leg, and the final, who looked to be trying to save the two of them, had already lost an eye.

I immediately casted vertigo pulse on the heavily damaged Wraith as I walked with Beelzebub. I readied myself to blast out a cast of Stun, and even Burden if needed.

Beelzebub readied the cannon to fry that little bastard. And all of my other mechs were readying their own attacks against the Wraith.

The damn thing started to vomit, while I grit my teeth at the neural heat that's being forced onto my body. I bit my tongue to help the heat dissipate, and readied Stun.

The three other psycasters looked at me in shock, and realized that I was trying to give them a fighting chance. They readied their own psycasts, and pulled out fucking bows to get rid of the thing.

(USE SOMETHING THAT CAN PIERCE IT'S SKIN DAMMIT! THE BLOODY THING CAN SHRUG MOST CUTS!)

They didn't even listen to me as the thing shrugged the arrows off, vomiting so often that it nearly couldn't move. The thing was stuck in one spot bleeding and vomiting, looking at me with dead eyes.

And then, right as I needed it, Beelzebub fired. The payload of superheated material washed over the Wraith, making it screech out in pain from the severe burns.

And the aftermath showed the efficacy of having a diabolus against these abominations. Normally, the best case scenario would be having a Goliath, or five, a couple dozen lancers and militors to keep the attention of the thing.

Not only that, it would also require you to come fully equipped with armor-piercing ammunition, and with a full colony. Horrible, but the diabolus was an ingenious mech that helped with getting rid of the bastard.

The Wraith was more or less cooked, it's face mostly gone, the left arm and left leg were vaporized from the cannon. But it still tried to cling to life, and beneath all of the cauterization of it's body, I could see the rippling effect of it's virus slowly fixing it.

I ordered Beelzebub to ready itself for another battle, but then the three stooges proceeded to walk closer to me.

(Move out of the bleeding way!!! It's going to get back up, one more hit'll keep it out of commission.)

(*#947&6':219294|}¥÷™¢§`√✓??)

Their voices weren't getting picked up by the translation system of the helmet. That's not a good sign. Normally, it's would be capable of splicing together a coherent from its library of languages that it's heard before.

This wasn't in the repository of languages. By the Pact, where the actual hell even am I?

I let Beelzebub fire again, as the three women looked shocked, as I walked past them, and looked at the attack on the Wraith.

Crispy. Good.

I had all of my other mechanoids come over and aim at every possible vital organ, and consistently fire over and over again. Once the systems checked that there weren't any signs of life left over, I took a nice deep breath and turned around, seeing the three looking angry at me.

{Okay, these girls need to chill out. They were nearly killed by a VOID creature, and yet they couldn't seem to understand that they aren't going to come out of that alive.}

I glanced at the one that lost their arm, as they approached me for something. I called over Captain Rex, my centipede blaster, and pulled off what little medicine I had left over and handed the box to her.

I pointed at the box, then at her stump, her friend's stump, and their other friend's eye. I walked back over to the VOID creature and sighed at the sight.

{Rest in pieces, poor guy. You'll make a damn good meal. And since this is a tundra, it'll be easier to get everything nice and chilled for enough packaged survival meals.}

Readying myself to grab the corpse and butcher it, I hoisted its arm on my shoulder, until I heard something clattering and saw that they dropped the medical supplies.

{Oh god, do they even know how to dress their own wounds?}

I groaned and walked back over, grabbed what fell down to the floor and prepared to try and treat them. The one without a leg then fell over, as I immediately rushed over to her, sliding my knees on the ground as I grabbed whatever was necessary.

(Antiseptic applied, now I need to clean. Okay, stitches, uhuh. Okay okay! I know it hurts, bear with it for a while!)

I tried to keep her calm, but she kept trying to push me back. What the hell was she doing? Does she have luciferium in her veins that can allow her to regrow her limbs?

I looked confused as the one that lost her eye tapped my shoulder and gave me a look that I didn't comprehend. I didn't really know how to describe it, and it showed that she was trying to stop me from closing up her friend's wound.

The girl in front of me then tried to get to a sitting position, and I took care to help her up. I wasn't a Speaker for the Pact, I was a Leader.

That's why made this more difficult. They wouldn't be able to fight against any infections if I don't clean them up more at the very least.

The next thing that she did made me even more confused. She started channeling psychic energy, and I noticed that she was also a cryomancer. Were they all the same? Why were they all trying to be the same type of psycaster.

It's odd, but not the worst thing that I've seen. I took a deep breath and watched her do something almost unspeakable. She froze her stump, and then proceeded to continue melding her flesh with ice made from psychic effects.

{That's not a good thing. Wha-}

I turned around and saw that they were already sighing, relief in their eyes as I realized something.

(Is this your ideoligion?)

They heard me again, but they still couldn't understand me. This is gonna be a rather large pain to have to handle.