New Era’s Mould 4 – Mind and Machine [Scarlett POV]

Scarlett adjusted the code as the machine closed around her. Everything went black. Machines did not need light, only diagnostic programs. Hatches in the walls opened loudly, allowing clamps on robotic tendrils to find proper latching points. Metal closed around her limbs, pulling her into the code-confirming position.

The darkness inside was interrupted for a brief second by the green and red flashes of lasers painting a grid over her. Main routines identified her suit as an obstacle. Wishing to conserve as much of herself as possible, Scarlett narrowed the scope of the operation to her right arm. Low-powered lasers seared the cloth at strategic points. Support claws tore the clothes off the limb.

Then, the blades came out.

High-pitched vibrations filled the small chamber. Scarlett stared blankly ahead. Her eyelids twitched in response to the pain only after the blade had cut through flesh that she had pulled her mana from. Her entire sense of balance shifted. The right arm she had possessed a moment ago was rapidly drawn into the internal furnace to be reduced to ashes alongside the Lorylim infestation within it.

Cold metal pressed against where her shoulder used to be. An altogether more aggressive sound filled the room when a multi-purpose metal drill integrated a bionic socket into her flesh. Screws were twisted into bones. Synthetic sinews connected to what remained of their organic counterparts.

Scarlett adjusted the flow of pumps into the oil tanks of the furnace, spilling useless machine lubricant somewhere else in the building. Alchemical healing compounds were spread on the gaps between her and the machine instead, accelerating the process. The bionic implant reacted as it was designed to do. Artifice flared, stimulating surrounding nerve tissue.

Gritting her teeth, Scarlet fought through the pain as her entire nervous system adjusted to the sensation of a new addition to it. She could feel her arm again, despite it not existing. The phantom limb was more real than the usual mirage of the brain. The Combi-Assembler measured the flow of electricity and mana into the implant. The socket had been successfully integrated.

Then came the truly painful part.

Mercy was no concept to a machine. Scarlett would not have had it any other way. It did exactly what it was supposed to when it was supposed to. The artificial limb was attached in one robotic motion.

The firing of the nerves before was the simple test, the diagnostic of the body to see that the communication point operated. When the artificial limb attached, it did so with all of the phantom sensations becoming real. All of its own systems ran through. The arm felt too hot, too cold, as if it was bursting and as if it was constricting. It was every kind of pleasant and unpleasant sensation a limb could experience condensed into one.

One pain was joined by another. Scalpers carved into the sides of her face, taking the second ear off and cleaning the first site off. The bone drills returned, completely deafening her as the insufficient eardrums became a biological support system to the mechanical solution that was integrated into her skull.

Scarlett’s pained growl turned to a gargle. Saliva mixed with the uncontrolled exhale. She refused to scream. She refused to let the pain make her rely on anything but her own willpower. After a few terrible seconds, the pain subsided. The clamps around her released. The access gate opened with a soft hiss.

Indulging the curiosity of her own eyes, Scarlett held the new limb up. It was a replacement part for the current AM version. Its outer plates were of a heavy Elementium alloy, the gold colour turned almost brass-like by an increased fire element presence. The claws, angular pieces of a elongated, triangular shape, were truly red to withstand the heat.

Scarlett ran her own diagnostics, rolling each individual finger first in human ways, then on the multi-directional joints integrated into them. She walked even as she verified the reliable electric flow. Her new ears tuned through frequency ranges. Radio tunes, phone calls, satellite signals, routers, she tuned through all of it in a second, digesting the intel with a mind that had long outpaced the body.

‘As little as I must,’ Scarlett told herself. She knew that she needed the limitation. Without it, she would have been too tempted to end up like Malady: just a brain and a pair of ovaries in a metal chassis.

Sounds and remaining camera data reached her. Sensory data flowed through the pointy skull implants that had replaced her ears. It was all clearer than ever before, allowing her erudite mind to make calculations in a split second.

Delicia was launched through the wall to her right. The redhead let the alchemist fly by. Her replaced right arm snapped forwards only when the Metracana charged after his target. The metal limb moved so much faster than the rest of her body, it was staggering. Runes carved into the surface lit up as Scarlett pumped her magic through it.

If Malady could use technomancy to increase the power of artificial limbs, then so could she.

Scarlett grabbed the Metracana, whether it was Xerxes or Kerelex she really did not give a fuck about, by the leg as he flew past. Enchantments within the limb prevented her entire body from getting dragged along, stopping the momentum of the monster. The circular joint that had replaced her shoulder allowed her to slam the creature on the ground, drag him over and then launch him at the massive window behind her work desk.

The Metracana broke through the glass, then went into freefall. “That ought to neutralize him for a minute or two. Delicia, get to work.” Scarlett’s eyes snapped over to Hailey, who entered the room in that instant. “Good timing.”

“Jesus Christ, Rayd!” Hailey’s stare could be felt through her helmet, directed at Scarlett’s new implant. “You did not have to-“

“Do not waste my time with talk,” Scarlett interrupted. “Get to fucking work. I will hold them back. My schematics are displayed on station 3.”

“Hol’ on, ya can’t just-“

Scarlett grabbed Hailey by the neck and lifted her up. The moment was shocking to the country gal and Delicia, something that the Bloodsoaked Technomancer had no patience for. “DO WHAT I TELL YOU OR ALL THREE OF US ARE LEAVING THIS BUILDING AS SHAMBLING MONSTROSITIES!” she screamed, then threw Hailey in the direction of the alchemist. “Get to fucking work! Make me a weapon.”

Scarlett’s sensors picked up on Thresta before she could sneak past. The supportive motion of her body felt woefully inadequate, even as the backflow of strengthening runes inside the artificial limb increased her pitiful physical capability. Surprise let her deliver the strike to the invisible foe anyhow.

Sharp points opened the skin, allowing the rest of the claws to sink in. Scarlett capitalized on the surprise, flinging Thresta back the way she came. Prolonged engagements were against her interest. She had neither the speed nor a reason to give up her position.

The mechanical arm bent at an angle impossible for a biological equivalent. A mass of Lorylim matter hit the palm, denying the hit to her stomach. The other male Metracana had arrived back on field. He closed the distance, while the metal claws heated up, searing the mass out of existence.

She put the useful arm forwards. Neural implants fired up, lending computing power to her optic nerves. The world slowed. The blade of the Hatred Metracana came down. ‘The superiority of the human mind – flexibility.’

Scarlett was not a fighter, but she had fought. She had fought over and over again. Teachers that her parents sent over, then teachers she hired herself, then the other women in sparring matches and endlessly she had run simulation after simulation for John and for herself. Tens of thousands of hours of simultaneous learning.

To apply it through a robotic extension of herself was calculation and willpower. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The back of her hand hit the side of the curved sword. Edge alignment was pushed off its course. Skidding along the length of the vambrace plate, the sword-

Suddenly stopped. The Metracana’s own combat experience had prevented him from overcommitting on the swing. He turned his torso, bringing his right upwards. Claws buried into her leg, dragging straight through one thigh, then ruining the other.

Scarlett had her own surprise in store. Her other hand, seemingly harmless, managed to secure a grip. The liquid covering the surface of the corrupted Metracana reacted to the touch with a thousand little bites, like maggots chomping away rotting fruit. The sensation stopped when she conjured her power and sent as many volts as she could muster into her enemy. That her specialization was mechanisms changed nothing about the fact that she was still an electricity mage. At her level, she could conjure a devastating current, skin-to-skin.

A creature with a metal skeleton would not have suffered much under regular circumstances. A creature with a metal skeleton engulfed in semi-liquid biological matter was a different topic entirely. The volts rushed towards the ground, spreading out through rancid tissues on the way down. The Metracana went into a full seizure.

Rapid calculations culminated in a simple gambit. Internal mechanisms in the floor were pulled back, turning structural integrity into a joke. A shove, a swing through the hollow module, then a pull to tilt its entirety, that was all it took for the footing of not one but two Metracanas to be removed. Thresta and her male kin fell not just down to the next floor, but several stories worth of holes that earlier fights and strategic detonations of energy relays had created.

Scarlett barely managed to limp a few steps away from the hole, before the two Metracanas leapt up again. Her legs refused to even try to bend properly, the ruined muscles in her thighs making her already lacking movements more difficult. Her left palm was a writhing mess of infection, having clung through her past the electric discharge.

Thresta and her male kin were about to descend on Scarlett when Delicia and Hailey jumped into the mix. “…GO!” the enigma engineered shouted. There was still **** in her voice, but at least she knew to lend her competence to the Bloodsoaked Technomancer’s vision of success.

‘Proper help, the rarest of resources,’ Scarlett thought and limped back towards the Combi-Assembler. The front hatch slid open to allow her access to the chamber of remodelling again. ‘As much as I have to. Every fucking limb.’ She already knew John would frown at this. He would understand, however. He was no idiot.

The rewritten protocols in the machine activated. Scarlett was moved into position by the emotionless clamps. The entirety of her suit was designated to be in the way of operations and clinically cut from her. She was left behind naked as a newborn. The laser grid flashed over her a second time, turning the precise data into a 3D model. Computational power played out the operation fifty times in the span of 2,3 seconds. Chance of success of the operation: 100%. Chance of her remaining conscious: 0,4%. Chance of her stepping out ready for combat: 0%.

Clearly the machine had too little data on Scarlett Thorne.

Laser markers appeared on her skin. Two sets of tools emerged from the walls. One sprayed a layer of synth skin over the torso, the other covered the latex-like material in a powder that accelerated the solidification. The function had not existed two minutes ago. Delicia and Hailey had worked fast, filling the material into the tanks and reworking the cable-coating mechanisms for skin.

The synthetic skin coated the entirety of her torso, stopping where the laser outlined where it stopped and her limbs began. The clamps had retreated to let the process commence and returned with additional support, practically enveloping her chest in a metal harness.

Then, the blades came back out.

Scarlett was prepared for the pain. The removal of her organic limbs was the first pain, the attachments and integration of the bionic sockets the second. Both of them were mild, compared to what she knew would come next. The clamps released the one robotic arm she had as well. There were not even nubs of her limbs left, just empty sockets. For a brief moment, she was a limbless, helpless piece of meat, held up only by the machine. It was the only second in which Scarlett felt a hint of panic.

Then there was pain.

Right arm, right leg, left leg, left arm, the emergency upgrades of the designs were slotted into her with the briefest of pauses between them, all in order to prevent any synapse flaring from overlapping. All of her limbs were on fire, basked in ice, they were as cold as steel and as hot as combusting gasoline. Runes carved quickly and expertly into thick plates flared up, synchronizing with her own magical fingerprint. She sent electric impulses into the limbs, manually confirming activation checks in a way only a technomancer could. She clenched her teeth, almost screaming, almost letting her heart beat too fast to the multi-facetted torment, almost bending to the demands of her brain to shut down for even a split second.

Camera data continued to inform her of what was happening outside.

She did not have the seconds to wait for the remaining operational checks.

The clamps attached to her snapped at the closing point. The front hatch of the Combi-Assembler turned into a steel projectile, flying at over a hundred kilometres an hour.

It was a minor distraction to Thresta. The Third of Darkness swiped the metal plate aside with her offhand, still pressing down with her Astrotium dagger. The tip had already broken through Hailey’s helmet and was millimetres away from sinking into her forehead. On her knees, the enigma engineer could only desperately press up with her inferior strength.

That was until Scarlett arrived.

Hands like clawed gauntlets swiped at Thresta, forcing the corrupted Metracana to back away. The red-brown of the metal limbs gleamed in the artificial light of flickering bulbs overhead. Scarlett inspected the design in the middle of the motion. It was an interesting fusion of modernisms and medieval practicality. Heavily plated forearms were framed by round, doll-like joints at wrist and elbow. The upper arms were less bulky, the shoulder joints protected by pauldrons reduced to the bare minimum size required to adequately protect what no longer needed space-consuming tissue to function.

The result was a limb that, despite the plate-esque armaments, adhered largely to human proportions. Only the additional protections slotted into the forearms and the backs of the red-clawed hands were different.

Protections that Scarlett immediately made use of.

The Astrotium dagger sunk into the outer plating, then suddenly stopped. However sharp, however heavy, however dense, the meteor metal still had limitations. Hyper-advanced alchemical cures strengthened the materials; runes, impossible to decipher, empowered the bionics; and the strongest technomancer in the world operated them, manually routing power and alternating currents as she needed.

Scarlett brought the other arm forwards. Her flesh and blood torso moved alongside the machinery with pleasing grace. Transmutational compounds in the synth-skin synergized with the artifice inside the robotic limbs to elevate her muscles to adequate efficiency. For all the benefits of metal, truly, flesh remained the most flexible material.

Her fist slammed into Thresta’s face. Following the impact simulation, Scarlett continued the motion downwards. The Third of Darkness was slammed into the steel floor with such **** that she bounced back up.

The omni-directional joints allowed a gravity-defying manoeuvre. She swivelled back on the auto-stabilized left leg, while pulling the right one back. It unloaded the coiled energy in a straight kick. The metal plates covering the powerful machinery within the thighs were of the same colour as the arms. The knee joint was protected by overhang and extension by the thigh and shin plating. While, overall, the legs still adhered to the standard human template, there were select changes.

Crimson, bird-like talons closed around the midriff. The power of the kick drove the body into the curved blades, slicing liquid corruption. Scarlett moved at a speed she could have never achieved regularly, twisting with the grace and precision of a mechanical ballerina. One whirl around her own axis and Thresta was launched towards her male kin.

Rather than catch her, he side-stepped, then charged at Scarlett. The technomancer put her foot back down. Three front and one back claw clacked on the metal floor. She raised her new right hand, pointing the rune encased in the crystal glass of her palm at the enemy. Mana was drawn from her soul in a singular quantity that she had never expended.

That was fine. She always had more than she needed.

The limit on how much electricity she could produce was exceeded, then multiplied by the layers of ingenious artifice. A blinding lance of voltaic devastation hit the Metracana in the chest. Metal, biological, outworlder, chaos spawn, it hardly mattered what it was that she hit with it. The electricity was no longer bound to traditional physics, slamming into the Metracana and launching him backwards with incredible kinetic ****. He slammed hard enough into one of the reinforced walls to leave a dent.

Not hard enough to kill him, however.

“Get back to work,” Scarlett told Hailey, who just gave a swift nod and ran for the nearby workbenches. Delicia was already creating something else there, pouring liquids from her internal processes into flasks, combining them manually while other operations went on within her veins. Hailey studied the remaining schematics Scarlett had left for them. They were incomplete, the gaps in them for them to fill within the next few minutes.

“You are very, very arrogant,” Thresta hissed, her voice between her own and that of Tiamat. “Craftier than we thought, but arrogant.” The third Metracana appeared again, having clawed their way back up the skyscraper. “You finally even the odds, little one, why not fight with them?”

“I thought you were well-informed.” Scarlett’s red eyes were a storm of circuitry. Prismatic lights constantly danced from and to her pupils, putting a network of jagged, changing lines over her red irises and white sclera. “I’m Scarlett Thorne, owner of the Thorne conglomerate, head of the private crafters of John Newman.” She glared at the trio of Metracanas. “Want to test how your petty hivemind competes against the assembled product of the marketplace of ideas?”

Tiamat laughed and threw her minions at the technomancer.